The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [8]
From the moment the Soviets brought their excavators to the desert at Aswan, the land itself rebelled. The sharp desert granite ripped the Soviet tires to strips, the drillheads and teeth of their diggers were ground down and blunted, the gears of their trucks could not endure the steep slopes, and within a single day in the river, the cotton-lined Soviet tires rotted to scraps. Even the great Ulanshev earth-moving machine – the pride of the Soviet engineers – which could hold six tonnes in its scoop and fill a twenty-five-tonne truck in two minutes, broke down continually, and each time they had to wait for parts to arrive from the Soviet Union; until, at last, defeated by the river that had so long been their ally, the Egyptians ordered Bucyrus machinery and Dunlop tires from Britain.
Every afternoon, a twenty-tonne pimento of dynamite was stuffed into each of twelve boreholes and exploded at 3 p.m. The shudder reverberated for thousands of kilometres. And every dusk, the instant the deplorable sun sank behind the hill, an army of men – eighteen thousand Soviet and thirty-four thousand Egyptian labourers – were loosed upon the site to recommence the cutting of the diversion channel. The banks of the river overflowed with shouting men, pounding machinery, shrieking drills, and excavators tearing into the ground. Only the Nile was mute.
At the ceremony to mark the first diversion of the Nile, Nasser had stood at the edge of the span, the captain of the ship, and beside him Khrushchev, the admiral. At the pressing of a button, the inundation began. Labourers clung to the sheer, man-made cliff, ants climbing aboard an ocean liner, slipping and falling into the river.
The dam would make a gash so deep and long that the land would never recover. The water would pool, a blood blister of a lake. The wound would become infected – bilharzia, malaria – and in the new towns, modern loneliness and decay of every sort. Sooner than anyone would expect, the fish would begin dying of thirst.
Hundreds of thousands of years before Nasser had ordered the building of the High Dam, or before Ramses had commanded his likeness to be sculpted at Abu Simbel, these cliffs on the Nile, in the heart of Nubia, had been considered sacred. On the stone summit high above the river, another likeness had been carved: a single prehistoric human footprint. Lake Nasser would melt away this holy ground.
In the evenings, those first months in Egypt, Avery and Jean often sat together in the hills above the camp, looking out upon what was as yet, to Jean, a scene of indecipherable activity. She felt that if the desert were plunged into darkness, all human presence would also instantly dis appear, as if the incessant motion of the camp was activated by the generators themselves, the men in their service and not the other way around.
There had been many schemes proposed for rescuing the temples at Abu Simbel from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam. It was understood, especially in the reality of post-war demolishment, that Abu Simbel must be saved.
The French had suggested building another dam, of rock and sand, to protect the temples from the reservoir that would form around them, but such a structure would require constant pumping and there would always be a danger of seepage. The Italians recommended the temples be extracted from the cliff and lifted in their entirety on gargantuan jacks capable of hoisting three hundred thousand tonnes. The Americans had advised floating the temples on two rafts, to higher ground. The British and the Poles thought it best to leave the temples where they were and construct a vast underwater viewing room around them, made of concrete and fitted with elevators.
At last, with no time left to prevaricate, the dismantling of Abu Simbel, block by block, and its re-erection sixty metres higher, had been chosen as the “solution of despair.” It was