Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

FATHER NILE. (From d Group in the I tiliccin Museum») THE NILE DAMS AND THE ASSOUAN RESERVOIR. BY J. S. WILSON, Assoc.M.Inst.C.E. FROM the dawn of history the engineer has been busy on the banks of the Nile, and not in modern times only has he carried out great schemes to gain con- trol over its waters. Menes (4400 B.C.), first of the historical rulers of Egypt, made a new channel for the river eastward of his city of Memphis. Two thou- sand years later Amenemhat III. (2300 b.c.), by enlarging the old canal connecting the Nile with the great Fayoum depression, created an immense reservoir, Lake Moeris, with a surface area of 970 square miles. The regulation of the flow in and out of this vast lake controlled the Nile flood at its highest and lowest. Of no country in the world can it be said more truly than of Egypt, that from the river it draws its life. Its rise and fall are watched with intense interest by all dwellers on its banks. The fluctuations in its movements are registered day by day and recorded immediately (1,408) in all the capitals of Europe. Egypt is the Nile, the Nile is Egypt. From its source to the sea the river extends 4,037 miles. The upper reaches of all its tributaries have not yet been, explored fully. The most distant of these, the Kagera River, has its source 6,50C feet above sea-level, and flows into Lake Vic- toria. From this and the other lakes on the Equatorial plateau water escapes through vari- ous channels, and unites to form the Bahr-el- Jebel. After passing through the great swamp or “ Sudd ” plain—a marsh some 200 miles in length and 60 at its broadest, covered by a dense growth of weeds and papyrus—the Bahr- el-Jebel is joined near Lake No by the north- eastward running waters of the Nile-Congo watershed, and presently flows northward as the White Nile. At Khartoum, 1,913 miles from the sea, takes place the confluence of the Blue Nile, coming down from Lake Tsana in Abyssinia, with the White Nile. Here the Nile 25 vol. ii.