It is late. The travelcraft, a vehicle capable of unlimited travel in, on, or through any medium, was delayed leaving. Some things never change. Our departure was held up for connecting passengers, one of whom had lost a bag. Arriving now in Alexandria after a flight from the States that lasted only one hour, I am amazed to see the new Aerodeck that has replaced the old airport. It is built high on stilts and juts out over the bay, ready to receive our group. As the level of the sea rose, the city went under water and had to be rebuilt. After much of the old delta was flooded, the concrete and steel of the city was recycled into massive dikes and lagoons created to provide the space needed to contain the spacious floating islands on which people now live. Large enough to support villages, towns, and factories, they are built on pontoons and flotation devices made of a light plastic that is manufactured from local vegetation.
We see all this from above as the travelcraft banks before sliding gently to a stop on a cushion of air. We walk out of the craft onto the moving sidewalk that passes us rapidly through an ultra-modern complex. The international customs system, based on electronic information stored on microchips embedded under our skin, allows us to walk directly to the curbside transport where our guide is waiting to show us the New Delta. We are the new generation of ecovisitors, bent on seeing firsthand what has happened to Egypt. We board sleek vehicles that are powered by microfusion plasma reactors and hover just above the ground or water surface. They are ideal all-terrain vehicles that allow us to glide unhindered across the delta terrain.
Here we see polders and dikes planted with reed grasses. The polders provide the platforms on which wind turbines and solar panels are built that power the continuously running pumps, pumps that keep the seawater levels low enough to balance the incoming fresh water. This maintains the New Delta as a floating world with wide plantations of salt grass, reeds, and fish farms stretching as far as the eye can see. Our clear-domed, air-cushioned vehicles allow us an unobstructed view as we scoot along, barely disturbing the water surface, reeds, or raised walking platforms between the fields.
Further along, well away from the brackish water of the coast, we see the beginning of the wide papyrus swamps that have been planted and nourished by effluents from the freshwater collection system, a centralized water carrier that channels all water in Egypt for treatment. Once passed through the reed beds, the water is used in the highly efficient floating farms, hydroponic wonders that use every drop.
Clean water in excess is sent directly from village and town papyrus filterbeds to the eastern and western deserts, which have become the new Edens of this world of plenty. Our visit is short; we have many other places to go. But we are impressed and look forward to seeing the large bird sanctuaries that are maintained throughout the Nile Valley. Cultivation of food, exotic vegetables, and grains for export under the thin plastic roofs of these floating farms has again made Egypt a world granary. In a way, the New Delta is a return to the water-world of archaic times. The ancient marsh men are now the engineers and technicians who keep the system going, and the plastic used on the farms, floating houses, boats, and futuristic buildings is made of plastic that comes from recycled swamp vegetation—papyrus in its new form.1
If Hapi were alive and well, he would smile and bow and shake the umbels in his crown to signal good times, and we would be told that we have survived because we listened to the earth spirits and learned to live within the natural system. Now, because we have deserved it, each of us can look forward to an eternal life within our own Field of Reeds.