Word: simbel
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...engineers last week unloaded their heavy earth-moving equipment, unfurled their geological maps, and began plotting the most daring construction job undertaken in Egypt since the Pharaohs built the Pyramids. Carved in the sandstone cliff above the Germans' camp are the 3,300-year-old monuments of Abu Simbel - two cavernous temples and ten mammoth statues built by Ramses II. The job: to cut these relics out of the cliff side and lift them, piece by piece, to be assembled on a higher location, where the waters will not reach them when the High Dam is completed...
...charge of foreign business and is expected to take over the firm next year: "We must continue to break our geographical boundaries." Hartmann looks to Asia, Africa and South America as places where future projects will be big enough to interest Hochtief. Besides the temple job at Abu Simbel, Hochtief has eight other major foreign projects on hand, ranging from a harbor in India to power plants in Buenos Aires. In the postwar period, the firm has completed $200 million worth of foreign construction, including India's first big steel plant, an imperial palace near Teheran and Athens...
...Italian plan ran into financial problems. It cost $70,000,000 and although the nations of the world wanted to see Abu Simbel saved, they were unwilling to give much money. UNESCO collected little over $7.5 million in three years and by March 1 of this year, pledges still fell $23 million short...
...effort to save it must be difficult and prohibitively expensive. The French proposed building a dam to protect it from the Aswan lake, but their plan would have required constant pumping to remove seepage from the pourous sandstone under Abu Simbel. And it would have cost at least $80 million...
Some people doubt that Abu Simbel is worth even $36 million. They argue that the temple has little artistic value and that money could be better spent preserving monuments less extensively catalogued. But the skeptics form a small minority. Drew Middleton, one of many recent last-chance visitors, observed in The New Yorker that "if either the pyramids or Abu Simbel had to be flooded ... one would flood the Pyramids...