Word: dams
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...High Dam will accomplish all this by harnessing the Nile's flood-that annual, June-to-October inundation of silt and water that since the beginning of history has brought life and uncertainty to Lower Egypt. Not only does the rain-fed flood vary in volume year by year, producing the "seven fat years and seven lean years," but at best spills some 9 billion gallons of fresh water into the sea annually, often leaving Egypt's cash crops of cotton and cane thirsty between floods...
...High Dam will contain the flood behind its massive wall, allow water out of Lake Nasser when needed. After aeons of capriciousness, the Nile will have to take orders...
Response to Challenge. Rising from its twin sources in Ethiopia and East Africa, the longest river in the world begins its course 4,150 miles from the sea. Its longest leg, called the White Nile, pours out of Lake Victoria through Uganda's Owen Falls Dam, drops swiftly to the Sudan, where it snarls itself in the tangled vegetation of the Sudd-50,000 sq. mi. of swamp, amidst whose 14-ft.-papyrus thickets and convoluted blue ambatch flowers the river loses half its water in evaporation and drainage. The Blue Nile dashes headlong down the rain-wreathed mountains...
...Swarming to the site in quest of the relatively high pay (up to $1.20 a day including overtime), the Egyptians often slept under tarpaulins that flapped in the blast-furnace desert wind, ate their rice and drank their syrupy tea mixed with sand. When blasting shocks crumpled a temporary dam above the diversion channel last July, and the onrushing Nile threatened 5,000 workers in the incompleted turbine shafts, thousands of fellahin swarmed in with sand and other fill, saved the whole project from disaster. An amazing spirit swept through the hot, dusty camp as D (for Diversion) Day neared...
Last Traces. The dam project already has changed the life of Upper Egypt. The once-sleepy resort of Aswan, where thin-blooded Edwardians and the Aga Khan wintered, has become a boom town; its population has effectively tripled in the past four years to 140,000. Steel mills, nucleonics plants, and vast chemical complexes that will provide fertilizer to replace the lost Nile silt, are rising in what the Cairo press calls "the Pittsburgh of Egypt." Four resort hotels, plus the Aswan Hilton currently abuilding, loom glassy and air-conditioned ("TV in every room") above the Old Cataract Hotel, where...