Egypt - Raoudha nilometre in Cairo

Egypt, the gift of the Nile Egypt would not exist without the river and its periodical flooding which regulated life, work in the fields, religious and civil feastdays. The banks flooded by the river when it was in spate were transformed into arable lands. Before the great modern dams were built, the average width of these banks varied between 100 m in Sudanese Nubia and 1000 m in Egypt. The floods were devastating when a certain limit was exceeded, when they were very late or when the floods did not reach the minimum required level. It is nearly always towards the 10th June that the Nile starts to rise, rolling its "green waters" full of the decomposed grasses from the great equatorial lakes. But the river rises almost imperceptibly and its waters are unhealthy. It is in the middle of July that the rise in water level becomes evident due to the "red waters" from the disaggregation of the rocks from the torrents of Ethiopia which are driven towards the Nile by the violent summer storms.