Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (18 page)

Aristotle refers to the Nile’s source as a silver mountain – an allusion again, one suspects, to the snow-capped Ruwenzoris. He calls them by their classical name, of course – the Mountains of the Moon.

It is fascinating to discover that in a convoluted sense these mountains and the lake they supply – Lake Albert – are the real source of the Nile. The argument is that water flowing into the top of Lake Albert is equal in quantity to that leaving Lake Victoria. Therefore there has been no increase. And a true source from a hydrological point of view is the point when a river begins to increase in volume of flow. Lake Albert is still (as it was 12,500 years ago before Lake Victoria burst its banks) the start of the Nile’s useful life; it is the place from which the river stops merely maintaining its size and starts a continual increase as it heads towards the sea.

For those, such as myself, who like to think that the ancients had it all nailed, there is further loose evidence that the Mountains of the Moon really are the source – even without invoking obscure hydrological definitions. Suggestively, the Ruwenzoris also join up with the rift-formed chain of hills that includes the upland area where the current ‘real source’, the Kagera river, rises.

When Strabo appeared some 300 years later in 63
BC
he turned his attention to Ethiopia and the Blue Nile’s source. For the first time in literature the Nile’s flood is laid bare: ‘Now the ancients depended mostly on conjecture, but the men of later times, having become eyewitnesses, perceived that the Nile was filled by summer rains when Upper Ethiopia was flooded, and particularly in the region of its furthermost mountains, and that when the rains ceased, the inundation gradually ceased.’

Which was about right. He also spoke of another source where the arum and the stalks of staphylini were twelve cubits high (about eighteen feet) – which sounds like the outsize and superabundant vegetation
in the high Ruwenzoris. That is more loose evidence that everything worth knowing has always been known in some way.

While pursuing this agreeable fantasy one should not ignore the later religions. One hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammad is ‘The Nile comes out of the Garden of Paradise, and if you were to examine it when it comes out, you would find in it leaves of Paradise.’ This could easily refer to the entangled vegetation of the immense swamp of the Sudd, but, more suggestively, the exuberant, giant, dripping flora of the Ruwenzoris comes to mind – a place of botanical strangeness unrivalled in its primitive grandeur.

From 7,500 feet upwards the bamboo towers to more than fifty feet high, only diminishing when the altitude creeps past 10,000 feet. At this height you enter the alpine zone where heather can be expected – but
Erica arborea
and
Philippia johnstonii
are no ordinary heathers – they grow to forty or fifty feet in height with trunks several feet in diameter. In the Ruwenzoris all year round it is the growing season; there is perpetual dampness but also exceptional quantities of ultraviolet light. What better place to identify as Eden?

At around 6,500 feet one encounters the giant lobelias – thirty-foot plants are not so uncommon, and many are over twenty feet high. The petals form dense flowers often ten feet in length. These plants have been seeded and can be grown, if treated with care, in England’s cool damp climate. Protected against frost inside a greenhouse they may reach heights of four or five feet in two years of growing. Out of Eden everything is diminished, a pale copy.

Another giant,
Lobelia wollastonii
, has a whole flower spike, often fifteen feet in length, pale-blue woolly bracts covering a delicate powder-blue flower. That such vigorous growth is possible at such high altitude is amazing. When transported to Europe, however, the plant almost invariably fails to thrive and soon perishes.

More Moon Mountain madness: Stanley, in
In Darkest Africa
(incidentally in this book revealing himself to be someone far more interesting than the conventionally accepted gung-ho caricature), explained that he had found an ancient manuscript while travelling through Egypt. Oh, what images that conjures up: the Victorian explorer resplendent in his special ‘explorer’s uniform’ (Stanley invented and popularised such a thing) wending through the labyrinthine souk. A hiss and a whisper alert him to some old wizened pedlar of antiquities. The man’s shop is loaded with dusty treasures, but it is the ancient book
that Stanley buys, for a Marie-Thérèse dollar he has hidden in his special ‘gold bearing’ explorer’s belt.

Back at Shepheard’s Hotel, making sure no one can see him, he peruses the manuscript which he has had translated by a bespectacled schoolmaster down on his luck. It appears to be a copy of an even older text. This was also in Arabic, and was known as
The Explorer’s Desire
and was said to date from around the time of Saladin, the eleventh century. Stanley was so impressed he quoted at length from this long-lost book:

As Stanley confirmed Lake Victoria as the source of the White Nile, one can see that this text supports his findings. The ancient book continues: ‘It is said that a certain king sent an expedition to discover the Nile sources, and they reached the copper mountains, and when the sun rose the rays reflected were so strong that they were burnt.’

It is interesting to note that in the 1930s, long after Stanley had died, the rich copper mines of Kilembe were found at the foot of the snowy Ruwenzoris. The Mountains of the Moon were rich in everything: water and mystery and now money.

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Powerstories: Aesop the Ethiopian

Two sharp edges do not cut each other
. Ethiopian proverb

If there is one defining characteristic that separates the ancient and traditional from the modern, it is the store set by storypower. Though businessmen and scientists are rediscovering traditional stories as structures of advanced and subtle thought, this has yet to enter the mainstream of ‘official’ thinking. To traditional man, stories are the lifeblood of communication. To the modern man stories are, well, just stories.

Herodotus’ text, like the Bible, Homer and
Don Quixote
, is just one story after another; indeed this was the form of all books until the modern era. One can see that the novel as an art form arises precisely when story begins to lose its official place and is being replaced by reasoned argument, logic, vaguely scientific opinion, politics, progress. The novel – as entertainment – is a suitable place for the story to retire to. And yet stories refuse to go away.

In telling the story of the Red Nile I haven’t just happened on a mass of stories; it is as if the Nile itself is intimately associated with the generation of stories throughout history. It seems to attract the great story originators. One of these was Aesop.

I had made most of my journeys into the lower parts of the White Nile, but I ensured I did not ignore Ethiopia – the source of the Blue Nile, the place where the fountain of youth is supposed to be situated. It may well also have been the birthplace of Aesop. Though some traditions place him as a Greek slave, the African animals in his stories and the happy etymology of his name – Aesop/Aethiope – have led many to conclude that the stories are of Ethiopian origin, and the Greekness of the tales (and the language in which they were written) merely the nationality of the reteller or even scribe.

The Nile connects everything up: connections were appearing that I could not have predicted. Many commentators consider that the original source of Aesop’s fables was a set of tales ascribed to a mythical African known as Luqman, a slave of Ethiopian origin. Delving further into orally supported traditions we discover that Luqman, the
hakim
or wise one as he was known, originated in Nubia, in a village on the Nile.

Luqman was captured by Greek marauders around 200
BC
and taken back to Greece to work as a carpenter and boat builder – trades he had acquired in Africa. Most African slaves of Nile origin were known as Ethiopians, and when he started telling his fables and wise proverbs the collection became known as the Ethiopian’s/Aesop’s fables. A traditional tale has it that his rehabilitation to freedom and renown began when his master asked him to slaughter a sheep and bring him the ‘best’ pieces of the animal as well as the worst. Perhaps his owner planned to patronise Luqman by offering him the classy food in contradistinction to the inedible. Whatever the motive, Luqman carried out the task and arrived with a plate containing only the heart and the tongue. The slave owner was taken aback but kept his own counsel. He
did not want a mere slave to get the better of him. However, the next day Luqman’s intrigued master asked him to slaughter another sheep – and Luqman arrived with the heart and the tongue again. ‘But how’, asked his Greek owner, ‘can these be both the best and the worst parts?’ Luqman replied, ‘In a sincere person the heart and the tongue are the best part of him, but in a hypocrite – the heart and the tongue are his worst parts.’

This somehow connected with his master’s thoughts. The Greek was delighted and Luqman soon acquired a reputation for passing on stories which people wanted to retell. Eventually he was granted his freedom – to be able to wander and tell stories wherever he chose. When Luqman was asked how he had acquired his knowledge he replied, ‘By observing the ignorant.’ On another occasion he said, ‘By speaking the truth and avoiding that which does not concern me.’

Many people, weary of the idea that such simple stories are merely for children, are naturally attracted to the Arabic tradition which states that Aesop’s fables often have the opposite meaning to their stated ‘moral’. The moral was the morsel needed to throw to the populace, and to kids, but that really each fable had a more useful, less obvious, more growth-inspiring meaning. Take the fox and the grapes story. A fox jumps and jumps to reach some grapes. Eventually he turns away disappointed and says, ‘They were most likely sour anyway.’ The standard moral is ‘sour grapes’ – we deride what we can’t reach. But the inner yarn has it that the fox, a creature who kills for curiosity, stands for the merely curious part of ourselves, the part that wants to know things just for the sake of knowing them. Instead of avoiding what does not concern us, as Luqman counsels, we plunge headlong into things which may indeed harm us. And this frame of mind means any attempt at real enquiry goes off half cocked, since we have taught ourselves, like the fox, to give up easily.

Unlike a ‘moral’ tale, this reading of Aesop allows for any number of meanings. We have seen that it admits of a warning against casual, uncommitted interest. If we want real enlightenment – and grapes and wine turn up time and again in traditional tales as symbols of enlightenment – then we must relinquish something. This can also mean giving up on using ‘reason’ to create a justifying argument when things have not gone the way one wanted – giving up on a ‘sour grapes’ justification. By making up such comforting after-the-event arguments we insulate ourselves from the reality – which in this case is simply
a failure to jump high enough. A really enlightened response is not the therapeutic use of argument but a practical response: go and get a ladder to reach the grapes. Get some assistance – a teacher, perhaps.

The fox, unlike Luqman, is interested in things that cannot benefit him. Until he learns to pay attention to that which concerns him and ignore that which doesn’t, the benefit will remain out of his grasp.

Naturally, in writing about such matters I had to consider my own conduct. Wasn’t I, on a more mundane level, acting out the worst kind of casual curiosity as I pursued endless leads that promised me enlightenment about the Nile? Perhaps. Yet I could not shake off the conviction, and it was only a conviction, that the Nile was the river of stories just as much as it was the river of history.

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The last will and testament of Eratosthenes, 194
BC

A hater hates even honey
. Nubian proverb

A story. Eratosthenes, his voice carried by his breath, not distinct from it, rising and falling, dictates to a patient scribe whose face he has never seen.

‘I am blind and I am old, and have been both for long enough to know these conditions as no more limiting than any other. Man is limited in his life, he carries his dreams of escape to his death. Now I have decided that the end is near enough: I will not eat again, to die by my own hand is of no interest to me, but to cease eating and to cease to be
that way
, is my way of leaving this life with some shred of dignity intact. The Library of Alexandria is where I shall continue to live – in my works – there shall the young meet me as their teacher when I am gone.

‘What did I manage? I have shown the truth about the Nile, stripped it of all its ugly superstition. I have shown the truth about the world, its size and extent. The distance of the sun and the moon – all these I have shown, correctly and for the first time. Will this knowledge ever be lost again? Not as long as the Library of Alexandria exists.

‘The Egyptian peasant still worships Amun, the sun, without knowing that the sun is impossibly distant. Nor does the peasant know, nor I, why the moon, which is so much closer and smaller, occupies in the
skies a shape the same size – when seen from earth. Hence the moon can block the sun and the sun can block the moon – neither one nor the other can claim supremacy of size. It is as if the gods planned it that way. But the distances I know. There is no magic in that.

‘To find the true course of the Nile, which I have shown a thousand times more accurately than Herodotus the old liar, is derived from my famous journeying to Syene to see for myself the sun overhead and casting no shadow to left or right. I had with me four trained pacers – who would walk at the same step for a hundred or a thousand paces. They marched only in a straight line, unless a bend of the river made that impossible. I measured the angle and course of any deviation and thus found the distance from Alexandria to Syene in Upper Egypt. It was knowing this that meant I could find the circumference of the earth.