Stopping the Gift of the Nile
Dams, once seen as entirely beneficial public works - which is why they are so often funded by loans from the World Bank - are now seen by all except the World Bank as very much two-edged swords. It is true that a dam can provide a useful reservoir of water to enhance agriculture or mitigate flooding, and it is also a clean source of energy from hydro-electric power.
Against that are the many negative aspects of a dam: the sheer weight of a huge volume of water can cause earthquakes; in addition the pressure of a large column of water can force liquid into rocks deep underground, lubricating them and making earthquakes even more likely. Many dams are built in areas of forest and the presence of millions of dead trees rotting away in the water produces significant quantities of greenhouse gases. Then there are the health risks posed by a large body of still water, ideal for mosquitoes and, in Egypt, for the bilharzia parasite.
The Aswan High Dam, built against the advice of Western experts as a nationalistic project by the dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser, is a very moot case. It has indeed stopped the annual flooding of the Nile, but the loss of the resultant silt has meant that Egypt's farmers have had to fill the land with artificial fertilisers that cost money and pollute land and water. It has generated thousands of watts of electricity but ruined millions of lives through bilharzia. It has opened up vast areas of land through irrigation but has also ruined vast areas through salt deposition.
The worst effect, however, has been on Egypt's cultural heritage, because the rise in the water table resulting from the pressure of water in the vast reservoir of Lake Nasser has turned the thousands of columns in the temples and palaces of antiquity into so many wicks, sucking up water from the ground and evaporating it into the air.
The problem lies in the fact that the water is rich in salts of various kinds and when the water evaporates, the salts are deposited in the "wicks" - and when the wick is stone, that means that the salt is deposited in the stone, causing it to crumble. Reliefs that have survived thousands of years of exposure to sun, wind and the depredations of Muslim fanatics are literally disappearing before our eyes. Every trip we make to Egypt we see more evidence of this insidious damage.
Over the last few years the colonnades of the temple of Luxor have been dismantled and rebuilt on a layer of plastic to form a damp-proof course, but that is only one temple out of the hundreds of temples and shrines that dot the Egyptian landscape. Meanwhile there are thousands of tombs whose frescoed walls are suffering irrepairable damage from the same cause but which cannot be so easily dismantled and rebuilt.
The latest monument to be threatened by this problem is the Sphinx itself, the iconic statue of a human-headed lion that crouches just below the Pyramid of Chephren. A recent survey by the Egyptian Authorities has concluded that there is no danger to the Sphinx, but when I see the pools of water lying within 150' of the Sphinx's paws I am not reassured.
Personally, the sooner the High Dam is demolished the better. It only has another century or two to go before it is completely buried beneath the silt brought down from the Ethiopian highlands and then whatever benefits it is supposed to bring will be lost forever, but by then the monuments of Egypt will have suffered so much damage that there will be very little left for the tourist to see. I don't anticipate being able to attract many customers on a tour to see where the temple of Luxor used to be!
Thus the nationalistic folly of Nasser will result in a country whose fields have been turned into desert from salt deposits and whose only other source of income - tourism - has been demolished from the same cause. Egypt, the "gift of the Nile", will cease to exist because of man's interference with the giver of the gift.
© Kendall K. Down 2008
