The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [9]
An international campaign was launched. Across the globe, children burgled their piggy banks and schools collected bags of loose change to save Abu Simbel and the other monuments of Nubia. When envelopes were torn open at the desks of UNESCO, coins from every country jangled to the floor. A woman in Bordeaux abstained from dinner for a year in the hope that her grandchildren might someday see the rescued temples, a man sold his stamp collection, students donated their earnings from paper routes, dog-washing, and snow-shovelling. Universities organized expeditions and sent hundreds of archaeologists, engineers, and photographers into the desert.
When Jean and Avery arrived at Abu Simbel in March 1964 for the vibrograph testing, which would determine more discriminately the fragility of the stone and the methods of cutting, the first task was already underway: the building of the immense cofferdam and its elaborate drainage system – 380,000 cubic metres of rock and sand, and a wall of 2,800 metric tonnes of steel sheeting – to keep Ramses' feet dry. Diversion tunnels and deep clefts lowered the water table, so the river would not probe its way into the soft sandstone of the temples. The cofferdam was conceived and constructed quickly, just in time. In November, Avery watched the water tempting the lip of the barrier. It was easy to imagine the colossi melting, toe by toe, the water slowly dissolving each muscular calf and thigh, and the Pharaoh's impassive courage as the Nile, his Nile, took him to her.
There was no town then, and in the rush to build the coffer dam, the workers lived in tents and houseboats, thousands of men in a vulnerable, makeshift camp. Although the Nubians had inhabited this desert with grace and ingenuity for many thousands of years, the foreigners at Abu Simbel lived with scraps of European equipment and their conditions could be described as primitive. But when the cofferdam was finished, the settlement quickly grew; housing for three thousand, offices, mosque, police station, two shops, tennis court, swimming pool. A contractors' colony, a governors' colony, a labourers' village. Two harbours were built for river barges heaped with supplies, and an airstrip for the delivery of mail and engineers. Machinery and food were brought by boat on the long journey up the Nile from Aswan or by jeep or camel caravan across the desert. Gravel and sand pits appeared, and ten kilometres of road, exclusively for the transport of the temple stones, the only paved surface for thousands of kilometres.
The camp was a living thing, born of extremes – river and desert, human time and geologic time. It contained such a babble of tongues that there was no attempt to provide a school for the forty-six children, since few of them spoke the same language.
Each cut, each of the thousands necessary to extract the temple from the cliff, was to be determined in advance and plotted on an ongoing master plan, a fluid web of forces continually shifting as the cliff disappeared. The sculpted faces were to be left whole when possible and no frieze separated at a place of particular fragility. Vibrations made by the cutting equipment and by the trucks were carefully accounted for. The sanctuary ceilings, which had, for generations, held themselves together according to the basic principle of the arch, would slowly be sliced and stored, taking the arch effect with them. And as the stress of the horizontal pressure increased, steel scaffolding with stanchions would be essential to assume the load. Avery worked with Daub Arbab, an engineer from Cairo who set off from his houseboat each day in an impeccably ironed, pale blue, short-sleeved shirt and whose hands – with shining nails and tapered fingers – seemed similarly finely tailored. Avery was at ease with Daub, and was impressed both by Daub's elegant shirts and by the enthusiasm with which he soiled them. Daub was always the first to get his hands dirty, always eager to kneel, to climb, to carry, to crawl into passages to read