Salvation for Abu Simbel

For five years the problem was attacked by the world's most imaginative engineers. Scheme after intricate scheme was devised on their drawing boards. Offer after expensive offer was made to save the great Egyptian temple at Abu Simbel from the waters that will soon rise behind the Aswan Dam. Which method would finally be chosen to preserve that magnificent relic of a lost civilization? While the world waited for an answer, each new suggestion drew new publicity while the money raisers raced against time to collect enough cash to pay what seemed sure to be an astronomical bill.

Piecemeal Plan. Last week the Egyptian government announced its decision. The competition was won by a group of Swedish engineers whose plans are so simple and so cheap they were never considered out loud in the long search. While others hawked their spectacular schemes, the Swedes worked quietly inside the temple itself. They probed the sandstone with diamond drills, measuring its strength. They charted its cracks and flaws. Finally they produced a carefully documented plan to cut the temple into chunks, lift it piecemeal to the top of the cliff and reassemble it--just as other workmen once cut up a European monastery, packed it in crates and shipped it home to be pasted together for a famed collector of antiquities, William Randolph Hearst. The cost will be a modest $36 million, one-third of which has been all but promised by the U.S. Government.

The Swedes do not expect to have an easy time, but they have found no reason why the work cannot be done. When the walls and roof have been freed from the rock around them, they will be sawed into chunks weighing not more than 30 tons each. Some of the pieces will be split apart and the breaks joined later. Blocks that are weak will be held together by bolts. Cranes will lift them one by one and deposit them gently on beds of sand on top of the cliff, where they will be wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect their surfaces. When the lowest of the blocks arrive, they will be placed on a concrete foundation. The temple will be reassembled as accurately as possible and surrounded by a natural-looking wall of local sandstone.

Healed Wounds. In the days when no scheme for saving the temple seemed satisfactory, when the ancient monument seemed doomed, tourists swarmed up the Nile. An air-conditioned hotel was built at Aswan to handle the traffic; an Aswan-Abu Simbel service went into operation with hydrofoil launches, one of which sank this spring, drowning two Frenchwomen. Business boomed--and now it may go on and on. When Lake Nasser has filled its tremendous basin, tourists will be able to float to the temple door, where the huge statues of Ramses II, their saw wounds healed and inconspicuous, will be waiting to greet all visitors.

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