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Show ductlve area; two crops one of cotton and sugar will be raised in the summer sum-mer and grain In the winter. A thousand thous-and years ago the Nile valley was rendered fruitful by floods which overflowed over-flowed the banks, and subsiding left their fertilizing deposits; when the overflow was liberal the people feasted, when, however. It failed there were famines, and slnco Joseph's day there have been periods of feasting and famine fam-ine due to the absence or the presence of the Nile flood. The design of the reservoir and the dam construction was to provide such artlflclal devices as would always mako the Nile dependable de-pendable for the uBes which nature Intended In-tended to provide for the benefit of man; the constructors have not alone realized their expectations but demonstrated dem-onstrated the accuracy of their calculations calcu-lations when the vast work was planned STORING THE NILE WATERS. February 9 the Eanch barrage, or dam, across the Nile, was declared open. The Financier declares this dam Is some distance north of the As-suan As-suan barrage; the construction work of the Esnoh was begun after the Nile flood of 1S90, and it was carried forward for-ward with such energy that It was completed moro than eighteen months before tho time limit of tho contract It was an Anglo-Egyptian government enterprise, labor was cheap and unrestricted un-restricted and hence uninterrupted progress was made. The first step in thla enterprise was the building of the Assuan reservoir seven hundred and fifty miles from the sea, which reservoir reser-voir Is capable of Impounding 2 1-3 billion tons of water for delivery at the lower reachos of the river when required; at Intervals below the Assuan As-suan are smaller barrages to control the water level and the Esneh is the last of such barriers to be completed. In the dam at Assuan are huge gates that open at the touch of a button; dally as wire from Cairo Informs the engineer in charge of the barrage how much water will be needed, the gates are opened and the wator flows along the hundreds of miles of river and tho thousands of miles of irrigation canals, contributing to the nourishment of the earth and to the deposit of rich mud highly fertilizing vegetation. One result re-sult of the completion of this enterprise enter-prise will be an enormously Increased acreage of the hitherto arid and unpro-' |