Word: cairo
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Sitting impassively on the sunbaked Giza Plateau on Cairo's outskirts, the pyramids look from a distance as though they have hardly aged in the more than 4 1/2 millenniums since they were built. But up close they look anything but eternal. Rubble and rock dust crumbling from the pyramid of Chephren have accumulated in piles on its lower levels. In the pyramid of Cheops, encrustations of salt, left by the evaporation of brackish groundwater, have eaten away at the walls of the burial chamber. The Sphinx, a few hundred feet away from the pyramids, has lost...
Throughout Egypt, the story is much the same. The walls of the Temple of Luxor, some 400 miles upriver from Cairo, are cracking so badly that President Hosni Mubarak, visiting the site in February, called for a thorough restoration. Nearly a fifth of the wall paintings at the tomb of Nefertari, across the Nile from Luxor in the Valley of the Queens, have been destroyed by salt deposits. In fact, says Zahi Hawass, who supervises the Giza Plateau for the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, "all the monuments are endangered. If we don't do something soon, in 100 years the paintings...
...almost in the shadow of modern apartment buildings. Nearby factories and old vehicles spew forth noxious clouds of particulate-laden exhaust, which becomes corrosive when dissolved by rain. Vibrations from traffic produce cracks in the monuments. More serious still is the damage caused by water. An estimated 80% of Cairo's incoming water supply escapes from leaking pipes into the ground. And the aging sewerage system, built 75 years ago to serve a population of half a million, is choking on the wastes of 13 million. Much of the wastewater overflows into the soil...
...resulting rise in the water table gradually undermines the foundations of buildings, causing them to list and even collapse. In 1987, according to Luis Monreal, director of the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, at least one house fell down in old Cairo every day. "The damage is irretrievable," he says...
London: William Mader, Anne Constable Paris: Christopher Redman, Margot Hornblower European Economic Correspondent: Adam Zagorin Bonn: James O. Jackson Rome: Cathy Booth Eastern Europe: Kenneth W. Banta Moscow: John Kohan, Ann Blackman Jerusalem: Jon D. Hull Cairo: Dean Fischer, David S. Jackson Nairobi: James Wilde Johannesburg: Bruce W. Nelan New Delhi: Edward W. Desmond, Anita Pratap Beijing: Sandra Burton Southeast Asia: William Stewart Hong Kong: Jay Branegan Bangkok: Ross H. Munro Tokyo: Barry Hillenbrand, Seiichi Kanise, Kumiko Makihara Ottawa: James L. Graff Central America: John Moody Mexico City: John Borrell Rio de Janeiro: Laura Lopez...