About two years later Mr. Cope Whitehouse suggested utilising the Wadi Rayan depression as a reservoir. This depression had been already mentioned by Linant Pasha in his book and located by him on his hydrological map. Financial difficulties prevented Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff from immediately considering the question of reservoirs. The success of the Barrage repairs in 1887 however gave new life to the question of reservoirs and Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff deputed Col. Western to give scope to the suggestion made by Mr. Cope Whitehouse, to make plans of the Wady Rayan and the deserts between it and the Nile, to find out the capacity of the reservoir, and see if it could be utilised. Col. Western’s report, plans and estimates were printed by the Egyptian Government in 1888. At the same time I was deputed to examine the other projects of Count de la Motte. In 1889 and 1891 I reported unfavourably on them, because I could find no depression near Kalabsha to put in communication with the Nile, and could find no rock at Silsila on which to build a dam. The Bergat Takham pan was the only depression near Kalabsha which could have been used as a reservoir and it was over 100 metres above the level of the Nile flood; while both in the Silsila pass and the Silsila gate I bored for rock and was everywhere still in sand 10 metres below the level at which the existence of rock was assumed by the Count’s engineers. On my report reaching Cairo, M. Prompt proposed using the trough of the Nile itself at Kalabsha as a reservoir in place of the depression which did not exist. Col. Western left the country in 1890 and I became Director General of Reservoir Studies. M. Prompt had supposed that rock could be met with at Kalabsha at a depth of 4 metres below low-water level. I could not find it at a depth of 26 metres. After sounding and boring at every possible site on the Nile and surveying, boring, and levelling in the desert between Wadi Halfa and the Fayoum, I submitted my report in 1894, proposing an open dam at Assouan of a type which I trusted would meet the requirements of a Nile reservoir dam. Sir William Garstin approved of the site and the design, and the dam was built between 1898 and 1902 with Mr. Maurice Fitzmaurice C.M.G, as resident engineer. The Assouan Reservoir at its present level contains one milliard of cubic metres of water which will suffice for the conversion of half a million acres to perennial irrigation, adding £15,000,000 to the wealth of the country. But though the dam was only completed at the end of 1902, already the whole of the water has been devoted to special tracts, and the Government is reluctantly compelled to refuse all applications for water.