Where to begin understanding a body of water that has defined the nature of Egypt for millennia? Fatemah Farag listens to Rushdi Said in Cairo this week I have not stopped water when it should flow. I have not made a cutting in a canal of running water ... I am pure. I am pure. I am pure -- Book of the Dead There was a time when the desecration of the Nile could result in the denial of eternal life in the hereafter; today all too many Egyptians are thoughtless towards the river that provides their homeland with an essential life line. "We are negligent when it comes to the Nile. We fill it with sewage because we do not have comprehensive sewage systems to cover most of Egypt, industrial pollution from factories and chlorine from tourist boats. It is unfortunate," lamented internationally renowned geologist Rushdi Said in a talk given this week at the Higher Council for Culture. It is a far cry from the time that Ancient Egyptians actually fought for the preservation of the Nile. "If not for the effort of the Egyptians the Nile would have dwindled into non-existence," explained Said. "Every year a part of the social labour was allocated to clearing the waterway of the Nile from silt. Otherwise the Nile would have gotten progressively smaller." At a time when the River Nile has come into the limelight once again within the context of water disputes among the countries that share the Nile Basin, Said emphasised the extraordinary geological history of the river. "It is one of its kind; the only river that has been able to survive in such a dry area traversing the long distance it takes to get to the Mediterranean Sea without receiving a drop of water," said Said. This uniqueness of the Nile has occupied much of Said's thought and career. "In the 1970s we were searching for natural gas in the Delta and we began to dig deep wells which resulted in our finding out more about the origins of the Nile. We found out that the oldest evidence of the Nile, six million years old, was two kilometres deep, which is amazing," recounted Said. More amazing is the Nile's history which puts this piece of evidence into context. A simplified summary of Said's presentation would go like this: Six million years ago, the opening between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean closed and the sea became a closed body of water. At the time the climate was very warm and all the water evaporated, leaving a desert of salt. The resultant humidity was blown over Egypt which was much higher than it is now and resulted in heavy rains. The resulting river was not connected to the rest of Africa and was hardly the same as the one we know today. It is a history where a hundred thousand years passes in the blink of an eye; a history of the map of the world when the Atlantic Ocean was as big as the Red Sea. "Saudi Arabia will not always be as close as it is today," quipped Said. Hence, the first connection to Africa came only 600,000 years ago Said reminds us, and from Ethiopia. This is known as the pre-Nile stage -- a great flow of water that swept aside huge quantities of sand in its torrent as far as Crete. "In fact the stone quarries that are used in construction in today's Delta were a by-product of this having taken place," added Said. It was a time when the Nile's flooding was so erratic and powerful that people sought the desert -- which still enjoyed frequent rains -- for habitation. But with the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, the rains dried up as did the White Nile. Eventually the flow of the Nile would quiet down enough to allow for the cultivation and habitation of the Nile Valley and Egypt became unique: "Civilisation could develop without much effort because the inundation of the Nile resulted in the easy cultivation of the valley and also resulted in the fact that the soil did not become salty allowing for the easy use of the plow without any negative side effects such as those suffered by the Babylonians," said Said. Today, however, the challenge facing Egyptians is not how to tame a wild river which gives in abundance but how to conserve what remains. For many conservationists, the land reclamation project of Toshka is at the centre of debate. "I was very disturbed when I first heard of Toshka for several reasons. For starters where are we going to get the water. I went back and checked the files on the last 28 years of inundation and found that between low and high years Egypt invariably received its quota in water. So where was the extra water for the project going to come from?" queried Said. Said noted that it seemed the project had been decided upon before the availability of water had been made. "Before the building of the High Dam in Aswan exhaustive studies had been undertaken. One of these suggested that the only way to conserve water was to stop producing rice," commented Said who went on to explain that the government planned to make the extra water for Toshka available by conserving current water use. "Of course we should conserve but this is a lengthy and expensive process," said Said. That is not to say that we do not have enough water. "All the Nile basin countries have enough water when other sources of water are taken into consideration," noted Said. And then when you consider the brief history of humanity on the Nile to date within the prism of millions of years, who knows what the future may hold in store.
