Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (3 page)

At first. But just as I glimpsed the puddle that I knew immediately was the source a strange sense of contentment came over me. It wasn’t the exultation I had anticipated long ago when making plans, buying tickets, telling people. Rather it was a sense of wondrous contentment, and, at the risk of ridicule, it was not unlike the sentiment I first felt visiting Legoland. The sheer size of the tiny Legoland world (all built out of Lego – mountains, towns, cities, harbours, jungles) on my first visit made me feel awe mixed with cosiness, a kind of pet-owners’ generosity of spirit – a world in your palm, but still a world.

And the source of all this was a small puddle in the middle of the jungle in Rwanda. I had forced our guide, called Pius, using my cheap yellow eTrex GPS, which I already thought of as a dear friend, to follow a route he thought both improbable and pointless, through strange bushes equipped with a thousand thorns and up and down ditches and over rotten logs soft as pie crust to get to the spot explorers earlier that year had decided was the real true source of the Nile – in their eyes
– as it was the longest distance from its end in the Egyptian delta that flows into the Mediterranean. I sat by the puddle and produced to great interest and some hilarity my secret weapon, my piece of business, my magic. Si-105 was a mini-pump filter that was guaranteed to clean fifty-five litres (twelve gallons) before it was used up. It was about the size of a big tube of toothpaste with rubber pipes that allowed one to suck up water from a tree bole, for example, or a handy crevice. The great thing about Si-105 was the built-in filter over the sucking end – it sort of flared out and had a micromesh net over it. This stopped the thing getting clogged, something that had happened with previous pump water filters I had used. The idea was simple, diabolically simple – I would drink my way down the Nile, imbibing it at every point of interest, historical, psychological, mystical and any other significance I could think of. I’d be able to make fifty-five samples, more than enough. I hoped I wouldn’t get ill – but hell, no pain, no gain, and I knew of no other way to discover the river in all its pride and glory. Except one – swim it. I already had my sweaty Gore-Tex boots off and was dangling my toes in the slime. I removed them before I started pumping, recalling a story told about Orde Wingate, the enigmatic Abyssinian campaigner who insisted on rushing to the head of his military column when they arrived at a water hole – and stripping off and dunking his behind in the water . . . before any of his men could take a drink. But that was at the other source – the Blue Nile.

The water came out clear and enticing. I thought Pius and his friend Peter would be vaguely insulted. Instead they gave broad grins and were keen to share the half-litre or so of liquid I managed to pump into my Sigg water bottle, another friend (you cling to travel kit, turn the everyday into the iconic as a way of normalising the new and unexpected).

It had been my ambition like the venerable Roger Deakin, who swam his way across England, to swim and drink my way down the Nile. I stuck to it, for a while, and then it began to seem a bit silly. Why risk getting ill or eaten just for a book? It served its purpose I suppose, it got me moving, really looking at the river and seeing it as the main source of water and movement for the entire region – since earliest times until this century, when air travel and mineral water served up from wells drilled deep into the Nubian aquifer began to take over. And even now it is really only the rich who can afford to ignore the Nile’s bounty.

I intended to meander. That was important. I eschewed, out of epistemic necessity, the purely linear way of approaching the river; that left
the vaguely historical, the psychogeographical and the purely personal and meandering. History was definitely my major resource. Psychogeography was less promising; while I applauded the works and methods of the psychogeographers, I knew such occidental urbanity would be chewed up and utterly masticated by the immensity of Africa. As for the neat interpretations of psychology, they tend to become dwarfed and tortured into mythology when they leave the comfortable confines of the Western city, the cosy suburbanalities of the campus. What sort of psychological analysis can one apply to Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, who had his men remove the lips of children who displeased him? Or to Napoleon invading Egypt in 1798 with his sights set on Persia, India and the world? Or to the first Sultana of Egypt, Shajarat al-Durr – who murdered one husband in his bath and pretended another was still alive when he wasn’t? The personal and meandering had always served me surprisingly well in the face of other such enormities. I hoped, with such a long meandering river in my sights, it would serve me well again.

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A high-speed journey down the Nile

Where there is the Nile they do not wash by using water drip by drip
. Egyptian proverb

The problem with any book attempting to tell both a geographical and a historical tale, or a linked series of tales, is that geography starts at the source (if we are talking about rivers) and ends at the sea, while history can zip up and down the river a couple of times each generation. Certain spots attract more history than others – Cairo, obviously, and also the dark jungles of the upper Nile – but, whatever way you cut it, any history of the Nile involves knowing a lot of geography before you can even start. Otherwise, as one zips up and down the river, following, say, General Horatio Kitchener on his mission to avenge Gordon and at the same time steal the Nile from the French pushing in from the Congo, one needs to know where one is. The names of places. The rapids, waterfalls and tributaries. Maps help a lot, and we have included a few in this book, but you still need a solid mental picture of the river before we start. Hence the instant jetboat and Cessna plane descent,
taking, I hope, no more than ten pages and keeping you fully engaged in what is actually a very, very long river with its fair share of longueurs between all the very exciting bits.

First, for those who have never seen the Nile, what is it like? I’ll never forget the disappointment I felt on seeing the mighty Mississippi in New Orleans. Muddy, dull, forgettable. It didn’t help that I had just been mugged on the viewing platform. My main thought was: it ain’t
that
wide. I was expecting something like the Brahmaputra – so wide you can’t see the other side, something more reminiscent of a great lake or the sea than a river. Nope, the Mississippi is ordinary, like the Thames at Deptford, the eminently missable Mississippi. (I’m talking about New Orleans here – it widens out elsewhere.) In Cairo, when the Nile filters around mid-river islands, it too can look rather narrow. But get down to the riverside and the grandeur, the stately calm of the river, is all too apparent. This is a river that has been places – and with its unhurried air it seems not a jot tired of its journey, not yet at least. It is a fast river, a continent-crossing river – fast compared to a big English river. There are parts where the river widens out – Lake Kiyoga north of Lake Victoria, in stretches in Sudan and Upper Egypt – but this is never a river like the Congo and the Amazon, rivers watered along their entire length by tropical downpours. The Nile spends most of its time crossing desert or dry savannah – it is less of a drain than a life-bringing irrigation stream. There are no big cities south of Egypt on the Nile, apart from Khartoum. It is a clean river and looks clean. Oh you get rubbish in the canals, and a few beaches and washing places in Cairo, places where, even today, women take pots and pans down to the river to wash them; there may be Coke bottles and plastic bags. But there is nothing like the garbage you see on the streets around the overflowing skips (which replaced the highly efficient donkey-cart-driving rubbish collectors who were deemed too ‘old fashioned’).

But what of its character? I have written that all rivers have a moral character. This is indefinable, but appears to those who spend a long time in their company. The Nile’s character is
sui generis
, one of dependability. For all its floods and famines and small tantrums, this is a river you can rely on. It won’t rush you to your death if you fall in. It will carry you along, perhaps to the shore. I should say I am talking about the lower Nile here – the mixture of the White and the Blue. And, despite its cataracts and waterfalls, the upper White Nile too has a similarly dependable feel. The Blue Nile is altogether wilder and more
unpredictable. The character of the Blue Nile is unlettered wildness, the wildness of a falcon or bird of prey that can be yoked into work but never entirely trusted. Turn your back on the Blue Nile, one feels, and it will drown you.

Now we have the several sources to skim over and observe: the Blue Nile rising in Ethiopia – at Lake Tana, or, rather, thirty miles from Lake Tana; the White Nile in that part of Africa where a great many countries seem to get drawn together: Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda. The sources dominate men’s imaginations, but they are only a small part of the river’s identity, an identity largely forged by the terrain the river travels through. With its huge summer flood, literally pregnant with water, the Mother of the Nile would have to be the Blue Nile. But we’ll start our quick journey with the broadly agreed beginning of the White Nile, the father of all the Niles. The Kagera river, the ultimate source of the White Nile, snakes its way from the montane jungles of Rwanda to the west coast of Lake Victoria. But where does the water actually come from? Just as the Blue Nile is charged by the monsoons that pound the Ethiopian highlands, the White Nile receives its rainfall from the south Atlantic gales that arrive burdened with moisture on the African coast. Meeting no real resistance until they strike the mountains of the central rift, the rain falls and is channelled north. The precipitation that hits the mountains lower in the chain around Lake Tanganyika drains into the Congo basin and back into the Atlantic. Interestingly Lake Victoria, being only 300 feet deep and over 25,000 square miles in area, is actually a net loser of water – more flows into it than flows out – the rest being lost to the wind as evaporation.

For the first part of its life after the Owen Falls at Lake Victoria the Nile follows a chain of rapids through forest traditionally unoccupied, due to the prevalence of sleeping sickness. The river is wild and only with the coming of whitewater rafting has it been possible to descend safely. The thick, subtropical forest on either side was traditionally penetrated only by elephants, whose huge trails became the paths for inquisitive explorers who, in the late nineteenth century, ignored the local avoidance of the disease-ridden area – and suffered for it. Dealing with strange fevers, boils, mysterious sheddings of skin, bone ache and ague became the stock in trade of all who dared penetrate to the heart of Africa.

Around 50,000 people a year in Africa are still supposed to die from sleeping sickness. Spread by the tsetse fly, the disease is a parasitic
amoeba that eventually invades the nervous system, causing, if it is not treated, disability and death. There are now several lines of defence, various drugs and treatments. This has led to eradication from some areas. Spread further by Arab slavers, colonisers and modernisers from its original location in the upper Nile regions, sleeping sickness is now more of a problem elsewhere than in the lands above Lake Victoria.

So, with less disease and tamer rapids, thanks to the Owen Falls dam (now renamed the Nalubaale), the first forty miles of the White Nile are not so wild as they once were. As it drops 600 feet in those forty miles it is easy to see why, in the 1860s, the explorer John Hanning Speke chose to avoid a direct descent of the river – though, if he had braved disease and cataract, he would have found the next 120 miles perfectly navigable. The Nile widens to a third of a mile and the forest begins to recede. It is as if someone has employed a forestry company to thin the trees in a charming manner in keeping with the landscape; only it is nature that has performed this task.

The river gets to a mile wide and the river’s floor gets nearer and nearer – less than ten feet deep. You can see the fish rising for air – Nile perch and catfish, tilapia, elephant fish. The river becomes wider still and transforms into Lake Kiyoga, a broad muddy sheet of water choked in parts with weed; it is a presentiment of the swamps to come. As the river flows through this lake for sixty miles it carries a pale-blue water lily that lies like a Chinese carpet on the moving surface.

The lake receives another wild tributary, the Kafu, at its northern end. This is just as well – if the tributary entered earlier on in the swampy lake its force would be absorbed and negated. Just as it was thousands of years ago, the Nile would be finished, spent of all motive force before it had half started.

After the join, the river begins to loop, and following its hypnotic swirls I am reminded of the philosopher’s conundrum about the identity of a broom which has had its brush and handle changed many times. Is it still the same broom? Similarly the Nile is rejuvenated all along its path and loses much of its source water long before it reaches the sea; yet it maintains its identity by some mysterious process.

The first of the swamps abruptly changes and the scoured rocky river floor is gained again as the Nile sweeps west and becomes again a mountain stream – an epithet uttered by Speke and the cause of much mockery from the bewhiskered stalwarts of the Royal Geographical Society. The mighty Nile – a stream! The insult! Yet only those who
have seen both the mile-wideness of the Nile and its ferocity squeezed into a gorge twenty feet wide can understand that it can be both of these things. It is here, at the Murchison Falls, first seen by the explorer Samuel Baker, that the Nile is squeezed and then dashed from ledge to ledge surmounted by a constant rainbow, which Baker took to be a symbol of good fortune.

The foam stays on the river long after the bruising 141-foot Murchison Falls, but the river again quickly broadens as the rocky out-crops become less pronounced. It is here that hippos proliferate; and crocs – hundreds of them basking on rocks; both animals waiting, it seems, for rafters and kayakers who are too cocky or too unlucky to ply these waters carefully. Now the Nile enters, again at its head, another lake – the Albert. On its banks grassland alternates with forest and all manner of wildlife proliferates; and again the Nile is recharged, this time by the waters gathered in Lake Albert from the Ruwenzori – the Mountains of the Moon.