This thought was impressive as I sat below the dam, where the eight central sluices pressed by the millions of tons of water lying behind them poured forth their mighty flood. I had climbed down the steps at the north side of the centre of the dam to make a photograph of the streams flowing through. They come forth with a rush like that of Niagara and go foaming over the rocks with a force that might generate thousands of horsepower. The noise is like thunder and the torrents fairly shake the earth. Each is about fifteen feet in height and yellow with mud. There were eight such streams of golden foam at my right, and farther over I could see the spray from others all dashing through the dam until they met in a yellow frothing mass several hundred feet below me and rolled onward down the rocks to Egypt. They flow out with such a force that they tear up the rocky bed of the Nile, lifting stones weighing many tons and carrying them some distance down the river. They have done so much damage of this nature that a cement foundation has now been made below the dam itself in order to prevent the gouging out of the bed which would mean the undermining of the main structure. But the thirsty land and its teeming millions forever clamour for more water. Even this great Aswan Dam has not nearly solved the irrigation problem of Egypt. There are always too many would-be farmers for the watered area. At the present rate of growth, it is estimated, the population will have increased by the middle of the century to twenty millions of people, practically all of them dependent on agriculture, and so on this one river system. The government has yet more ambitious schemes for hoarding and meting out its precious waters. At Wady Halfa, about two hundred miles up the river from Aswan, begins the Sudan, which extends for thousands of miles southward. In controlling this vast territory, Great Britain has hold also of the upper reaches of the Nile from the south boundary of Egypt proper into the Great Lakes of Central Africa where the river has its source. The irrigation works, new dams, and reservoirs planned or building on the Upper Nile are intended to increase the arable lands not only in the Sudan but in Egypt as well. The projects which the British have for the improvement of the Nile will rank as the most daring of the engineering plans of the century. To carry them out will cost as much as the Suez Canal, but they will build up fifteen hundred or two thousand miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, several other Egypts twice or thrice as rich as the lower Nile valley, each supporting its millions of people.