Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (36 page)

The
barrage du Nil
meant that cotton could at last be grown in quantity, since cotton cannot survive inundation but needs regular watering throughout the summer. With the barrage backing up the Nile towards Cairo, with canals and pumps and syphons installed, it was possible to water a vast area of land previously allowed to be fallow in the summer.

When he was over seventy, the man who owed his reign to the invasion of Napoleon, who was inspired by Napoleon, was visited in turn by Napoleon’s son, Count Walewski. One suspects that the son was jealous to maintain his father’s reputation when he wrote of Muhammad Ali: ‘His genius is greater in civilising than in organising. He has neither the eagle eye which sees men and things from above, nor the
superior intelligence which permits a man to take decisions which at first sight seem surprising, but he has a keen intelligence, perseverance, a strong will, and astonishing dexterity. Had he been born in our country he would have become a Metternich or a Talleyrand rather than a Napoleon.’

Though Muhammad Ali was an avid reader of Napoleon’s work, it was only because Napoleon demonstrated his knowledge through deeds as well as words. When Machiavelli was read to Muhammad Ali he remarked after forty pages that ‘I can learn nothing from this man. And as regards cunning, I know far more about it than he.’ He returned to reading, or having read to him, the works of Bonaparte.

That the student failed to outdo his master in grandiosity and sweep is evident. But Muhammad Ali lived until he was eighty, and had, quite probably, a more lasting impact on Egypt and the Nile than even Napoleon did. His legacy was certainly bloodier.

16
•
The killing of the 499

They don’t praise the army going to war, they praise it on returning
.
Egyptian proverb

There were 500 – and 500 were called. One stayed in bed and then there were none, none except him. All 499 dead, cleaved into pieces, grapeshot and musket fire tearing their bodies to pieces, scattered in the ditches of the Citadel, where Shajarat al-Durr’s body had been left, the traditional dumping ground of the Mamluks themselves.

Muhammad Ali planned a feat of treachery that not even Machiavelli would have conceived. Rightly the Albanian had little time for the Italian fox. The plan was quite simple: lure the troublesome Mamluks, who still thought they should have power, to a single spot. And then kill them all.

The River Soldiers knew their time was up, but they sought a new role with Muhammad Ali. They clung to their power, as all do, because power is the hardest thing to give up. The British, a century and a half later, would have to give up their power over the Nile and it broke the heart of Churchill, who as a young man had been in the battle of Omdurman and helped win that power.

So the Mamluks suspected but they did not suspect. The River Soldiers who still rode out with swords and armour battered by Napoleon’s victories, with red and green banners, these Mamluks came from all over Egypt to be honoured by their Albanian ruler.

All 499 of them. One stayed in bed. It’s like a cautionary tale in reverse. The late bird doesn’t just get the worm, he gets off scot free and gets to live the rest of his life in the Levant. Which is what happened. The rest were slaughtered.

It is not an easy job to kill 499 men, mounted on fine Arabian horses, attended by servants, all trotting along the lengthy defile that runs to this day around the foot of the Citadel. You can see it as you speed past on the autostrade heading to the airport or downtown.

No machine guns. No gas. No depleted-uranium bombs to fulfil the order. Single-shot muskets and grapeshot did the job, or most of it. The worst part, hacking down the survivors and killing the wounded, was done by Anwar the Druze and his crack squad of murderous subordinates. Anwar was a giant of a man, bursting his tunic at chest and belly, huge blacksmith’s arms, though in truth he had never done a day’s honest work in his life. His arms were the legacy of a youth spent on smuggling ships on the Syrian coast. Now he was the trusted killer, wielding a curved sword that was soon blunt from cutting off heads. ‘It is better to stab than cut,’ he told his men, ‘because it is quicker and blunts the sword less.’ But he could not help cutting, and cutting and cutting. The ditch was soon ankle deep in the blood of horses, Mamluks and their servants.

And the one that got away? He awoke late and decided not to leave his estate in the delta. But the news reached him that not a single Mamluk had returned home. It was enough. He was slipped under cover of darkness onto a trading barge going downstream to Rosetta. From there he was smuggled on a fishing boat to Cyprus and then to Jaffa. His family lived there until 1948, when they escaped again, strangely, back to Egypt. I know this story because the sole descendant of the one who escaped told me.

17
•
Death(s) on the Nile

Who learns about the leopard lives
. Ethiopian proverb

Blood flowed freely – not only in the ditches of the Citadel, but on the banks of the Nile, in Egypt and Sudan. There were many funerals. Muhammad Ali craved control of the entire river; he was the first ruler to see that control of the Nile meant controlling all the wealth of Africa – slaves, ivory and gold.

Muhammad Ali made many expeditions up and down the Nile, subduing the last remnants of the Mamluks, Baiburs’ descendants, outmanoeuvred by this wily Albanian who, we have seen, is said to have tricked those 499 into attending a gathering in Cairo. But others, including Muhammad Ali (but why should we trust him?), claim he was not so careless. In another story it is related that, over a few years, he picked off the Mamluk leaders one at a time all over the country. This final massacre was just the last few, a mopping-up operation. In one account it is suggested only twenty-four turned up to be killed. Whatever happened at the Citadel, Muhammad Ali had made himself undisputed ruler of Egypt. His expeditions south resulted in conquering the Upper Egyptian and Sudanese tribes; he became known as an enlightener – to some – but to many he was the bringer of death. Funerals along the Nile marked the passage of his armies.

Muhammad Ali’s troops killed Christians and Muslims alike. It is a sign that the funeral service is ancient and, in essence, precedes both Islam and Christianity in that it remains, in Egypt, largely the same for each religion. But there are differences. The Christians bury in coffins, which, in accordance with a tradition of ancient Egypt, were made of stone, but in more modern times were wooden. Muslims use only a shroud, or rather several shrouds. Shortly after the Napoleonic occupation there was a case where land belonging to Copts was seized by Muslims. It was found to be a burial ground, and all of those graves, when excavated, contained coffins. As a Coptic burial ground it was returned to the Copts.

Burial in either religion must take place within twenty-four hours of death. On the way to the grave, in Christian cases hymns and chants are sung. In the case of a Muslim, a hired singer or singers of the Koran will lead.

Copts are closer to the ancients in that they are buried in their finest garments, including a few jewels. The shroud, on a rich man, is embroidered in gold and silver. If the dead man has made a pilgrimage to the River Jordan, the garments he wore may be interred with him. If he is not a pilgrim he will be clad in the robe he wore in life for receiving Holy Communion. At both Muslim and Christian funerals prayers and incense are offered up for the soul of the departed.

The ancient Egyptians chose to bury their dead on the west bank and to live on the eastern bank. Crossing the River Nile, like the Styx, was an inevitable part of the route towards one’s own death. That the ancient Egyptians were obsessed by death is evident everywhere. Some of that obsession continues to this day with elaborate ceremonies performed at graves seven days, forty days, one year and seven years after someone has died. Both Muslims and Coptic Christians respect the
arbyeen
, the forty-day ceremony, meaning it is almost certainly of pharaonic origin. The Nile is still a river entwined with death, natural death and the cycles of the flood seeming to go together. But by the nineteenth century man would begin his attempt to change nature. The Nile was soon to become an unnatural river of death.

Part Five

THE NILE DAMNED

Elephants, exploration and Agatha Christie’s trunk

1
•
The discovery of Mougel Bey

Do not fear the person who talks much
. Eritrean proverb

Napoleon long gone, Muhammad Ali slowly fulfilled the impatient Frenchman’s dreams and dammed, or barraged, the Nile. The year he started operations was 1840 – and this initial barrage was not completed until twenty years later in 1860, and was not functional until 1889. It was a damn slow dam. But the act of damming the Nile was a turning point. Man, at last, knew, or thought he knew, that he could conquer the river.

The desire to dam the Nile started, as we’ve seen, with the Pharaohs, peaked first with the mad plans of Hakim the Caliph and Ibn al-Haytham, then receded until the arrival of Napoleon, who immediately saw the utility of damming the river, but never got round to fitting this enormous plan in with all his other enormous plans. There is a strong correl ation between big dams and megalomaniacs. Just as one may conquer countries to satisfy a desire for extending the dominion of the self, so one can conquer nature, most obviously by stopping up its greatest and most powerful rivers.

That Muhammad Ali should have sought to dam the Nile is, in a way, entirely predictable. That his heir across the centuries, Gamel Abdul Nasser, should also seek to dam the Nile was also entirely unsurprising. But, to succeed, both attempts needed European help.

The barrage was the first dam across the Nile. But was it a dam or even a barrage? For its first fifty years it was neither, having failed to hold back water without ominous cracks appearing. So, reluctantly, its builders asked for its gates to be left fully open. From then until the early 1880s it served as a picturesque and very useful bridge across the Nile.

The Frenchman Linant Bey was the first European engineer enlisted to get the project off the ground. In fact it was he who saved the Pyramids as we know them. We’ve already alluded to this fact, but it deserves repetition: without Linant Bey there would be no existing seventh wonder of the world. Just as the Taliban put an end to the Great Buddhas, so
Muhammad Ali desired to replace the greatest works of the past with one of the present that was even greater. We can imagine his joy when he realised he could kill two birds with one stone (or many), kill off the competition provided by the Pyramids and use their stone to build something even bigger and better. But unlike the great pyramid builders he was in a hurry. Perhaps this is how megalomania always reveals itself in the end – its practitioners are always in too much of a hurry to achieve their ends. Napoleon’s hurry to conquer the world resulted in a failure to build up a large enough navy – a prerequisite of world conquest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hitler’s hurry to replicate Napoleon in Russia resulted in an unwinnable war on two fronts. Though speed brings many benefits – Napoleon’s rapid marches and Hitler’s blitzkriegs are testament to that – in the end both of those leaders overextended themselves and ground to a halt. But the pyramid builders just worked as meticulously as ever, day in, day out, until their great monuments were finished. What a torture to build the Pyramids in a hurry! But slowly, painstakingly, that made it all possible.

Linant Bey, though eager to build the dam – actually two: one on the Rosetta Nile branch and one on the Damietta branch – was not so eager to go down in history as the man who levelled the Pyramids (though the mad Caliph Hakim came close). But Muhammad Ali ordered him to do so. Linant then did what anyone under the command of a madman does, he took the job seriously, so seriously that he felt compelled to make a comparison of the costs and time – time being the most important and persuasive factor here – involved in a pyramid demolition versus cutting the stone in an ordinary quarry closer to the Nile and floating it in the correct size downriver. The savings in time and money were so great that reluctantly Muhammad Ali agreed to keep the Pyramids.

But something of his earlier enthusiasm had left him, as if, deprived of the chance to make his mark doubly – through gigantic destruction and construction – he was depriving himself of a motivation he sorely needed. With this failing interest in the project, Linant was soon to be pensioned off and his place taken by another French enthusiast – Charles Mougel, soon to be Mougel Bey.

Mougel Bey arrived in Egypt to help extend the docks of Alexandria. His success at this job led to him taking over the dam project. Mougel Bey improved on Linant’s plans and moved the barrage a fraction upstream so that both branches could be closed by the same structure.
But still he was subject to the same pressure that Linant had endured. At one point Muhammad Ali ordered that 1,300 cubic yards of concrete be poured every day – regardless of whether it be needed or not. Now that
is
the sign of a megalomaniac.