On the island at our right was the machine they call the
Nilometer, a stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of the river and prophecy whether it will reach only thirty-two feet and produce a famine, or whether it will properly flood the land at forty and produce plenty, or whether it will rise to forty-three and bring death and destruction to flocks and crops--but how it does all this they could not explain to us so that we could understand.
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a
Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.
Dome of the
Nilometer from the inside decorated with different colors
This devastation could be somewhat diminished, though, by the
Nilometer, an invention that monitored the height of the river.
In order to add more pleasure for the visitor, one can get there a little early and have the chance to visit the historic
Nilometer as it stands just in front of the entrance to the palace.
The
Nilometer was how Egyptians measured the water level of the Nile River up until the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
Popper, The Cairo
Nilometer: Studies in Ibn Taghtl Birdi's Chronicles of Egypt I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ.
Washington, May 12 (ANI): The remains of a 5th century Egyptian Christian church and a "
nilometer," a structure used to gauge the level of the Nile during floods, are the latest finds at the "Avenue of Sphinxes".
The shape of the sculpture, Homage to Roudah Island (The Result of One Month Listening to Oum Kalthoum While Building an Unfoldable Portable
Nilometer) (all works 2009), by Mariana Castillo Deball, approximates both the narrative twists and turns of the classic Oum Kalthoum song "Al-Atlal" (The Ruins) and the architecture of the
Nilometer, a structure of stairs and columns devised in Pharaonic times to measure water levels along the Nile and maintain historical records of seasonal floods.