Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

The Aswan Dam is a huge granite barrier a mile and a quarter long which now controls the waters of the Nile after centuries of alternate flood and drought, saves Egypt from famine, and adds millions of acres to her irrigable lands.

It brings one close to the days of the Scriptures when he can put his hand on the very same things that were touched by old Pharaoh; and can visit the temples in which he worshipped, or sit on the monuments erected in his honour, and look at the tomb in which his royal bones were laid away. One feels closer still when he can look at the royal mummy itself and actually see the hardhearted old heathen almost as he was when alive, as I did at the museum the other day.

This Pharaoh, Rameses II, was one of the greatest kings of ancient Egypt. His temples are scattered throughout the Nile valley and his statues are the largest ever discovered. One was found in the Nile delta which measures forty-two feet in height, and there are others sixty-six feet high at Abu Simbel in Nubia, about as far up the Nile as Chicago is distant from the mouth of the Hudson. They are seated on thrones and are hewn from the solid rocks. These figures stand in front of the temple, also cut out of rock. This building is said to have been erected by him in honour of his favourite wife, Nefertari, and there are statues of his children about it. These show that he was very much of a family man, for inscriptions on the various monuments mention one hundred and sixty-two of his children by name.

CHAPTER XVI
THE NILE IN HARNESS

Within a mile or so of the red granite quarries, out of which Pompey’s Pillar and the obelisks were taken by the ancient Egyptians, just below the island of Philæ, with its stone temples built ages ago to the Goddess Isis, far up the Nile valley, on the edge of Lower Nubia, I write these notes for my American readers. I am in the heart of the desert, seven hundred miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, at the point where the great river drops down over the first cataract. I have come here to describe the Aswan Dam, which the British built to harness the Nile and thereby save Egypt from famine.

We all look upon this as the oldest of rivers, but the Nile god of to-day has many new aspects. For ages he has been ramping and charging at his own sweet will, but he is now being harnessed and will have to work in the traces like an old plough mule. In the past he has been feeding his daughter Egypt or not, as he pleased. He has sometimes stuffed her to repletion, and at others has held back his supplies of water and mud, causing a famine. This was the case during the seven hungry years of Joseph’s time, and the fat years of that day were undoubtedly produced by high Niles. Such ups and downs have occurred in Egypt from time to time since the dawn of her history, and it is only in comparatively recent years that man has attempted to control the old river and by a system of dams hold back the waters and let them out over the farms as needed. To master the Nile has cost many millions of dollars which have gone into building the great barrages in the lower river, and more important than all, the mighty dam away up here at Aswan.

Egypt is almost rainless and the Nile gives both land and people their food and drink. I have already described some of the wonders of the stream and what it does for Egypt. It rises in Lake Victoria, in Central Africa, and drops a distance greater than the altitude of the highest of the Alleghanies before it flows into the Mediterranean Sea. In the upper part of its course it is known as the White Nile, and this should be called the main stream of the river. At Khartum, thirteen hundred and fifty miles from the Mediterranean, the Blue Nile, which rises in the Abyssinian Mountains, comes in, while about one hundred and forty miles farther north the Atbara, or Black Nile, which is also from Abyssinia, joins the main stream. From the mouth of the Atbara to the sea there is not a tributary of any kind connected with the river. It ploughs its way through the desert valley, in which it has built up Egypt, narrowing and widening, until a few miles below Cairo, where it divides into two great branches and flows off into the sea.

The volume of the Nile is enormous. At flood times, a billion tons of water go by at Aswan every day. The river then rises twenty-five feet at Cairo, thirty-eight feet at Old Thebes, and almost fifty feet at the first cataract, where I now am. There is so much water that no dam could hold it, hence all of these great works had to be made so that the water can be let in and out and allowed to pass through at will.

It is at flood time that the Nile valley gets its rich feed of Abyssinian mud. This is brought down in part by the Blue Nile, but more abundantly by the Atbara, or Black Nile. It is carried by the inundation all over Egypt and by means of irrigation conducted to nearly every farm. After the floods subside the muddy waters grow clear again. The Blue Nile and the Black Nile become almost dry, and the white water of the main, or Victoria Nile, is about all that Egypt has. It is this white water that is stored up by the Aswan Dam, and it feeds the country in much the same way as our irrigation canals do, with water only and not with a thick mixture of water and mud as in the times of the overflow.