Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (41 page)

A curious symptom of Asperger’s syndrome results, for some, in the childhood sufferer hating stories. Such a child will stand in stark contrast to most children, who seem programmed at birth to love hearing any kind of story. This unusual child will take refuge in memorising lists of capitals, birds’ names, ‘interesting numbers’. To engage such a child ask them about ‘infinity plus one’; to offer a story will cause them physical distress since they lack the ability to understand it. This seems remarkable. Surely all humans can understand stories? Surely they are the basic form of all spoken communication – be it religious, scientific or social? Not to understand a story, at its most basic level, is to lack the ability to know which parts of a story are important and which are not. To appreciate a story you must have a basic understanding of what makes people tick, human wants, desires, fears – which is why great works of literature often seem dull to undergraduates, who have yet to observe in real life similar things for themselves.

There is no doubt that a child who hates stories and prefers talking about numbers might well become an excellent engineer. In a world where, only recently, reverence for mechanical marvels has been tempered with a note of scepticism about their ultimate worth, we see a strange reversal. The child who is a freak, who hates stories, becomes the cultural icon, the trail blazer, the important man of the tribe. Storytelling, though enjoying a continuing revival since the 1970s, has yet to usurp statistics and ‘testable’ hypotheses as the significant game changers in our lives.

Yet remarkable people of all ages are driven by stories – the stories they are told as children, and the stories they pick up along the way. On the Nile, the guides and boatmen of Aswan tell stories to their charges that they have learnt from hearing
The Thousand and One Nights
. In the story of Anas el-Wogud they speak of the King’s favourite who had the
misfortune to fall in love with the Vizier’s daughter, Zahr el-Warda, Blossom of the Rose. But, though a favourite of the King, Anas was not a prince, and any vizier worth his salt desires that his daughter marry into royalty.

Learning of the young courtier’s affections the Vizier had his daughter confined to an island far away. But he had reckoned without the persistence of Anas el-Wogud, who travelled far and wide in search of the Vizier’s daughter. Eventually he came across a desert hermit, sitting in his cave and contemplating eternity. The hermit directed Anas to the island but warned him of the multiple difficulties he could expect – not the least of which were the crocodiles infesting the water. Yet Anas found a friendly one, and lying on its back made his way under the eyes of the guards to rescue his love, who of course he married.

The island, the boatmen will tell you, is Philae, and the Osiris room there, where Florence Nightingale buried her necklace, the bridal chamber of Anas and his Rose. We know that Florence was reading probably the 1840 Lane translation of the
Nights
, which Richard Burton would call ‘a sorry performance at best’. She would have thrilled perhaps to hear a dragoman of Aswan relate the local Philae version of the story, and in the room of the Anas–Zahr marriage she pledged her own marriage – to her humanitarian cause, which she saw as her ‘real self’ as opposed to the less significant social selves who desired an ordinary marriage and a conventional life.

The story is a love story on one level, but its real interest becomes apparent when we cast the Vizier’s daughter as our potential and the faithful Anas as the mixed-up everyday person who must trick crocodiles and prison guards to identify and ‘rescue’ the right future for him.

12
•
A murder that changed the world

Although he has no ox his bag is full of whips
. Sudanese proverb

In 1854, while Florence Nightingale was busy trying to persuade her parents that she should be allowed to study nursing seriously, and while Flaubert battled away at draft after draft of
Madame Bovary
, a murder was being planned on the banks of the Nile. This would not
only change the world in a figurative sense, it would literally change the world by altering its very geography.

Murder was not uncommon in the royal families of the Ottoman Empire. Like queen bees killing competing queens, Ottoman princes were used to doing away with rivals. In Egypt things were more civilised, until Abbas Pasha (another grandson of Muhammad Ali) supposedly fell foul of a Turkish aunt over an issue of inheritance. In a way that harked back to Saladin she sent him two ‘loyal’ Mamluk slaves (Turkish rather than Egyptian Mamluks). These men waited for their chance as they worked polishing horse brasses and restuffing mattresses in Abbas’ court.

Abbas was a man who disliked Europeans. His only concession to modernity was to allow George Stephenson to build Africa’s first railway from Cairo to Alexandria in 1853. Abbas had no interest in the dreams which had obsessed the French since the arrival, brief stay and departure of Napoleon – namely, the revival and excavation of a canal connecting the Nile and the Red Sea. Indeed Stephenson was a consulting engineer on an early plan to build the Suez Canal, a plan Abbas quickly scotched. If Abbas had remained in power the Suez Canal would never have been built.

The two Mamluk assassins had a hobby: collecting tail hairs from Abbas’ favourite horses. Quite a collection they built up of horse hair (longer than the horse hair they used for stuffing mattresses, but easy to hide in the same place). These long hairs were for spinning by hand into a single powerful thread. When Abbas retired early to his divan on 13 July 1854, he was not alone. The horsehair garrotte ended his reign in a few violent minutes.

His successor, his uncle Muhammad Said, was quite a different man. He loved the idea of a great canal.

Four thousand years ago, in the reign of Pharaoh Sesostris I, a canal was built, according to later classical writers, which linked the Nile north of Memphis with the Red Sea. A suggestive inscription at the temple of Amon in Karnak records that the canal may well still have been in use 600 years later in 1290
BC
.

Ships would have sailed up the Nile from the Mediterranean, or, more likely, would have been rowed along the eastern arm of the delta to Bubastis (close to the wonderfully named Zagazig of modern times). From Bubastis the canal cut across to the Bitter Lakes, which drained at that time into the Red Sea Gulf of Suez.

By the sixth century
BC
the Bitter Lakes had long been blocked by drifting sand, so the Pharaoh Necho decided to cut a new channel from the lakes to the Gulf of Suez. Herodotus tells us that this plan cost the lives of 120,000 Egyptians. This is surely an exaggeration, but it is one that lives on. In 1956 Nasser made a speech about nationalis-ing the Suez Canal. In it he claimed that 120,000 Egyptians had died while the modern canal was being built! (The real figure is considered to be between 5,000 and 10,000 – though these are still rough estimates.) A year ago I was on the subway train to Maadi and was reading a book about the Suez Canal. A middle-aged Egyptian standing next to me told me he now lived in the US and was ‘visiting the Third World’ for a holiday. He saw my book and assumed the aggrieved air of a nationalist – did I not realise that 120,000 Egyptians had lost their lives building the Suez Canal? Had he been reading Herodotus, I asked him? He had never heard of him. I told him the actual figure and he said I was wrong. I agreed that I might be and got off the train.

An oracle warned Necho that the advantage of such a canal would be enjoyed most fully not by the Egyptians but by the barbarians. Given all the foreign manoeuvring around the Suez Canal the oracle seems strangely perceptive. Necho gave up his work, but the invading Persian king Darius completed the work about a hundred years later. The canal was a great success, was used by Alexander the Great and was later enlarged by the Roman emperor Trajan around
AD
100. By the fifth century
AD
with the collapse of Rome the canal again silted up.

When the Arabs invaded they took an interest, and in the eighth century a navigable canal existed between Old Cairo and the Red Sea. You can still see the filled-in remains of this canal as you wing along the Corniche. According to an ancient treatise by Dicuil, an English monk called Fidelis sailed on the canal during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the eighth century. Though this extension of the Nile into the Red Sea was opened and closed several times until about 1000, it eventually silted up and fell into disrepair. It took the arrival of Napoleon to change things.

The British most definitely did not want a canal through the isthmus of Suez. Indeed they opposed it almost until the day of its opening ceremony. Sailing round Africa may have taken a long time, but it meant they could not be held hostage by whoever controlled the Nile – since control of the Nile would imply control of the Suez Canal and whatever trade passed through it. And the British did not control the
Nile – Napoleon did. He took great interest in looking at the remains of the old canals. In the run-down town of Suez he saw the potential for a new and illustrious port. He ordered the building of it. His chief engineer, Jean-Baptiste Lepère, drew up the plans, meanwhile, for a canal. We can marvel now at his idiocy, but it was an idiocy that held sway for fifty years. Lepère, owing to faulty measuring equipment, arrived at the astonishing idea that the Red Sea, at high tide, was thirty feet higher than the Med at low tide, so a direct canal could not be dug. He argued (and only a few clear-thinking mathematicians opposed him) that to construct such a canal would be asking for a tidal wave to sweep up the diggings and flood the Nile delta. If this had been the case then it would have happened thousands of years earlier when the ancient canals were built. His mistake was enough to kill the project until the royal murder in 1854.

But Lepère’s words had an impact beyond his cancelling of the project. His published book
The Canal of the Two Seas
inspired the retired diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps that East and West really could be joined. The mystical union of East and West was part of the philosophical agenda of the Saint-Simonian cult headed by Prosper Enfantin, who believed that the physical conjoining through Suez (and Panama) was a prerequisite to the spiritual marriage of both cultures. Enfantin spent his life – when he wasn’t campaigning for the Suez Canal – looking for the symbolic perfect female ‘other half’ for another kind of conjoining. He dressed in a loose tunic and tight trousers with ‘Le Père’ emblazoned across his chest. His future partner would be forced to wear a similar get-up but with ‘La Mère’ across her chest (it is odd that Lepère and Le Père should both be necessary to the plot). But just as destiny did not allow Le Père the chance to meet the perfect female to balance his perfect male, so too the canal was never to be completed in his lifetime.

Enfantin was a true visionary but an obvious nut. Perhaps we’ll discover, at some later date, similarly useful ideas in the words of David Icke. Perhaps not. But we’ll need a practical man for the task who does not shy away from big projects. De Lesseps was the unlikely candidate. His career as a diplomat having stalled, he took Lepère and Le Père’s ideas and looked for a way to make them work. When Abbas Pasha fell foul of his two slave servants and was murdered after only a brief period reigning in Egypt, de Lesseps’ time had come. He had in his youth been confidant and fencing teacher of the next ruler of Egypt, Muhammad
Said. De Lesseps had also known Linant Bey, the man who had saved the Pyramids and designed the first incarnation of the barrage across the Nile. Linant would form the nucleus of engineers assigned to the technical design of the canal, something de Lesseps had no training in.

De Lesseps knew his time had come because the day he presented his idea to his friend Said Pasha there was a Saint-Simonian rainbow in the sky linking East to West. Said had not forgotten his old friend and tutor – he agreed immediately that such a canal should be made.

Without the corvée the canal could not have been built – and the corvée existed because of the Nile. But long before the problems of digging the canal appeared de Lesseps had to fight the Turks and the British to get his canal started. His correspondence offers a handbook in surmounting huge difficulties. He never doubts that he will succeed. He is willing to continue until he drops (his wife had died and he had vowed he would never marry again until he had achieved his Suez dream – and on the opening voyage through the canal which Flaubert’s mistress Louise Colet joined, he married again). And he never writes anything negative. And eventually he succeeded. Fifteen years after his old pupil Said (who was now dead) had agreed to de Lesseps’ plan, the canal was opened.

The canal changed the position of Egypt almost overnight. It extended the Nile east, and became the gateway to India. From being sceptical the British suddenly appreciated its worth. As we have seen, when Said’s successor Ismail bankrupted Egypt through rebuilding Cairo, they assumed his debts and took over the country. From the moment Britain became the driving force in Egypt the Nile became British business. To boost the exchequer it was decided to improve irrigation and thus agricultural yield. While many hated Lord Cromer, the British proconsul in Egypt, he and his Nile irrigation experts such as Scott-Moncrieff and William Willcocks turned Egypt from a bankrupt country into one that enjoyed a commercial boom.

I got a little obsessed by de Lesseps. He seemed both so ordinary and yet so extraordinary in his efforts. In the end he went slightly mad and was sentenced to a suspended prison term for corruption over his next big scheme – the Panama Canal. He was eighty-eight at the time.

I saw in a book of black and white photographs a giant statue of de Lesseps lying in a heap of rusty cables and scrap metal in Port Said. I went looking for the statue, which I discovered had been erected at the entrance of the Suez Canal and had been sculpted by Emmanuel Frémiet.
Yet rather than the figure of de Lesseps it had nearly been the Statue of Liberty that graced the entrance. Another French sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, had approached the Egyptian ruler Ismail and suggested that a giant statue of an Egyptian peasant woman holding a torch should act as a lighthouse at the entrance of the Suez Canal. Sketches and models were made but the project was derailed by the Franco-Prussian War when Bartholdi’s home was occupied by the Prussians.