A Great Engineer Sir William Willcocks, whose death at the
age of eighty we record with regret, built his own monuments in Egypt and Iraq, as durable as those of Cheops and very much more useful. The son of an English officer serving under "John Company," he entered the Indian Public Works Department. From India, like Cromer and other eminent men, he went to reorganize Egypt. There he conceived the bold scheme of damming the Nile at Assuan so as to assure a plentiful supply of water at all seasons to Lower Egypt. The plan involved heavy expense, great engineering difficulties and the submergence of the famous temples at Philae. But it was carried out at a cost of £5,000,000 and the dam, a mile and a quarter long, has stood firm for a generation and been twice heightened. His Assuan feat led the Sultan Abdul Hamid to entrust Willcocks with the designing of the great Hindia barrage on the Euphrates, to the south-west of Baghdad, mainly to irrigate the Sultan's estates. This work was finished in 1911 and has proved its value, though it was but a small part of the engineer's plans for making Mesopotamia once more blossom like the rose.
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