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National Geographic : 1960 Sep
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National Geographic, September, 1960 extend his influence over all of new Africa. He looks without envy beyond his mountains. That was not always true of Ethiop kings, for once they ruled Egypt. HIGH ABOVE the Blue Nile, which rises in Ethiopia, I followed the Ethiop path of conquest to Khartoum in the Sudan, and on northward to Wadi Halfa in the blazing desert. There beside the Nile I stood where an Egyptian archer had stood when Cushite sol diers from the south advanced to the attack. He failed and likely died, this archer; the enemy tumbled the walls of Buhen and burned the rubble and broke the wine jars, and I saw the ashes and stood on the shards myself 3,500 years later. Senusret I built the frontier fortress of Buhen about 2000 B.C. It had thick ram parts and high square towers for the sling platoons. Below them, just above the dry moat, the archers stood on their fire steps, and each man guarded an embrasure in the wall into which his bow fitted. "See how cleverly this was planned," said Walter B. Emery, Edwards Professor of Egyp tology at the University of London, who has been excavating Buhen for several years. "Stand on the fire step. Pretend you hold your bow in the embrasure, which opens into a little chamber inside the wall. Aim your arrow through any of the six holes in the wall from the chamber to the outside. "Using the top holes, you deliver frontal or crossfire against the enemy as he comes across the plain to the moat. Some of them escape and scramble into the moat. Switch to the lower holes. You can pick off the men in the ditch at your leisure-or at least that's the way it was supposed to work." I looked through the lower middle hole, and there was a Cushite looking up at me, but he turned out to be the Sudanese felucca skipper who had ferried me across the Nile, warning me to hurry before the wind died out. The Cushites burned Buhen. The Egyp tians did not rebuild it for 200 years. After their return, Queen Hatshepshut built a temple there. Thutmose III later took her name off its inscriptions and put his own there instead. A later wave of Ethiopian conquerors ap parently pulled the walls of Buhen down, never to be rebuilt, but they spared the tem- ple. It is still there, its paintings of Pharaohs and deities as fresh as ever. "They've fought a few battles in this place," I remarked, stooping to pick up a smooth stone, a missile from a sling that may have felled an Ethiopian so many years ago. "Yes," said Dr. Emery, "but the Nile will win the last one. After the Aswan High Dam is built, the water will cover Buhen and that will be the end, because Buhen was built of mud brick." SADD EL-AALI, the Aswan High Dam, will be the mightiest work of man in Africa when it is finished in about ten years. It will cost a billion dollars. It will contain sixteen times as much material as there is in the Great Pyramid of Khufu, and it will create a lake 300 miles long from a point on the Nile 400 miles south of Cairo to somewhere near the Third Cataract, 100 miles inside Sudan. These waters will irrigate two million des ert acres, adding 30 percent to the cultivable land of Egypt. They will manufacture 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, or about ten times as much as Egypt produces now. But they will also destroy Buhen and a hundred other sites of ancient civilizations beneath the Nubian sands. Worse, they may cover the sacred island of Philae, and the Great Temple of Abu Simbil with its colossal rock hewn statues (page 359). The United Nations, with Egyptian cooperation, now wages a cam paign for funds with which to dike these marvels of antiquity against the flood. President Gamal Nasser began work on the High Dam in January, 1960, by setting off 11 tons of dynamite. There is not yet much to see, however; I had to look elsewhere for the marks of progress in Egypt. Pyramids Visible From Luxury Hotels In Cairo, tall hotels and deluxe apartment houses look down on tall-masted feluccas and the straining men who pull them with long ropes when the Nile wind dies. You can still see the timeless Pyramids from the city, but now you must look past a striking masonry tower that houses a television enterprise. Colored lights etch the minarets of the bus tling capital's mosques on religious holidays. Some muezzins chant with metal throats, their call to prayer tape-recorded. Traffic is a swarm of bees, growing denser daily with 354
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