Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (2 page)

Alexander’s emissaries never did get to the source. Instead he turned to the Oracle in Siwa. The Boy King asked it to explain the summer inundation. There is no record of the oracular answer. But we now know the flood arises in the summer monsoon rains that deluge the Ethiopian highlands.

Creation’s river

The banks of the Nile are smoking with the fires of the river dwellers. There are crocodiles and hippos, gazelle and ibis. Hyacinth floats midstream. A sacred river, old and contorted as a creation myth, the Red Nile absorbs all life and death and moves on. It swirls its way deep into Africa, its scale beyond comprehension.

So much begins on the banks of the Red Nile, on the palm-tree bank, the papyrus bank. All religion, all life, all stories. The script we write in, the language we speak. The gods and the legends and the names of stars. This great river, somehow unhurried, yet always swiftly moving on, has been history’s greatest and most sustained creator.

The first people of the Red Nile were very probably the first people anywhere. They came up the Nile valley, an extension of the Great Rift Valley of east Africa. The rift was where all the little competing groups of humanoids first emerged. Eventually
Homo sapiens sapiens
made it up the rift and up the river, into Europe and the rest of the world.

These first humans were far from unimaginative. We encounter them through their art, drawn exquisitely on scooped-out cave walls, and through their tools: hand axes, heavy and scalloped, and flint arrowheads chipped from silica, a rare natural glass found only in the Egyptian Sahara, thought to have been formed by a meteor of massive proportions smashing into the sand and fusing with the Great Sand Sea into a wondrous aquarium green. (Millennia later, a large piece of this glass was transported by donkey and then up the Nile, so that the Pharaoh Tutankhamen could have it carved into a scarab and set in gold around his neck.)

Stories remain

Older than Egypt, older than the current course of the Nile, is the
Crocodylus niloticus
, the Nile crocodile. There is one outside my window in Cairo, where the Nile moves with effortless ease, always wind lapped, always flowing north. The crocodile’s appearance, usually among the reeds of some Nileside suburb of Cairo, gets reported every two or three years. This time it surfaces in Maadi, where I live, a few miles from the centre of the city. Instead of being a wild creature it is a pet released by
a bored owner. In ancient Egypt, the crocodile was a symbol of protection. It’s comforting to have him near.

My home is one road back from the Corniche, the once grand, now faded and tatty avenue that runs alongside the Nile in Cairo. I can see the water between two new buildings: an oblong of river, a single palm and a patch of blue sky. In the late afternoon I can see, in this oblong, the sun setting directly behind the Pyramids, ten miles away – when the smog isn’t too bad, that is. The Pyramids were built with giant limestone blocks carried to the Giza plateau by the floodwaters of the Nile. If you tried to build them today using the methods of the Pharaohs you couldn’t, because the Aswan high dam has reduced the summer flood to no more than a quickening of the flow and a rise of a foot or so; this is all that remains of the great flood of the past. There is almost always a breeze blowing up or down the river and, remarkably, it is never crowded. On it sail pleasure boats, small dhows called feluccas named by the British after the Portuguese boats, also of Arab origin, that look similar. Far older are the rowing boats plied by the fishermen. The design, with an upturned bow and stern and square-shaped oars, is the same as those found in ancient tombs in Saqqara.

Families of fisherfolk live year round on the water. While the men usually have an outboard motor, the women and young men still have to row using big ungainly oars. They cast their nets and beat the water to drive the fish into them; as with the boats, there are 3,000-year-old friezes, in the tombs of Beni Hassan, depicting fishermen beating the waters, doing exactly the same as they do today. There is another type of fisherfolk I can only see when I get closer to the river, usually from the outdoor terrace of TGI Friday’s, which serves ice-cold beer and overlooks the water. It is the Nile kingfisher, black and white to our kingfisher’s blue, and it plunges from on high to splash into the water, a sudden flicker like a flash photo, surfacing with a blood-stained silvery fish in its beak. Not long ago, in a small rubber boat more suited to a beach than the Nile, I floated downstream for six miles, from my suburb to the city centre. I passed an island where, according to legend, Moses was left in his basket; a few miles further downstream was the spot where Joseph and Mary landed after their flight to Egypt. The present population were busy killing a lamb for the
eid
festival, there on the beach – they waved at me to join them and the kids jumped into the bloodied river to grab hold of my boat. The Red Nile won’t let you
get away from history – it’s the source and the sauce in more ways than one.

People set eyes on the Nile and they are beset by a curious urge to travel up it, discover its secrets, own it, control its bounty. Most of the stories, the human stories, concern attempts successful or not to control this river. For millennia the Nile’s flood was controlled by building up high banks or levees along the river. These would contain the flood. Then at right angles other embankments directed the flood’s might right and left into large square basins, a patchwork of small lakes over which the populace would sail on papyrus rafts, wooden boats or even floating logs. The basins would dry up and be planted with grain which grew abundantly on such well-silted and well-watered soil. What follows is not the mainstream of history, chuntering on, year in, year out. Instead I have followed the metaphor a step further, written stories borne on the back of the Red Nile’s flood, stories of excess, love, passion, splendour and death. Plenty of death.

But, while necessarily limiting myself to the bloodiest and best narratives, I found something odd happening. This patchwork of stories began to join up in most unexpected ways. Just as floodwaters link up overlooked canals and waterways I started to expect rather than be surprised by the often extraordinary connections between stories I uncovered. Who would have thought that the place where the crusaders’ blood filled the Nile – Mansoura – would also be the place where, only a few years later, the first accurate description of the blood’s circulation would be made? That Cleopatra would not only be the mistress of Caesar and travel up the Nile on a state boat with him, but also have an affair with the same King Herod who would later drive Mary and Joseph to embark on a less exclusive Nile cruise with their infant son Jesus? Or that an island in the Nile with the oldest flood-measuring device should also be the headquarters of the slave warrior Mamluks later to be exterminated by Muhammad Ali, the first man to interfere with the flood by building a barrage across the Nile? Or that Napoleon would inadvertently be the cause of both the Suez Canal and the translation of hieroglyphics? Or that Flaubert would almost literally walk in Florence Nightingale’s footprints in the sand as he was only a few days behind her on a Nile cruise? Or that the Stanley who discovered Livingstone was the first man to visit the Blue Nile source before the White Nile source when he covered the little-known elephant war of 1868 in Ethiopia (accompanied coincidentally by James Grant, who
had already been to the source of the White Nile and was now visiting the Blue Nile)? Or that the man whose brainchild was the Aswan high dam was a lone Greek inventor, who was inspired by the first Arab to try and dam the Nile, Ibn al-Haytham, who incidentally also invented the camera? Or that the first man to photograph the Nile, Maxime du Camp, would also be the man inadvertently to cause Flaubert to write
Madame Bovary
, the world’s first modern novel? And these are only a few of the canals, irrigation ditches, patches of shining water that accompany any historical journey down the Nile.

I made the easy decision not to travel from the source to the sea in the rubber boat I travelled through Cairo in (or even one a little more seaworthy). I left my hang glider at home, so to speak, and forwent, rather easily, the temptation to jet ski like James Bond from Uganda to the Med. I’d need to read as much as make miles. Rather, I would travel at my own pace, and try to uncover the best stories, in all their light and darkness, the stories red in tooth and claw, the more bizarre the better, the blood and the guts of this river which spills into history. Only the stories remain.

Part One

NATURAL NILE

Beasts and beginnings

1
•
The source

The strength of the crocodile is the water
. Ugandan proverb

One should always begin at the beginning, and with a river that means the source. But where exactly is it? Despite, and maybe because of, a universal longing to ‘find the source of the Nile’, even now the exact location of the source is still disputed.

Searching for the real source of the Nile, in fact, is rather like visiting Stratford and discovering that the commercial attraction known as ‘Shakespeare’s Birthplace’ is simply a nineteenth-century invention, and that, in reality, Shakespeare has several competing birthplaces. (According to the most informed, the real site of the bard’s birthplace is now currently a car park.)

In antiquity the twin sources of the Nile – the Blue Nile and the White Nile – were often confused when it came to naming the true source. The Blue rises in Ethiopia, the White in central Africa. The Blue Nile, in the wet summer season, provides 85 per cent of the water that crosses the Sahara Desert and enters Egypt. But in the dry winter season the Blue Nile’s contribution is negligible, less than 5 per cent, and the White Nile is the main provider. So in summer you could argue the Blue Nile is the source and in winter the White Nile.

Another definition, more acceptable, is that the source is simply the furthest point on the river from its end, from the delta on the Mediterranean where it enters the sea. The White Nile is by far the longest contributory branch and its official start is where it leaves Lake Victoria at the town of Jinja.

But rivers feed Lake Victoria too and the longest of these is the Kagera. A river of considerably greater girth and power than many European rivers, it makes the Thames look rather small and unimportant. Though it doesn’t bear the Nile’s name the Kagera is, in a sense, the mother to the Nile; 450 miles long, it is a mighty river in its own right. It is navigable in its lower stretches, but higher up it weaves through deep clefts and swampy patches occluded with papyrus. Higher still it takes on the vivacity of a mountain stream as it drains the western lake
mountains that extend from the Ruwenzori range, known in antiquity as the Mountains of the Moon.

So the true source of the great River Nile, arguably, and most do argue this, is the source of the Kagera river. It was this that I had come in search of. It wasn’t the first of my Nile explorations – I had been travelling up and down the river for some years, ever since moving to Cairo in 2004 – but it felt like the start of the current phase, ‘the Nile-book phase’ as I had come to think of it.

But the complications multiplied. The Kagera has several sources of its own, mostly in damp and hard-to-get-to forests. And river measuring – from maps and satellite pictures – is never an exact science. Do you, for example, measure along the inside curve, the middle or the outside? Presumably the middle. But what about when it went around islands – islands, which, in the case of the vast Sudd swamp in Sudan that the Nile traverses, actually moved?

On a previous expedition I had been involved in the tricky task of measuring long snakes, pythons that refused to straighten out. Pythons are strong – the best you can expect in terms of straightness is a wavy line, like a river; finding their length as they squirm is more art than science despite the technology of exact measurement.

A 2006 expedition that had gone up the Nile in powered rubber boats equipped with hang-glider wings for flying over rapids had measured their route as they went. From this practical rather than theoretical measuring we get the official length of 4,175 miles – 6,719 kilometres. This expedition had also made a diligent search for the furthest source they could find. It was this source I had decided to seek out.

It should have been rather momentous, plodding towards this most sought-after of places. Think of the history, I kept telling myself, but here, in the Rwandan Nyungwe Forest, the dripping Nyungwe Forest, I sensed nothing significant at all. At first. Not even the troop of olive baboons that sidled away could interest me. ‘Them scared of bushmeat hunters,’ I was told.

I thought I knew about rivers. I had followed one of Canada’s longest, the Peace, from its finish in Lake Athabasca to its start in the pine-clad Rockies. I’d written about my three-season journey against its vicious current in my book
Voyageur
. I say vicious because the Peace river was plain mean compared to the strong but benign Fraser. Every river has a moral character, strange but true, and you find it at your peril usually by going against it, drinking it, pissing in it, watching it in its moods
of repose and anger. If you ride with a river it’s harder to get to know it. It’s the same with people – you only find out the real person when you come up against them, anger them or they anger you, or you strive together against some joint adversity. If you submit to another and just get carried along you’re more likely to go to sleep than learn anything. Not that I was going to do anything as crass as follow it geographically from start to finish, or finish to start as that group of adventurous folk did using powered hang gliders to jump over the rapids. I suspected that this would be about the dullest way to approach a river as rich historically as it was geographically. My own experience as a latterday explorer making long and difficult journeys where others hadn’t been (in recent memory at least) was that the very difficulty in remaining authentic – ignoring handy lifts from pick-ups, stops in towns, going on local tours – actually kept you from interacting with, and keenly observing, the country you travelled through. It was like the whitewater rafting I was later to do during my Nile journey. Every raft experience was more like the previous one than different. The guides sought to turn every evening into a beach party with beer, boombox and barbie tickling your senses with the scent of meat fat crackling over the glowing embers. The more a trip becomes a physical test the more you have to ignore the non-physical – everything else, really. But the Nile wasn’t just a series of Class 5 rapids separated by a lot of boring flat water, it was a river of immense human significance.