The Winter Vault Read Online Free PDF Page B

the soil of the floodplain such richness would be lost entirely, pinioned, useless behind the dam. Instead, international corporations would introduce chemical fertilizers, and the cost of these fertilizers – lacking all the trace elements of the silt – would soon escalate to billions of dollars every year. Without the sediment from the floods, farmland downriver would soon erode. The rice fields of the northern Delta would be parched by salt water. Throughout the Mediterranean basin, fish populations – dependent on silicates and phosphates from the annual flooding – would decrease, then die out completely. The exploding insect population would result in an exploding scorpion population. The new ecology would attract destructive micro-organisms that would thrive in the new moist environment, and introduce new pests – the cotton-leaf worm and the great moth and the cornstalk-borer – that would devastate the very crops the dam was meant to make possible. Insects would spread infectious – and excruciating – diseases in plague proportions, such as bilharzia, an illness caused by a parasite laying its eggs in almost any organ of the human body – including liver, lungs, and brain.
    The silt, like the river water, also had its own unique intimacies, a chemical wisdom that had been refining itself for millennia. To Jean, the Nile silt was like flesh, it held not only a history but a heredity. Like a species, it would never again be known on this earth.
    At the new site of the temple, without the ecology of the original shore, there would also be consequences – a kind of revenge. The desert and the river had always safeguarded the temples, but now their divine protection would come to an end. At the new height, there would be severe erosion by sandstorms, and lawns would have to be planted to replace the sand, the lawns in turn attracting a biblical plague of frogs, which in turn would attract a plague of snakes, which in turn would not attract the tourists …
    More than five hundred official guests would attend the inauguration of the re-erected temples. There would be passionate speeches. “No civilized government can fail to give first priority to the welfare of its people … The High Dam had to be built, no matter what the effects might be …” “This is not the moment to go back over the actions and reactions to which the International Campaign has given rise …”
    Simulation is the perfect disguise. The replica, which is meant to commemorate, achieves the opposite effect: it allows the original to be forgotten. Out of the crowd, the heckling of a journalist: “It looks exactly the same! What have you boys done with the forty million bucks?”
    No word would be uttered of the Nubians who had been forced to leave their ancient homes and their river, nor of the twenty-seven towns and villages that had vanished under the new lake: Abri, Kosh Dakki, Ukma, Semna, Saras Shoboka, Gemaii, Wadi Halfa, Ashkeit, Dabarosa, Qatta, Kalobsha, Dabud, Faras …
    … Farran's Point, thought Avery, Aultsville, Maple Grove, Dickinson's Landing, half of Morrisburg, Wales, Milles Roches, Moulinette, Woodlands, Sheek Island …

    At the edge of the St. Lawrence River, near Aultsville, Canada, Avery awaited the arrival of the Bucyrus Erie 45 – The Gentleman – an immense dragline that had been floated to the future site of the St. Lawrence dam from a Kentucky coal mine. All around him was a display that would satisfy even the most ardent machine-worshipper: nine dredges, eighty-five scrapers, one hundred and forty shovels and draglines, fifteen hundred tractors and trucks.
    This was the moment his father had loved best, surveying the gathering of the mechanical infantry; making ready not to capture the hill but to eliminate it, or manufacture it, as circumstances demanded. William Escher knew this was not a simple battle of brute force between technology and nature but a test of will, two intelligences pitted against each