The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

  There was no town then, and in the rush to build the coffer dam, the workers lived in tents and houseboats, thousands of men in a vulnerable, makeshift camp. Although the Nubians had inhabited this desert with grace and ingenuity for many thousands of years, the foreigners at Abu Simbel lived with scraps of European equipment and their conditions could be described as primitive. But when the cofferdam was finished, the settlement quickly grew; housing for three thousand, offices, mosque, police station, two shops, tennis court, swimming pool. A contractors' colony, a governors' colony, a labourers' village. Two harbours were built for river barges heaped with supplies, and an airstrip for the delivery of mail and engineers. Machinery and food were brought by boat on the long journey up the Nile from Aswan or by jeep or camel caravan across the desert. Gravel and sand pits appeared, and ten kilometres of road, exclusively for the transport of the temple stones, the only paved surface for thousands of kilometres.

  The camp was a living thing, born of extremes – river and desert, human time and geologic time. It contained such a babble of tongues that there was no attempt to provide a school for the forty-six children, since few of them spoke the same language.

  Each cut, each of the thousands necessary to extract the temple from the cliff, was to be determined in advance and plotted on an ongoing master plan, a fluid web of forces continually shifting as the cliff disappeared. The sculpted faces were to be left whole when possible and no frieze separated at a place of particular fragility. Vibrations made by the cutting equipment and by the trucks were carefully accounted for. The sanctuary ceilings, which had, for generations, held themselves together according to the basic principle of the arch, would slowly be sliced and stored, taking the arch effect with them. And as the stress of the horizontal pressure increased, steel scaffolding with stanchions would be essential to assume the load. Avery worked with Daub Arbab, an engineer from Cairo who set off from his houseboat each day in an impeccably ironed, pale blue, short-sleeved shirt and whose hands – with shining nails and tapered fingers – seemed similarly finely tailored. Avery was at ease with Daub, and was impressed both by Daub's elegant shirts and by the enthusiasm with which he soiled them. Daub was always the first to get his hands dirty, always eager to kneel, to climb, to carry, to crawl into passages to read the gauges. Together each day, to remain ahead of the changing consequences, they monitored the strengthening tests and the stress-relieving cuts in the rock above; any omission or miscalculation of an altered force, disastrous.

  Avery watched as the men sliced into the stone. Closer and closer, down to a distance of 0.8 millimetres from the hair on Ramses' head. The workers clenched their teeth against the motion of their own breath. While scaffolding supported the chambers, the walls of the temples were cut into twenty-tonne blocks. Gargantuan columns, like stone trees, were filleted by desert lumberjacks into rings weighing thirty tonnes.

  Because lifting equipment was forbidden to touch the sculpted facade, holes were drilled in the top of the temple blocks and lifting bolts were sealed inside. Steel rods were inserted and epoxy (modified to withstand the high temperatures) held together fractures in the coarse-grained yellow sandstone. Cranes slowly lifted the blocks onto the sand beds of loading trucks and they were taken to the plateau above. In the storage area, the blocks were given steel anchor bars and their surfaces were waterproofed with resin. Meanwhile, the new site was readied. The foundation was excavated, frameworks were built for the facades, which would be placed in position and mounted in concrete. And then the concrete domes would be constructed, one on top of each temple, to bear the weight of the cliff to be built above them.

  The most delicate work, inside the chambers themselves, was left to the marmisti, whose intimacy with stone was unrivalled. They alone were entrusted to cut into the painted ceiling; it was essential that the blocks fit into place within six millimetres, the maximum allowance for inaccuracy. The Italian stoneworkers possessed a daredevil nonchalance, pure scavezzacollo, an instinct so honed that the possibility of error was precisely calculated then disregarded. With handkerchiefs tied around their heads to keep any possibility of sweat from their eyes, they stroked the stone surface, reading like a lover every crevice with their fingers, then bit into the stone with the teeth of the saw.

  Giovanni Belzoni contemplated the tip of Ramses' head: a few sculpted centimetres exposed from under the weight of the drifted sand. He saw that to clear a passage would be like trying to “dig a hole in water.”

  Giovanni Battista Belzoni was born in Padua in 1778, the son of a barber. Because he grew to more than six feet, six inches tall and was able to carry twenty-two men on his back, he had, in his youth, joined the circus as “The Patagonian Samson.” But he was also an hydraulic engineer, an amateur archaeologist, and an unrepentant traveller; he and his wife, Sarah, wandered through twenty years of marriage in search of treasure in the desert.

  At three o'clock in the afternoon of July 16, 1817, Belzoni climbed the dune at Abu Simbel, took off his shirt, and began to dig with his bare hands. Before dawn, by lantern light, until nine in the morning, when the sun was already murderous, then resting for six hours and continuing again into the night. For sixteen days, Belzoni dug. The cold of the night urged him on. The persistent chill of sand, wind, and darkness; ambition, failure, forsakeness.

  Then, at last, at the edge of the lantern light, his hand fell into space and a small gap, barely big enough for a man to crawl through, opened up under the cornice of the temple.

  For a moment Belzoni remained perfectly still, almost believing his hand was no longer attached to him. Then, something in the night changed, the desert changed, he could feel it, he could hear it: the ancient air inside the temple moaning from its new small mouth. Belzoni knew he should wait until the morning light, but he could not. Slowly he removed his hand from the hole (like the boy at the dyke) and felt an intense power released, as if a great furnace of sacredness had been opened and the heat of belief was pouring out. An intensity utterly unfamiliar, frightening. Later he remembered what the explorer Johann Burckhardt had said to him – “We have so long forgotten how to be intimate with immensity.” He felt as if the black heat had burned right through him, a wound where now the chill desert wind was rushing – and indeed, when he recovered himself a little, he realized that the air coming from inside the temple was insufferably hot, hotter than a steambath, so hot that later the sweat would run down his arm and through his fingers onto his notebook and Belzoni would have to stop drawing. But now he knew he would have to wait for morning. When he pulled out his upper body, the night wind doused him; instantly, shockingly, the heat froze on his skin.

  He squatted in the sand and looked out toward the river that was becoming almost visible, the sun beginning to crack open on the rim of the hills. It was dawn, August 1, 1817.

  Soon the sun would enter the great painted hall of Abu Simbel for the first time in more than a thousand years.

  From the small hole behind him, the immense roar of silence.

  One day, a blind man appeared in the desert. His dark skin was smooth over his bones, and however old one guessed him to be, he was most certainly older. He wore European trousers and singlet but spoke no European language, only a whispered Arabic, as if he were afraid to be woken by his own voice.

  At the blind man's request, the labourers carefully guided him up the contours of Ramses' powerful calves to the king's thick knees, each the size of a boulder. The old man would not be carried and took his time memorizing the way. After several ascents and descents, he knew his route perfectly, and they let him climb unaided to sit on Ramses' knee. So steady and interested was his blind gaze, a stranger might assume the old man was looking for something in the river, or keeping watch. It made all the imported engineers nervous to see a blind man at that height, but, after the first day, the labourers took no notice.

  The blind man fascinated the stonecutters. The marmisti watched his fingers follow the clues in the rock with professional app
reciation. They saw that he never faltered, that he moved with intense slowness and precision. If he moved, he was sure. When Jean first saw him in Ramses' lap, she gasped. How still he sat, how sculpted his face; he looked like a living Horus, the god with the head of a bird. One night she saw him, his singlet shining white, and he was singing. The machinery was loud; he could not be heard, his mouth open in silence. But Jean could tell the blind man was singing because he had closed his eyes.

  Each river has its own distinct recipe for water, its own chemical intimacies. Silt, animal waste, paint from the hulls of boats, soil carried on skin and clothes and feathers, human spit, human hair … Looking out at the river, which at first had astonished Avery with its smallness – the great Nile seemed to him as slender as a woman's arm, incontestably female – Avery was pained to imagine the force with which it would soon be bound, its submission. Each year, for thousands of years, swollen with the waters from Ethiopia, the Nile offered her intense fertility to the desert. But now this ancient cycle would abruptly end. And end, too, the centuries-old celebrations of that inundation, inseparable from gods and civilization and rebirth, an abundance that gave meaning to the very rotation of the earth.

  Instead there would be a massive reservoir reshaping the land – a lake “as large as England” – so large that the estimated rate of evaporation would prove a serious misjudgment. Enough water would disappear into the air to have made fertile for farming more than two million acres. The precious, nutrient-saturated silt that had given 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 other, requiring both probity and shrewdness.

  Avery contemplated the St. Lawrence clay at his feet. He understood almost instantly that it would harden to rock in winter and in summer grip even the largest wheels immobile. Though it was compliant at the moment, this early afternoon in March 1957, he guessed correctly that the building of the seaway could easily become one of the most treacherous excavations on the continent. Avery had been hired on his own merits and under his father's supervision. But William Escher had died before even the first tree was felled. Since leaving school, Avery had always worked with his father. Now he found himself looking out upon the last moments of a landscape – always their shared ceremony – without his father's hand on his shoulder.

  Along these leafy shores of the St. Lawrence, towns and hamlets had sprung up, founded by United Empire Loyalists, settlers made up of former soldiers in the battalion of the “Royal Yorkers.” Then came the German, the Dutch, the Scottish settlers. Then a tourist by the name of Charles Dickens, travelling by steamboat and stagecoach who described the river that “boiled and bubbled” near Dickinson's Landing and the astonishing sight of the log drive. “A most gigantic raft, some thirty or forty wooden houses on it, and at least as many log-masts, so that it looked like a nautical street …”

  Before this came the hunters of the sea, the Basque, Breton, and English whalers. And, in 1534, Jacques Cartier, the hunter who captured the biggest prize, an entire continent, by quickly recognizing that, by bark canoe, one could follow the river and pierce the land to its heart.

  The great trade barons grumbled, unable to depart their Atlantic ports and conquer the Great Lakes with their large ships, groaning with goods to sell. Two irksome details stood in the way: the second largest falls in the world – Niagara – and the Long Sault Rapids.

  The sound of the Long Sault was deafening. It ate words out of the air and anything caught up in its force. For three miles, a heavy mist hung over the river and even those at a distance were soaked with spray. The white water rampaged through a narrow gorge, a gradual thirty-foot descent.

  In the mid-1800s, canals were cut to bypass the rapids but were too shallow for the great freighters. It was the way of things; Avery could not name a significant instance where this was not true, that early canals proved to be the first cut of a future dam, no matter how many generations lay between them. Building the seaway, with a dam to span the Canadian and American banks of the river, had been discussed many times, over many decades, until, in 1954, the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was born. Hydro-electricity would be created for both countries; a lake, a hundred miles long, would pool between them.

  To achieve these ends, the wild Long Sault would be drained to its riverbed. For a year, while the channels were widened, archaeologists would roam the ships' graveya
rd where, for centuries, the force of the water had welded cannonballs, masts, and iron plate into the rock of “the cellar” on impact. Nothing short of an explosion would pry them loose.

  For some time, Avery sat on the shore of the river, in sight of the heavy machines, and thought about the wildness of that water, the elation of that force. It was familiar to him now, this feeling at the beginning, which he conscientiously registered as containing an element of self-pity; the first signs of a slow, coagulating grief.

  In the flooding of the shoreline, Aultsville, Farran's Point, Milles Roches, Maple Grove, Wales, Moulinette, Dickinson's Landing, Santa Cruz, and Woodlands would become “lost.” This was a term for which Avery had once felt contempt but now appreciated, for the sting of its unintentional truth; thousands would become homeless as though through some act of negligence. The former inhabitants would be conglomerated and relocated, distributed between two newly built towns – Town #1 and Town #2, eventually to be named Long Sault and Ingleside. Because the town of Iroquois was to be rebuilt a mile farther from shore and retain its name, officially it was not considered “lost,” though it would lose everything but its name. To be flooded, too, were Croil's, Barnhart, and Sheek islands. Construction would soon begin on the northern edge of the town of Morrisburg to make up for the half of itself that would disappear. The First Nations, descendants of Siberian hunters who'd crossed the land bridge from Asia twenty thousand years before and who'd made these shores their home since the melting of the great glacier, were dispossessed of shore and islands, and heavy metals from the new seaway industries would poison their fish supply and their cattle on Cornwall Island. Spawning grounds would be destroyed. Salmon would struggle upstream, alive with purpose, to find their way blocked by concrete.