Word: niles
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Sadat not only wants peace but profoundly needs it. Egypt, disastrously impoverished and overpopulated, claustrophobically crowded into the life-sustaining Nile Valley, can no longer afford to spend 28% of its national budget on military hardware to aim at Israel. Egypt is also deeply weary of fighting. In the four bloody wars against Israel (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973), Egypt, of all the Arab states, has absorbed the heaviest losses. In '67 Egypt lost 3,000 killed, v. 600 for the Syrians and 696 for the Jordanians. Today the Nile Valley nationalism always present in the Egyptian character is asserting itself...
...satellite photo, which can distinguish between desert and arable land, tells a different story. Viewed from space, the real Egypt?the land that man can live on?is small and lotus-shaped. A thin, two-to ten-mile-wide strip of green, the flower's stem, follows the Nile north from the Sudan border; then, near Cairo, comes the blossom, the Nile Delta. In that narrow space of 13,800 sq. mi., no larger than Taiwan, live 37.8 million people, or 97% of the country's population. Almost all the rest of Egypt is brutal, dun-colored desert, unchanged...
...Nile has molded the country's character as well as its geography. Men needed organization to cope with the ebbs and floods of the fickle river; thus civilization emerged. They required some means of surveying their tiny plots of irrigated land; thus geometry became necessary. Protected in their green river valley by the desert's barriers, the ancient Egyptians constructed perdurable institutions, of which the pyramids remain as awesome symbols. With scarcely an interruption, pharaoh succeeded pharaoh and dynasty followed dynasty for nearly 3,000 years before Christ, a continuity of government unmatched by any other people. To appreciate...
...pharaonic line, and for more than 2,000 years Egypt was little more than a province of foreign conquerors: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mamelukes, Turks, French and British, who renounced their final claims only 21 years ago, after the failure of the Suez invasion. Through the centuries, however, the Nile flowed on, and the Egyptian, that unique river creature, determined his life by the rise and fall of its waters rather than by the temporary whims of a foreign master...
...most Egyptians the Nile still rules, and a peasant from pharaonic days would find life little altered along much of the riverbank today: land is still divided into tiny plots, and the precious water is still raised from the river by having a cow or blind-folded water buffalo turn a primitive screw or a crude wooden lift balanced by a weight of mud. The ordinary meal of an Egyptian fellah still consists of foul beans; moulekieh, a soup made of the greens that grow among cotton plants, is a dish reserved for special days...