Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

BOOK: Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River
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RED NILE

A Biography of the World’s Greatest River

ROBERT TWIGGER

 

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

List of Illustrations

Maps

Introduction

One: Natural Nile

Beasts and beginnings

Two: Ancient Nile

Famine, pestilence and a severed penis

Three: River of the Believers

Madness and mystics

Four: The Nile Extended

Raw steak and Napoleon

Five: The Nile Damned

Elephants, exploration and Agatha Christie’s trunk

Six: Blood on the Nile

From assassination to revolution

Epilogue

A Very Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Plate Section

By Robert Twigger

About the Author

Copyright

 

 

 

 

 

ILLUSTRATIONS

Papyrus from the Book of the Dead of Nakht, showing Spell 110. Thebes, late Eighteenth Dynasty, 1350–1300
BC
(
The Trustees of the British Museum
)

Back view of a crocodile-skin suit of armour from the third century
AD
, discovered near Manfalut (
The Trustees of the British Museum
)

Map showing Egypt to Ethiopia from the Ptolemy manuscript, illustration from
Memoires de la Societe Royale de Geographie d’Egypte
, c.1470 (
Private Collection/Bridgeman
)

Photograph of the Great Pyramid of Cheops reflected in the Nile over-flow, c.1950 (
G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection/Library of Congress
)

Aerial photograph of the Aswan Dam, looking north, c.1936 (
G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection/Library of Congress
)

Fifteenth-century illumination from
Les Grandes Chroniques de France
, showing Louis IX’s battle against the Saracens on the Nile (
AKG/Erich Lessing
)

The Nilometer, Rhoda Island (
Radius Images/Corbis
)

The Battle of the Nile, 1 August 1798 at 10 p.m
. by Thomas Luny, 1834 (
Bonham’s, London/Bridgeman
)

Map of Speke and Grant’s route from Zanzibar to the Nile, drawn and coloured by Grant with explanatory note by Speke dated 26 February 1863 (
Royal Geographical Society
)

Tissisat Falls (
Christophe Bolsvieux/Hemis/Corbis
)

Albumen print of a house and garden in the French Quarter, Cairo, with Gustave Flaubert, 1850 (
Private collection/Christie’s/Bridgeman
)

Photograph of a
dahabiya
in Cairo, c.1860–90 (
Library of Congress
)

Photographic print of boys shooting the rapids of the Nile on logs, c.1901 (
H.C. White Co./Library of Congress
)

Stereograph showing palm trees partially submerged by water of the Nile, Cairo, c.1898 (
B.W. Kilburn/Library of Congress
)

General Gordon’s Last Stand
by George William Joy (
Leeds Art Gallery/Bridgeman
)

Egyptian soldiers firing on President Anwar Al-Sadat while reviewing a military parade in honour of The October 1973 War, on 6 October, 1981 in Cairo (
Makaram Gad Alkareem/AFP/Getty Images
)

Murchison Falls (
Ric Ergenbright/Corbis
)

Aerial photograph of Khartoum showing the confluence of the Blue and White Nile, taken from the Columbia space shuttle, 1990 (
Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images
)

 

 

 

 

 

MAPS

Two dams that changed the Nile forever

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Red river

Picture a river that flows through a quarter of all Africa, a river fed by smaller streams and other rivers, yet retaining in our mind a unity, a single identity, despite the diversity of the nations and tribes it passes through. One molecule of the water that rises in the forests of Burundi or in Lake Tana in Ethiopia can make its journey all the way to the Nile delta in Egypt and flow into the Mediterranean, and so justify our referring to the mighty system of the Nile as one river.

The Nile is mighty. If the Thames were on the same scale it would not end at Gravesend – it would swim the Channel, continue through Europe, cross all of Turkey and enter Iraq to issue like the Euphrates into the Arabian Gulf. Imagine travelling such a river, wanting to own it and control it. This has been the dream of men and nations since nations began with the world’s first – the country known as Misr, Egypt.

These attempts at control have faded, the influence and consequences all forgotten. Only the stories remain. And the ruins of great buildings, old dams, temples and statues? Don’t these exist too as the stories we tell of such buildings and their makers? Only the stories remain.

And what is the colour of such stories? A trick question. The stories that remain are always the most highly coloured, the most passion filled or the most blood curdling. Naturally, their colour is red.

Red. The real Nile isn’t White or Blue or even Green. It’s Red. For a moment when the Blue Nile in full flood enters the White Nile it backs up the river, reversing its flow for five miles, mixing its load of sediment with the clearer waters of the White Nile to make, for a few days, a blood-red river. This moment, in time and place, where Blue and White meet in the Sudan in early summer near Khartoum, is a magical metaphor for the world’s greatest river: a river of blood, of life, of
death. When Moses demanded that the Pharaoh allow the Israelites to leave, ten plagues were visited upon the Egyptians – the first being that the Nile turned into blood and all the fish died. Some commentators suggest this was a ‘red tide’, a rare algal bloom on the river’s surface, but we will, in a short while, discover better explanations for this seeming miracle. Later, in 1249, ‘Bloody’ Baiburs, the Mamluk defender of Egypt, put 3,000 French crusaders to the sword in the delta and turned ‘the mighty Nile red with blood’. This is a river that naturally runs red throughout history, the colour of wars, of creation, of struggle, of pilgrimage, of sickness, of triumph.

The White Nile and the Blue Nile are rivers, amazing rivers, but riverine in scope and history, like rivers, admittedly big rivers, the world over. The lower Nile, the only river to cross the Sahara Desert, is extraordinary in its own right too. But take them together – the Blue, White and lower Nile – and you have something truly remarkable. This is what I choose to call the Red Nile. It is the entire system of Niles, and it is without doubt the greatest and most influential river system in the world.

The Nile inspired Alexander the Great in the fourth century
BC
to seek its source to discover the explanation for its miraculous flood – which happens in summer. All other rivers in the ancient world flooded in winter. One reason for the incredible plenty of Egypt, which allowed it to amass grain and establish an urban culture (and the world’s first nation state), is the fact that just when you need water, when it’s hot and dry, you get a ton of it. A veritable flood, an inundation that bursts banks and brings life-giving silt into every field. And the sheer quantity of silt, which comes from the Ethiopian highlands, was unsurpassed in growing power until the advent of chemical fertilisers. With flood and flood-borne silt you have the makings of a country that the Romans would call the ‘breadbasket of the Empire’.

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