| || Under the burning sun of northwest Egypt, the evaporation
of water from the shallower parts of this salt lake has cracked
its bed of sand and mud, forming these extremely hard, rounded
wrinkles. Here and there salt forms a white crust, tracing the
outline of the bluish, stagnant pool. The salt concentration in
the water is so high that no living organism can survive.
However, the shores of these lakes are shaded by palm trees and
olive trees, fed by the oasis’s 230 freshwater springs. Thus,
Siwa’s 15,000 inhabitants grow 300,000 date palms and 70,000
olive trees. Fresh water is one of the scarcest resources on the
planet, accounting for only 2.5 percent of the total volume of
water on the Earth, and of that proportion, 77 percent is
trapped as ice at the poles and in glaciers. Liquid fresh water
is unequally distributed, being rare in the tropics but
plentiful on the equator and in temperate regions. Even where it
is abundant, it is still precious. Its quality is constantly
deteriorating as a result of c