Nile is running short of black gold

ONLY one of the seven wonders of the ancient world survives. The pyramids of Giza, just outside Cairo, have been standing for 4,600 years.

Khufu’s pyramid, the largest, is 145 metres high, 230 metres square at the base and consists of 2.3 million blocks of limestone, each weighing, on average, 2.5 tonnes. The weight of the enormous pile is about 6,000,000 tonnes.

The river Nile is about 11 kilometres away from the pyramids but, in Khufu’s day, it would have been much closer. Over 900 kilometres upstream of Giza, on this the longest river on Earth, lies one of the wonders of the modern world, the Aswan High Dam. It is not much of a spectacle and, at 118 metres, not as high as Khufu’s pyramid but it contains 18 times as much material. Over 3.6 kilometres long, its construction created the world’s largest artificial body of water, Lake Nasser, named after the leader whose great project this was. Completed in 1971, 451 men died in accidents during its construction.