The Nomadic Alternative – Page 55

waters passed from the self-sufficient Neolithic peasant into the hands of the bureaucrats. Instead of farming beside the sources of water, water was brought to him. The results were superficially spectacular. Production soared, but the nuclear family lost its individuality, and became enslaved to the caprices of an unstable machine, that masqueraded as a cooperative and ended as a police state. The Common Market Agricultural Policy discourages Tuscan farm-workers on cooperative projects from keeping their own rabbits.

Irrigation schemes hold out the tempting promise of more food and more land for greater numbers of hungry mouths. But vegetable production stimulates infant production. The playfulness of small children is perhaps the greatest reward a man can expect after his daily grind in the fields.

Pandit Nehru recorded his justifiable horror of the human coercion needed for a Chinese hydro-electric scheme. The rulers of China have always been master irrigators, and posthumous medals were awarded to the human dams who momentarily checked a river in spate with their bodies before they were swept off by the flood-waters chanting the sayings of Chairman Mao. It is symptomatic of the Pyramid mentality that one of the "solutions" to the problem of South Vietnam is - or was - the construction of a vast barrage across the Mekong Delta. One of the earliest royal antiquities from Egypt is a huge stone macehead - the symbol of naked power. On it carved in low relief, the king, whose emblem was a scorpion, rigidly magnificent, inaugurates an irrigation canal.

To live under the shadow of a great dam is to quiver with fear. The Egyptian fellahin has learned this. The placid waters behind the dam can cataract down an alluvial valley as the waters of chaos. The Sumerians feared Enlil, Lord of the Storm as well as Master of Compulsion. "What has he planned against me in his Holy Mind?"

"The rampant flood which no man can oppose, it shakes the heaven and earth. In a blanket of horror, it enfolds heaven and earth, beats down the canebreaks in their luxuriant greenery, and drowns the ripe harvest." Conversely in myth heroes have released the pent-up