EGYPT: Granite Wall

In the busy days after the 1952 revolution which brought him to power, Lieut.

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser received a visitor who, by wide repute, was a purveyor of quaint and useless notions. His claim: he had solved the problem that for 7,000 years had resisted solution, the taming of the Nile. Nasser called in a trusted engineer, who said, “The man’s crazy.” “That may be,” Egypt’s new young boss replied, “but don’t come back until you’re sure.” The crazy idea was to build a dam barely 300 feet high which would back up the Nile’s waters for 400 miles.

Men have dammed the Nile in many places, but still it drifts sluggishly for half the year leaving much good land parched, and then spews its silt-laden floodwaters, wasted, into the Mediterranean. Dams upstream in Ethiopia, Uganda and the Sudan are out of Egypt’s control and too far to bring electric power.

Since the Nile drops an average of only six inches per mile, Nasser’s not-so-crazy visitor saw that one big dam would do much to meet the nation’s needs.

The new Aswan Dam (see map) would create the world’s largest man-made lake, three times as long as Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead and with a capacity of 105 million acre-feet of water. It would multiply Egypt’s electric-power supply eightfold and irrigate 2,000,000 new acres, expanding Egypt’s farmland by 30% and the national income by 25%. At $1.3 billion for the dam and irrigation works, the cost, reckoned at $650 per acre of new irrigated land, is a bargain by comparison with some projects in the U.S. West.

Raising the money was Nasser’s problem.

Wherever he could make a deal—in E.ast and West Germany, in France and Red China—the Premier has been peddling cotton in exchange for trucks, bulldozers and generators needed for the dam.

But Egypt still had to find more than $400 million in foreign exchange. For two years, the World Bank mulled over Nasser’s request for a loan. It wanted guarantees that the dam was feasible, that Egyptian finance was stable, and that there would be no graft. Not until Russia recently charged forward with an offer of $300 million for the Aswan Dam did things begin to stir in Washington. The U.S. decided at last to underwrite the Egyptian investment.

Last week the World Bank was polishing the fine print in the terms for a $200 million loan, and the U.S. State Department steeled itself to ask Congress for perhaps $200 million more, spread out over the ten years that the dam will take to build. With hopes for another loan from Britain, Premier Nasser can afford to turn down the Russian offer and still stop up the Nile with a mighty wall, not of concrete but of granite blocks, just like the ones that pyramids were made of.