On the Eve of the Session, the Reservoirs Speak for Themselves

They are only stripes of pale rock, but this week they have the authority of a subpoena. On the eve of the Concordat's emergency water session, the "bathtub rings" around the great reservoirs of three continents have widened to the exact figures that pulled a reluctant world into the hall at Geneva: the drawdown lines that hydrologists have watched creep upward, month on month, until they crossed the point where a meeting became unavoidable. At the Sahel's largest impoundment the water sits nineteen meters below its spillway; across the Deccan the story repeats in a different dialect of stone; in the American Southwest a boat ramp has ended two hundred meters short of the shore for the third summer running. "We have modeled this for a decade, and the reservoirs still manage to say it more plainly than we can," said one Tethys Hydrous Group engineer, walking a dry margin that was lakebed within living memory. The ministers arrive tomorrow to argue over allocation formulas. The reservoirs have already filed their brief. It is written on the rock, and it does not need translation.