Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
In the old days the great excursion from Assuan was by water to the "Great Gate," as the principal rapid was called, often a difficult matter to accomplish. To-day the great dam has replaced it as the object of a sail. This is the greatest engineering work of the kind ever constructed, and spans the Nile Valley at the head of the cataract basin.
The structure of the building is basilican, and it contains some strange carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, and St. Demetrius. Around the nave there are monolithic columns of white marble, and one column of the red and shining granite that is found in such quantities at Assuan. There are three altars in three chapels facing toward the East.
At the end of the gang-plank, his portliness exceeded only by his stateliness, was the great potentate His Excellency the Mahmoudieh of Assuan. With sweeping obeisances, he greeted each one in a manner only befitting those who held his provinces in such deep respect. His demeanour demanded rather a setting of pillared palace and crimson velvet than a background of castor-oil bushes and sugar-cane.
From the sphinx at Ghizeh, which is so ancient that no one knows its origin, to the great dam at Assuan, monument of its present day, each period of its history has left some record, some tomb or temple, which we may study, and it is this more than anything else which makes Egypt so attractive to thoughtful people.
For most Englishmen Assuan has also a tragic interest in its association with the expedition for the relief of General Gordon, and the subsequent Mahdist wars, when regiment after regiment of British soldiers passed through her streets on their way towards those burning deserts from which so many of them were destined never to return.
It was exactly similar to a little green glass bottle which she had bought in the bazaar at Assuan, in which the modern Egyptian, but more especially the Coptic, women carry the kohl which they use for blacking their eyes and eyebrows.
"Then let's forget. I was stupid. This is all too big and great for such smallness." She indicated the coming of the unearthly light. "Thy dawning, O Aton," Michael said. Margaret smiled. "He was very far from us at Assuan." "He was there. I stifled my consciousness of him, Meg." "Don't," she said. "Let's go forward." "I know what you mean," he said. "Regrets are weak, foolish."
Nevertheless, in spite of the tremendous diminution in volume caused by the dryness of the earth and air and the heat of the sun all of which drink greedily the river below Assuan is sufficiently great to supply nine millions of people with as much water as their utmost science and energies can draw, and yet to pour into the Mediterranean a low-water surplus current of 61,500 cubic feet per second.
From Basra, at the mouth of the Tigris, he probably visited the island of Kish in the Persian Gulf, which in the Middle Ages was a great emporium of commerce, and thence proceeded to Egypt by way of Aden and Assuan. Benjamin gives us a vivid sketch of the Egypt of his day. Peace and plenty seemed to prevail in the country.
To join the navigable reaches, and thus preserve the continuity of the communications, a complex system of railways and caravans was necessary. In the expedition to Dongola a line of railway was required to connect the two navigable reaches of the Nile which extend from Assuan to Wady Halfa, and from Kerma to Merawi.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking