The Canal Builders:
  The Story of Canal Engineers Through the Ages
   Robert Payne
  1959 The Macmillan Co. NY USA
   ISBN: unknown


Out of those first trenches arose the great civilizations of the fertile crescent and Egypt. Follow from the Labyrinth to the English craze to Suez and to Panama.

In our modern world, in the complacency of our civilization, the only times we think about water is when it doesn't work for us. Imagine living in the distant arid reaches of a flood plain. How would you bring that life-giving liquid to your land?

In Robert Payne's first chapter, we are gifted with an evocative picture of "a small man, burned by the sun" as he hoes a trench through the silt-laden earth joining the fields of his village to the roiling current and thus, for a while, ensuring survival.

"Sometimes as we look back on those ancient canal diggers it is possible to guess at the emotions which moved them when they tamed the waters. For them, as for us, water was power, without which all life would cease from the earth... Today we are in the process of taming the rivers, but we are only a little closer to the heart of the mystery."

The story of canals and canal builders is the history of great recorded civilizations, of great power and its use and misuse; of great kings and their laws and great explorers and builders; of great distances, continents and great foolishness.

The romance of canal building comes to every child who has ever played in the rain and certainly holds immense allure to those of us who live where there is a scarcity of precipitation or an isthmus to cross.

Mr. Payne takes us from ancient cultures whose writings come down to us on scraps of papyrus or slabs of stone with names deep in our memory, the Labyrinth and the Scorpion; of the giants of our past: Hammurabi, Herodotus, Sennacherib, and Darius; of the wondrous worlds of Nippur, Ur, Babylon and Nineveh.

And so you continue to read your way through the waterways of our species' stories. The great omissions that Mr. Payne has left are China and Meso-America. Printed in 1959, long, long before the advent of computers and their ability to rustle up statistics and images; long before satellites and infra-red cameras with their abilities to see beneath the surface of our earth and oceans, this lively tome recreates our ardent desire to control our waterways.

And while I have truly relished, dreamed and been enchanted by Mr. Payne's craft with words and engineering ideas, the maps and illustrations included in this volume seemed incomplete to me and needed far more attention. For example, the map of the canals in England had not one name attached nor one year of completion noted. And while I am all for romance and articulate evocation, I do too like my facts.

The Canal Builders has been with me it seems forever, ever since, that is I got to an American library and found their discard racks! I read this in California during a drought when flushing our toilets had become a conscious act of calculation, where no rain had fallen in nearly a decade, where the watering of one's garden was done illegally if at all and water seemed to be our main source of conversation and conservation. Little did I know then, about the fabulous canals that brought water from more waterlogged regions.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca