Chapter IX: The Inauguration of the Reservoir

December 10, 1902, was the official date of the inauguration of the Reservoir, a memorable day in the history of Egypt, and worthy to be marked with red even in the unchanging Mohammedan calendar.

The making of the Dam has been a great time for Assouan. The town has thriven and prospered beyond all knowledge since the days—not so very long ago—when two British battalions occupied the barracks on the hill overlooking the river to the south. The barracks are crumbling to pieces now, and only one or two blockhouses remain as memorials of the past state of siege and fear of dervish raids. The tide of war has rolled far away and spent itself utterly in remote corners. The whole of the Soudan lies between Assouan and the frontier of any possible enemy. Even the yellow fort is untenanted save by a few policemen. True, for four years an army of 10,000 men has been marshalled here, but it was an invasion of the arts of peace, creative and not destructive. Possibly the inhabitants would have liked their occupation to go on for ever; but even the best of times must have an end, and it was a good occasion for a holiday. In every Nile village flags and bunting were flying. For once the fields were deserted, and everywhere the people crowded to the bank in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Khedive and his distinguished guests. Here and there the gaffirs, or local policemen, lined the shore, standing stiffly to attention, or saluting with their Remingtons in the regulation attitude of European soldiers, which contrasted quaintly with their loose, flowing robes and white turbans.

At Assouan the faithful subjects of the Khedive surpassed themselves. Sunny Assouan lends itself readily to a festal garb. Situated where the Nile broadens out after emerging from the rocky defile of the cataract, the town has a most picturesque aspect at all times; its embanked river-front makes it the neatest of all the cities of Upper Egypt. Elephantine and the Sirdar’s Island rise green and smiling out of the broad bosom of the river; the perpetual blue sky makes everything doubly attractive to the Northern visitor. Dressed for the festival, it was a charming scene. Triumphal arches of the sacred yellow and brown, gorgeous hangings and many-coloured festoons, bore testimony to the Oriental love of vivid hues; steamers and dahabiehs, moored in line along the shore as well as along Elephantine Island, vied with each other in their decorations, and numerous feluccas were plying to and fro, half hidden by their burdens of flags and palm-leaves. At night thousands of lamps decorated shore and river alike, and the whole scene resembled nothing so much as a Henley in Regatta Week, with its illuminations unrestrained by doubts of weather. To the ear, however, the voices of the night told a very different tale. The crooning song of the Nubian boatmen, ‘Great is the Prophet, praise be to him!’ accompanying the creaking of their clumsy oars with monotonous persistency, sounded weird and barbaric over the twinkling waters. The bustle in the town, too, was no mere ordinary festal murmur; for this was the month of Ramadan, and the feast of lamps meant a great deal to all faithful Moslems. All day long they have abstained from food or drink, and the going down of the sun is keenly welcomed as the end of one day more of fasting.

The secret of the prosperity of Assouan lies in its granite. It is the granite bed of the river at this point that makes the Reservoir possible; here are the granite quarries from which the Dam was built, and from which every ruler of Egypt who wished to raise a monument for all time has drawn his supplies. Nothing that I have seen in this country brings the past so near as these quarries. Here lies a rough-hewn obelisk, just ready to be rolled away; here an enormous block of stone half hollowed into a bath for an Emperor, or a sarcophagus for an Apis bull, designed by some mighty ruler who ‘thought in continents,’ and recked little of the lives and labours of thousands provided he gratified his whim. But suddenly death or some other fate intervened, and a feebler or more merciful generation has never taken up the work. You may see the marks of the wedges on some great face of rock, as fresh as if it was only yesterday that Pharaoh’s workmen had driven them in and poured water on the wood till it swelled and burst the stone; down below is the fallen piece still waiting for the mason who never came back to it. Perhaps some of the very stones cut by Cheops or Rameses have been smoothed and planed and set in the Great Dam.

Passing along the raised causeway, down which so many great monuments have been rolled slowly to the river, I came through a long stretch of burning desert to a spur on the northern extremity of the granite hills. Here, unexpectedly, I found myself overlooking the lake formed by the filling of the Reservoir. Graceful lines of palm-trees showed where the banks of the river had once been. Philæ was but an insignificant speck on the blue waters, overpowered by the fantastic piles of granite boulders that hem in the valley. In the far distance rose some lofty hills, crowned by dazzling sand that might easily have been mistaken for snow. The Dam builders have been accused of vandalism, but they have created a standing pool in the wilderness of surpassing beauty. The view of the lake was not the only attraction of the spot; at my feet lay a colossal statue of Osiris, destined for some temple, but never moved from the spot where it was hewn.

Ancient Egypt may well look on with scornful wonder at our pride in our achievements. The Great Pyramid at Gizeh contains three times as much solid masonry as the Dam, cut from these same quarries. Every one of those huge blocks had to be dragged to the river, and carried down 600 miles, before it was hoisted into its place. As an achievement of mechanical power the Great Dam cannot compare with the Great Pyramid; but when at last I climbed a little hill hard by the river, below the Reservoir itself, and saw the whole length of the great stone rampart, stretching right across the valley, the contrast between the world of Pharaoh and our own came strong upon me.

Pharaoh, to whom time and life were nothing, out of the misery of the forced labour of his subjects, raised a perfectly useless monument of his own folly; yet he achieved his object, and made his tomb one of the wonders of the world. We, with the free labour of voluntary workers—paid, fed, and cared for, instead of being driven by the whip—have dared to harness Nile himself. It is a work vital to the interests of millions of dwellers by the river. Yet who can say that the fame of the Pyramid will not endure the longer? Hundreds of years after the time of Cheops a mighty Dam was built in Southern Arabia for a like purpose of irrigation; it lasted for eight centuries or more, and its bursting in 100 A.D. is mentioned in the Koran. Its ruins remain to this day, and show that it was larger than the Nile Dam. Eight hundred years is a long life for a reservoir, but if this one lasts a quarter of that period it will have repaid its cost many hundred times over.

Certainly it looks strong enough to last as long as the Nile itself. Strength, and nothing but strength, shows in every stone of it. Square, solid, and massive, it runs from shore to shore in an absolutely straight line, without the slightest attempt at any trace of ornament or decoration. Clearly, effect has been the last thing thought of. Even the sluice-gates have absolutely plain rectangular openings, and it detracts from the symmetry of the design that, owing to engineering exigencies, they are not all of one height, but run in sections of five, some of them lower than others. The top of the wall runs in a simple, unbroken level; there is nothing to catch the eye as it travels up the steep face of masonry except the slightest change in the angle of the slope to a nearly complete perpendicular. The wall simply leaves off because its builders thought it high enough for the present. Along the broad surface of the summit runs a tramway, with plenty of room for a man to walk on either side, flanked by perfectly plain, solid parapets as high as the waist, and more than a yard thick, of a piece with the masonry below.

On the eastern side the Dam is unostentatiously built into the living rocks; no arch or pylon marks its start. On the western side it is flanked by a ladder of four immense locks, set in a mountainous embankment. The gallows-like arms of the draw-bridge, hideous in appearance, but a marvel of mechanical ingenuity, over the upper gate of the highest lock are the only break in the long, unrelieved level. The hard gray colour of the granite strengthens the general impression, though in time every part exposed to the action of the water will be coated with the shining black varnish which the Nile mud always lays on granite, and it will look exactly the same as the natural bed of the stream.

How different all this is from the prettiness of the Delta Barrage, with its brickwork, originally designed and built under French influence, adorned with archways and towers, of which the lovely garden, with its flowers and shrubs, its green lawns and leafy trees, on the tongue of land which it crosses, seems a natural and appropriate part! The Assouan Dam is the work of a practical, unimaginative race. Its builders have had before them the problem of harnessing the great river with a yoke that cannot be broken; they had to hold up a reservoir containing 100,000,000 tons of water, so that for 140 miles the river is turned back upon itself; and they have succeeded.

In December all but a few of the sluice-gates are shut, for the reservoir has to be filled. But imagine it at the height of the flood, when the collected rainfall of half a continent is crashing past at the rate of nearly 1,000,000 tons a minute, and through each of the 180 openings shoots a solid cube of dark water to dash thundering in clouds of white foam on the rocks below, and rush tumultuously down the swirling slopes of the cataract. Think of the huge bulk of water held up when the reservoir is full. Then you will understand something of the difficulties of the work. Solidity and strength could not but be the first and overpowering idea in the minds of the builders. The longer you look, the more you are impressed. The vast dimensions of the Dam grow upon you from moment to moment. There is, after all, a fierce beauty in those uncompromising features, grimly set in the determination to hold the river in bondage. The massive structure is in harmony with the forces of Nature. Feeble and puny it may be compared with even the least of their handiwork, but it is impossible not to feel that its builders have been inspired with a spark of the same creative power. They drew their plans, and dug and built and strove their best to control the great river. They have succeeded because a portion of that spirit of Nature against which they struggled has passed into their work.

Is it too much to hope that a scheme of decoration may yet be found in consonance with these ideas? Some day the Dam will be raised to the full height of the original design, thus doubling the present capacity of the Reservoir. Then will be the time to finish the work magnificently, and make of it a stately monument, to be the glory of Egypt as well as the foundation of her material prosperity. The subject is worthy of a great artist. Only a scheme conceived on grand lines, perfectly simple and bold, can have the least chance of success. Anything else would be as ridiculous as a proposal to place a statue of ordinary dimensions on the top of the Great Pyramid. The difficulties are great, and so would be the expense, so great, indeed, that it would be far better to avoid any attempt at decoration, unless the results are to be admirable beyond all question. Are there no possible successors to the architects of Karnak?

The ceremony of inauguration was, like the masonry of the Dam itself, sensible and solid, but it was not impressive. Those who arranged its details had forgotten the vastness of the theatre in which it was performed. From the purely spectacular point of view it was a failure. Egypt has no money yet to spend on functions. Perhaps a better stage management might have made a better display without any greater expense. The material benefits of English rule would be appreciated none the less gratefully for a little gilding. But the Englishman in Egypt has had other things to think about than the organization of what the native would call ‘fantasias.’ So he fell back on the established custom of his own country. Wherever he goes he carries with him law and order and equity and righteousness and commonsense, and he also carries a peculiar kind of public ceremonial routine. Everybody knows it. The invited guests arrive in special trains, and perspire in top-hats and frock-coats for an interminable time, until Royalty arrives full of gracious smiles amid a cheering crowd. The distinguished persons pass into a pen carpeted with red baize, where all the notables are assembled. Somebody makes a perfectly inaudible speech, which receives a gracious and inaudible reply. A button is pressed here, a lever turned there, and several extraordinary things begin to happen in consequence. Then a number of good men and true receive some well-earned decorations, Royalty graciously departs, and everybody presses home as best he can, while the band plays the National Anthem. The whole is accompanied by the clicking of innumerable cameras, and nobody quite realizes the importance of the occasion until he reads about it afterwards. At the Nile Reservoir all this happened in due order with the necessary local variations. The officials wore red tarbushes instead of top-hats, and every sensible person carried a cotton umbrella over his head.

But apart from the ceremonial, the scene was deeply interesting. If the day’s routine was insignificant, it was because the overpowering presence of the Dam itself dwarfed every other presence. And the names of those assembled there recalled vividly the thrilling history of Egypt during the last twenty years. There were statesmen and diplomatists, soldiers and engineers, men of business and men of letters, all of whom, in some field or other, had done their part in building up the fallen country. Some, too, were there who, submitting contentedly before the logic of accomplished facts, burying old rivalries and animosities, had come in no unfriendly spirit to witness the realization of much that it had once been their policy to hinder. But if all the rest had been absent, the presence of one man, the Chief, whose wise counsel and guiding hand had been everywhere, would have been sufficient to represent all that these twenty years have meant to Egypt. Well might Lord Cromer and the irrigation engineers review their work with satisfaction. To them the Reservoir means the successful culmination of a great policy long and steadily pursued, nothing less than the establishment of the prosperity of Egypt upon a sure and certain basis: for that is what the regulation of the Nile involves. In Egypt, at any rate, they require no formal monument. Their praise stands clearly writ on the face of every cultivated field throughout the country.