Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (10 page)

The primary effect of bilharzia is tiredness and pain. The disease eats away at the body for years. Your health is broken, your strength gone. I was told in Nubia that the spread in the habitual use of bango (grass) and hashish coincided with the spread of bilharzia in the upper Nile – it dulls the pain wonderfully.

Previously there had been only tiny pockets of bilharzia in the delta, which increased as a result of the first perennial irrigation introduced after the building of the first dam on the delta, the barrage of the 1880s. But with the high dam at Aswan, the barrage at Asyut and all the other clever stoppages and diversions the snail spread throughout the much increased network of canals and ditches.

Since time immemorial the Egyptians had irrigated their land with the one-off rush of the Nile flood in the summer. Now the dams held back some of the water all year, allowing the canals to be fed year round. There was no longer one great surging, cleansing flood, ripping away the nooks and crannies beloved by the bilharzia snail, carrier of the disease bilharzia, also known as schistosomiasis.

This snail-carried parasitic trematode emerges (usually only during the day) and penetrates any human skin in its vicinity. Once inside the human being the creature visits the lungs and then makes a home in the liver and begins feeding on red blood cells. The parasite matures into a worm less than half an inch long which starts laying hundreds of eggs. Such worms may persist in the body for up to twenty years, resulting in chronic lethargy, liver ailments, fever and malnutrition.

Throughout the ditches and canals of Upper Egypt the snail spread and the disease spread. It reduced the strength of the Upper Egyptian workers in a measurable way. The P&O coaling station at Port Said had the highest recoaling rate anywhere in the world in the 1900s, when it
was manned by hardy Upper Egyptians used to hours of back-breaking work. By the 1930s the Upper Egyptian population was raddled with bilharzia and the recoaling rates had fallen to a miserable level.

A cure was developed in Britain in 1918; the medieval compound of antimony known as tartar emetic was found to be effective. There were side-effects – odd seizures and vomiting – but in Nasser’s new Egypt these were considered trifling. A huge programme of injection ran from the 1950s to the 1980s. There was another coda: unwashed needles were used again and again on the entire rural population of affected areas. This spread hepatitis C in Egypt, which today has the highest levels of infection in the world at around 10 per cent of the population. Bilharzia is now cured orally with an annual treatment of praziquantel.

Bilharzia had been present even in pharaonic times, though it peaked in the later periods, perhaps when knowledge of the need for fast-moving water to keep it at bay was lost. In ancient times myrrh was considered a cure. A modern drug containing myrrh, called Mirazid, was finally dropped in 2005 – because, though it worked, the current cure praziquantel was eight times more effective.

The bilharzia/injection/hepatitis C fiasco is another case of the iron law of unintended consequences. Yet, despite his lack of foresight, Willcocks was a fascinating man. Apart from his monumental work in two volumes,
The Nile
, he produced one of the most interesting books ever to be written on the adventures of Moses. Willcocks decided to look at the Bible from the viewpoint of hydrology and irrigation. Since the earliest civilisations were based on irrigation, it was an eminently sensible departure point. Look at the world from Moses’ point of view, not our own. Despite his or her earnest training in flint knapping and ancient fire making, how is it possible for an archaeologist to look at the world – after the BA, the MA, the PhD and all the digs and volunteer jobs copying potsherds – with anything other than the eyes of an archaeologist? It seems peculiar to me that specialisation should involve developing a point of view that obscures the very subject you wish to study.

I knew from my time in the desert collecting stone tools that any place that looks interesting to us will have been interesting to ancient man. Caves, strange rock formations, interesting overhangs – in all of these places you will find the best artefacts – and these are all places a child, or someone still with the instincts of childhood, will gravitate
towards. One of my best finds – three intact amphorae found in the Great Sand Sea – was the result of asking someone to climb on to an interesting rock for a photograph. The pots were buried at its foot.

Willcocks was an expert in irrigation, not in biblical studies, but his conclusions in
From the Garden of Eden to the Crossing of the Jordan
are never uninformed, never the flat-footed stuff engineers who chose to write about the mystery of the Pyramids tend to write. It is a fascinating, wonderful glimpse into the mind of a late nineteenth-century polymath.

He was of English descent though born in Mussoorie, a hill station in India. When I visited the place I recognised at once the steep hillsides and fragrant deodars that had been Willcocks’ playground in his youth. He attended Indian schools and an Indian college of engineering. His ambition was to be like his father, a Devon man who had raised himself up from simple soldier to irrigation engineer by sheer determination and hard work. His father believed that the success of the British abroad was down to the quality of their gentry. Though of humble yeoman by birth himself he claimed, with the experience of a well-travelled soldier who had fought for the Carlists in Spain and with the British in Afghanistan and India, that there was no more generous landlord than the British gentry. Therein, he told his son William, lay the secret weapon of the British.

Willcocks lived an austere and disciplined life. ‘Hardships and alertness, in my opinion, go together,’ he wrote. He was fond, when out on a survey, of living in a tent as humble as those of his workers, if not more so. When local landowners came by to pay visits they assumed that no European boss was in charge and turned away, leaving Willcocks to get on with his precious work. Even late in life he would often be mistaken for a clerk rather than the chief of a large hydrological project. Described by his superior and eventual father-in-law Colonel Colin Scott-Moncrieff (brother of the Proust translator) as a human dynamo, without whom the indentured slavery known as the corvée would not have been ended nor the Aswan dam built.

A typical day for Willcocks started at 5.00 a.m. with him rising in his shared lodgings in Helwan, a health resort built about fifteen miles south of Cairo. His neighbours included the venerable German explorer Georg August Schweinfurth, whose path will crisscross with ours throughout the book. After a hasty breakfast of porridge Willcocks would spend twenty minutes doing his Sandow exercises. Willcocks
was an early follower of Eugen Sandow along with another early bodybuilder, Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed Sandow staged the world’s first bodybuilding exhibition in the Royal Albert Hall in 1901 with Sherlock Holmes’ creator as the head judge.

The half-Russian, half-Prussian ‘father of modern bodybuilding’, Sandow wrote books with the titles
Strength and Health
and
Movement is Life
. He was filmed in 1894 by the Edison film company (we will later encounter Edison making the first elephant snuff movie: he filmed the death of a rogue elephant). The Sandow film was a huge success and people marvelled less at his strength than at the bulge of his muscles. Sandow’s fame was so great that a statuette of his resplendent physique is the first prize for Mr Olympia, the world-famous bodybuilding contest that Arnold Schwarzenegger won six times in a row. It seems appropriate that the man who did more than any other to wrestle the Nile into submission should be a fan of bodybuilding.

Anyway, with his exercises finished by 6.20 a.m., Willcocks would spend the next hour walking very fast ‘in a bee line up hill and down dale’ in the nearby desert. At 7.30 a.m. he would leave for Cairo and return home at 5. From 5.30 to 7.30 he again hurried through the desert. Walking was his favourite pastime and when surveying a new canal or irrigation he walked tirelessly. He boasted of once walking twenty-five miles a day every day for 107 days in temperatures of over 80 degrees. Truly a man of steel. Back home he would dine at 8.00 p.m. and be asleep in bed by 10, readying himself for another day at the office changing the course of nature and history.

But Willcocks, despite his zeal, or perhaps because of it, managed to get on the wrong side of Lord Cromer, the dictatorial
de facto
ruler of Egypt. For the first time in his life Willcocks was passed over for promotion. It was enough, he wrote, to shake his conviction in a Creator God and persuade him to give up his wishful plans for the great dam. Indeed he was thinking these blasphemous thoughts while out speed-walking in the desert one morning. Suddenly he felt an arm on his shoulder and the ghost of his dead father appeared and walked with him for half an hour and argued with him, at length persuading him never to give up his dream. Willcocks wrote, ‘From then on I never looked back but went on straight with my project with redoubled zeal.’

The plans were accepted as first rate. The survey work in Aswan was pronounced faultless. He had thought of everything – designing the
dam very high to accommodate archways through which the entire flood might run. This was Willcocks’ intention, so that the river would carry the silt-reddened Nile down to the delta and not back it up behind the dam. The dam could be raised further at a later date. Again Willcocks had foreseen that opposition to the yearly flooding of the temple of Philae would lessen once the multiple benefits of the dam were felt. His design was so complete it required only the Forth bridge engineer Sir Benjamin Baker to turn it into a reality.

But nothing happened. A year or two went by. He worked even harder; during one survey he never took a Sunday off in eighteen months and insisted that he and his men sleep in tents, the rougher sort of tent too, for that entire period. Finally in 1897 he asked Lord Cromer if his plans for the Aswan dam would ever be realised. Cromer rid himself of this troublesome employee by replying that all Egypt’s money was needed to reconquer the Sudan, and he doubted if the dam would ever be built in Willcocks’ time. So Willcocks resigned and took a job with the Cairo water board. A year later work on the world-changing dam began. Finance from the private investor Ernest Cassel had been found, but Willcocks was no longer there to be the midwife to his baby: ‘I well remember the feeling of humiliation which came over me when I stood on the four-foot diameter pipe which carried the whole of the water supply of Cairo and compared the dignity of looking after this water with that of designing structures for controlling the flood discharge of the Nile.’

Willcocks turned his back on building and started writing with a vengeance: his two-volume work
The Nile
is a masterpiece of detail and wonderfully drawn plans. He took up property speculation at the behest of the same Ernest Cassel who had funded the dam – and lost a lot of money.

But his zeal continued and he later worked in Iraq dealing with the irrigation problems of the Euphrates.

In later life Willcocks got into a dispute with Murdoch Macdonald, a man whom one immediately spots as a yes-man for the powers that be. The dispute ended as a libel suit, the traditional battleground of the English when all else has failed. Willcocks lost. The battle was about the flow rate of yet another dam to be built – this time on a major tributary of the Nile, the Atbara. Willcocks maintained that the figures were a lie. Whatever the truth of the matter, he lost. But the sheer venom of his attack seems unusual for this mild and industrious man. The
reason, I believe, can be found in his realisation that dams can bring misery too. He simply didn’t want another built.

All through those last years, the realisation slowly dawned that all that work, mountains of work, would not bring unalloyed benefits to mankind. The mountains of work. The dams, the canals, the pumps, the barrages – if anyone transforms the world it is the water engineer. He can raise fertile land from barren sea with polders and dykes, he can rewire the oceans with a giant canal, he can feed a nation that is starving. Instead of building useless stone monuments he builds useful ones (later we’ll find just how close the Pyramids came to being demolished to make the first dam across the Nile). Instead of wailing about floods and famines he stops them dead in their tracks. Is there anything wrong with that? Is there a point beyond which one leaves behind honest agriculture and enters the vicious swerve ball of unintended consequences? Of building a dam that brings disease and misery as well as population growth?

We know that agriculture resulted in a drop in general health compared to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Hunter-gatherers, for example, routinely keep all their teeth until old age. Once flour was milled, dental decay became usual among agricultural populations. So every step up the technological ladder results in a drop in individual health but an increase in population. Egypt’s dams have coincided with vast population growth – from five million in 1890 to eighty-five million today. All living on the same strip of land – just better watered and more chemically altered than almost any black earth on the planet.

The connection, the symbiosis between exponential population growth and stopping the river, stopping the flow, seems important. There is no useful link, nothing a dedicated development official could get their teeth into, nothing solid like that. But if it was obvious we’d be fixing it already. If it was obvious the problem would be addressed. I wonder if all we are ever allowed is hints, vague associations, informal evidence, useful rumour. The world wants us to exercise judgement and we want to shirk it, we want it to be easy. Willcocks tried to make amends, but the damage was done, the path set, the die cast. Any way you turn you can’t undo a dam. Only time can do that.

I recovered from my strange illness. You usually do. Willcocks retired to Egypt. He quite clearly loved the country. I’m not sure how he died.

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The Nile evaporates