Word: nile
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...sent their yards-long steel fingers combing through sand that gushed from giant tubes. Then, suddenly, there was silence. High on a granite crag overlooking the scene, two men pressed two tiny buttons. A muffled explosion sent rock whirling into the sky, and as the smoke cleared the River Nile changed its course for the first time under the hand...
...Yemen, formally completed the first stage of the Aswan Dam project. After 1,550 days of work, the laborers had finished piling up enough rock for the cofferdam to stem the river; the explosion set off by Nasser and his visitors opened up a diversion channel through which the Nile will now flow until the High Dam itself is completed. As the white-crested Nile rushed into the new channel, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko muttered in an unwontedly poetic mood: "It's like white horses." Even Khrushchev took time out from his attacks on the Western imperialists...
...High Dam will accomplish all this by harnessing the Nile's flood-that annual, June-to-October inundation of silt and water that since the beginning of history has brought life and uncertainty to Lower Egypt. Not only does the rain-fed flood vary in volume year by year, producing the "seven fat years and seven lean years," but at best spills some 9 billion gallons of fresh water into the sea annually, often leaving Egypt's cash crops of cotton and cane thirsty between floods...
...High Dam will contain the flood behind its massive wall, allow water out of Lake Nasser when needed. After aeons of capriciousness, the Nile will have to take orders...
Response to Challenge. Rising from its twin sources in Ethiopia and East Africa, the longest river in the world begins its course 4,150 miles from the sea. Its longest leg, called the White Nile, pours out of Lake Victoria through Uganda's Owen Falls Dam, drops swiftly to the Sudan, where it snarls itself in the tangled vegetation of the Sudd-50,000 sq. mi. of swamp, amidst whose 14-ft.-papyrus thickets and convoluted blue ambatch flowers the river loses half its water in evaporation and drainage. The Blue Nile dashes headlong down the rain-wreathed mountains...