The Binding of the Nile and the New Soudan — Sidney Cornwallis Peel

Description

Written in the early years of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, Sidney Peel examines the great engineering challenge of harnessing the Nile for agriculture and the transformation of Sudan under joint British-Egyptian administration. A fascinating account of colonial development, irrigation schemes, and the making of the new Sudan.

Excerpt

Far back in the world’s history a fracture of the earth’s crust took place in the region which is now Egypt, and the sea filled the valley as far as a point not much north of Assouan. Into this fiord ran several rivers from the high ground east and west, bearing down with them heaps of detritus, and forming small deltas like the plain of Kom-Ombos.

Meantime the volcanic movements of East Central Africa had shaped the country into its present configuration, and the rivers which drained from the great lakes and swamps of the south, and those which flowed down from the high plateau on the east, combining their waters somewhere about Khartoum, pushed their marvellous course northwards, and began the creation of the fertile soil of Egypt.