Word: nile
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...What the Nile is to Egypt, the Colorado is to the Great American Desert. Without the waters of the mighty Colorado, fifth longest of U.S. rivers, prosperous cities and fertile farms would wither and be layered over with wind-blown sand. Long before white men invaded the desert, Indian tribes constructed elaborate canals to irrigate their fields with Colorado River water. Today, by way of a vast system of aqueducts, canals and tunnels, the Colorado quenches the megalopolitan thirst of Los Angeles and keeps a million acres of Southern California farm land green in what used to be an arid...
Square Triumph. Less than a week later, the army struck out again for Cairo, 150 miles away across the desert and up the Nile. When they met the forces of Murad Bey outside Cairo, the French were hungry and thirsty, many of them barefoot and weakened by dysentery. Nevertheless, the battle-hardened French veterans easily routed Murad Bey's Mameluke tribesmen. Formed in squares six ranks deep, the French infantry coolly cut down the wildly charging Mameluke cavalry, despite the heroics of individual Mameluke warriors whose scimitars sliced through the barrels of French rifles as if they were straws...
...French fortunes soon changed. One trouble was that Mameluke warriors were replaceable and French riflemen were not. After Nelson finally caught the French fleet at Abukir Bay and all but destroyed it in the Battle of the Nile, Napoleon's lines of supply and communication with Europe were virtually cut off. His army was steadily reduced by sieges of sickness (most notably, ophthalmia and bubonic plague), by Bedouin raids, and by the almost incessant warfare the French were forced to wage to keep their sprawling colony subdued. Some 27,000 Frenchmen died in Egypt, and after a time even...
...collective scholarship was assembled by the 167-man Commission on the Sciences and Arts that Napoleon brought with him to establish a cultural institute in Alexandria. The assembled scientists interspersed papers like "Observations on the Wing of the Ostrich'' and "Analysis of the Slime of the Nile" with studies on capillary attraction, the treatment of smallpox and bubonic plague, the formation of ammonia and the nature of light...
Membrane Dam. While the fate of Abu Simbel hung in the balance, two cut-rate schemes were proposed to save it. British Movie Producer William MacQuitty. backed by a group of London engineers and architects, proposed building a thin ''membrane" dam around the temple. When muddy Nile water rises outside, pressure will be balanced as the space that the dam encloses will be filled to the same height with clear, filtered water treated so that it will not damage the temple's stonework. Visitors would be able to admire the temple from submerged portholes reached by elevators...