Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

I have had some talks here with the engineer-in-chief of the dam, and am surprised at the wonderful intelligence bureau that has been created in connection with the control of the Nile. Its officials know the exact weight of the river at every hour of the day. They have telegraphic reports on what the Nile is doing in Abyssinia, in Central Africa, and in the Sudan. They have dispatches as to every great rain, and they know to a ton just how fast Lower Egypt is using the water, so they can tell how much or how little to let out for the farms. They even estimate the force of the sun on the water and know how much it drinks up every day. When the reservoir is full Old Sol takes a million and a half tons from it every twenty-four hours. They know what the evaporation is, not only at Aswan, but all along the great stream and throughout its swamps to its source in Lake Victoria.

The gift of the Nile is not had without work. Fellaheen too poor to own camels or bullocks lift the river water from level to level and pour it into the irrigation ditches.

The fellaheen live in villages and go out to work on the farms. The average mud hut seldom contains more than one or two rooms and is at the mercy of thick clouds of dust from the road.

I am also amazed at the strength and delicacy of the machinery of this remarkable structure. The great sluice gates are each as high as a two-story house, and so wide that you could drive a hay wagon through them without touching the walls. They are cut right through the granite dam and are closed or opened by steel doors, which slide up and down inside the wall on rollers. Upon the top of the dam there are machines for moving these gates, so made that a child could operate them. They are equipped to be operated by electricity, but they are now worked by hand, and this mighty force, so tremendous that two billion horses would be required to move it, is now controlled at will by the muscular power of a single man.

This thought was impressive as I sat below the dam, where the eight central sluices pressed by the millions of tons of water lying behind them poured forth their mighty flood. I had climbed down the steps at the north side of the centre of the dam to make a photograph of the streams flowing through. They come forth with a rush like that of Niagara and go foaming over the rocks with a force that might generate thousands of horsepower. The noise is like thunder and the torrents fairly shake the earth. Each is about fifteen feet in height and yellow with mud. There were eight such streams of golden foam at my right, and farther over I could see the spray from others all dashing through the dam until they met in a yellow frothing mass several hundred feet below me and rolled onward down the rocks to Egypt. They flow out with such a force that they tear up the rocky bed of the Nile, lifting stones weighing many tons and carrying them some distance down the river. They have done so much damage of this nature that a cement foundation has now been made below the dam itself in order to prevent the gouging out of the bed which would mean the undermining of the main structure.

But the thirsty land and its teeming millions forever clamour for more water. Even this great Aswan Dam has not nearly solved the irrigation problem of Egypt. There are always too many would-be farmers for the watered area. At the present rate of growth, it is estimated, the population will have increased by the middle of the century to twenty millions of people, practically all of them dependent on agriculture, and so on this one river system. The government has yet more ambitious schemes for hoarding and meting out its precious waters.

At Wady Halfa, about two hundred miles up the river from Aswan, begins the Sudan, which extends for thousands of miles southward. In controlling this vast territory, Great Britain has hold also of the upper reaches of the Nile from the south boundary of Egypt proper into the Great Lakes of Central Africa where the river has its source. The irrigation works, new dams, and reservoirs planned or building on the Upper Nile are intended to increase the arable lands not only in the Sudan but in Egypt as well. The projects which the British have for the improvement of the Nile will rank as the most daring of the engineering plans of the century. To carry them out will cost as much as the Suez Canal, but they will build up fifteen hundred or two thousand miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, several other Egypts twice or thrice as rich as the lower Nile valley, each supporting its millions of people.

The projects include schemes for the regulation of the Great Lakes on the highlands of Central Africa, to make them serve as reservoirs for the Nile. They include, also, plans for the embankment of the tributaries of the White Nile flowing through the great swamps on the northern slope of the Congo watershed, and the digging of over two hundred miles of new channel, whereby the main stream of the White Nile will be greatly shortened and its bed fitted to carrying the enormous volume of its waters down to Khartum. Another scheme contemplates the erection of a dam at Lake Tsana, on the highlands of Abyssinia, which will make that lake a reservoir for the Blue Nile and enable it to water the fertile plain which lies between the Blue and White Niles, ending at Khartum.