We have travelled to the heart of a million square miles of vast, almost waterless isolation, a place once considered to be amongst the most inhospitable on the planet. Following in the footsteps of W.J. Harding-King, a British scientist who reached this spot in 1909, we have navigated the Western Desert, which forms the eastern fringe of the Sahara and spans parts of Egypt, Libya and Sudan. All that is visible around us are sand dunes, some up to 500 feet tall, marching unceasingly across...
more »We have travelled to the heart of a million square miles of vast, almost waterless isolation, a place once considered to be amongst the most inhospitable on the planet. Following in the footsteps of W.J. Harding-King, a British scientist who reached this spot in 1909, we have navigated the Western Desert, which forms the eastern fringe of the Sahara and spans parts of Egypt, Libya and Sudan. All that is visible around us are sand dunes, some up to 500 feet tall, marching unceasingly across the void.
One hundred years after Harding-King's great journey, the desert is subject to one of the most astounding environmental transformations taking place anywhere on earth. A land of lost legends - where the ancient god of chaos, Seth, was sent into exile, and where 50,000 hardened soldiers of the Persian pharaoh Cambyses were swallowed up en masse by a sandstorm, never to be seen again - is being slowly turned, house by house, road by road, city by city, into the most improbable of solutions to Egypt's rapidly-escalating population crisis.
Through a technological soup of new reservoirs, expensive pumping stations and irrigation canals that crawl hundreds of miles through 40 degree sunshine, the government is aiming to turn over three million acres of arid ground into green farmland over the next decade, and provide a home for up to 19 million Egyptians along the way. Nothing less than an entire new valley of life is scheduled to rise, phoenix-like, from the sand.
It will be the country's biggest construction project since the pyramids, cost billions and billions of dollars, and according to many experts, is so bold as to be completely unachievable. And yet it is underway - transforming beyond all recognition the 'untouched' wilderness that filled Harding-King with such foreboding when he stepped out on these sands a century ago.
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