Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (62 page)

Books of course. Often she had to relinquish space to make room for those of her husband. A plaid rug for picnics. She was ready for anything, it seems, even love on the Nile.

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King Tut’s swift

The birds of different rivers speak different languages
. Ethiopian proverb

Agatha, married to an archaeologist, met Howard Carter several times. In the early years after his great discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922, he was to be found ensconced each winter in his desert dwelling where he worked on cataloguing all the remains he had found. The building was a cube of mud with a tiny garden lying in the shadow of the house. His laboratory, where he unwrapped mummies, was in the Valley of the Kings. Melting off the resin that sealed the mummies’ shrouds with a soldering iron, he found within the wrapping jewelled objects more wonderful even than those that had been stacked in Tutankhamen’s tomb. One intrigued Agatha Christie when she later saw it: a ring of blood-red carnelian carved in the shape of a migrating swift – along with swallows, swifts are constant winter migrants to the Nile valley. The red sun’s shape is attached to the swift, the setting sun which must die each night, the soul which must fly like the swift to another place unknown.

I had seen a swift land awkwardly on a clifftop out in the Eastern Desert. There was some danger in this. If the swift could not flap its way to the edge to drop off into a thermal, it would die, as its legs are far too weak to carry it anywhere and it can neither perch nor walk. To make a nest the swift must catch its materials on the wing – floating pieces of hay, feathers, seed pods falling – and take them to whatever eave or overhanging rock it favours. The construction is plastered together with saliva, a less attractive nest than that of the house martin, whose masterful lodgings are made from wet mud pellets and grass plastered to the side of a wall.

Coming from England as I do and growing up with house martins nesting under the eaves of our house and swallows and swifts feeding at sunset on the insects above the cornfields, I had the sense growing ever stronger that the world as I saw it was, without intention from me to force it that way, circumscribed by familiar faces that all along my Nile journey – through reading and travelling – kept appearing, as if to remind me that life itself is as connected as a river system, that the tendency towards unity outweighs the forces of entropy. In short I saw swifts following the course of the Nile south. They are the original explorers of the Nile, from sea to source and beyond.

It isn’t difficult to confuse house martins, swallows and swifts from a distance. Closer up, swifts are the larger, sleeker and more aerodynamic, house martins the smallest and chubbiest, with white underparts to identify them. They all fly south in winter. I have been in the desert and seen one exhausted, a house martin, perched on the wing mirror of a Land Cruiser, panting for breath it seemed. The Bedouin driver fed it water in a saucer and it revived, flying onwards towards Lake Nasser.

Though Aristotle mentions the migration of swallows down the Nile, this knowledge was not widespread. As late as the time of Gilbert White, the eighteenth-century clergyman naturalist of Selborne, it was thought that some birds hibernated during the winter. Swallows rarely migrate in very large groups unless held up in fog or other difficult weather; then, groups can accumulate rather like the bunching of walkers at a single stile. They depart at different times and make their way over Europe in the autumn and across the Mediterranean and down the Nile to east and southern Africa.

The first men migrating north had only to follow the birds flying overhead. They must have followed them down the Nile to the sea and beyond. And, millennia later, come the new migrants, people like Agatha Christie and Howard Carter, returning each year to the East, like swallows and swifts in their own right.

Part Six

BLOOD ON THE NILE

From assassination to revolution

1
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To the end of the Nile

A sharp thorn, moving with the river’s flow, stabs without being seen
. Rwandan saying

The Nile fascinates. It mesmerises tourists such as Agatha Christie, but it also captures the minds of men set on wielding power and influence. Influence bears the same relationship to power as a stag’s antlers do to his status: there is an assumed and useful correlation between size and fighting ability, but it is not set in stone. A weak deer with fine antlers may be able to bluff his way for a very long time. It is fascinating to see those Mesopotamian statues and friezes of symbolically full-antlered stags as if they were saying
this is a man
. So, with the Nile, controlling it has an influence beyond any physical power it can exert.

But influence it has. And the way that influence was focused and amplified in the twentieth century was through the construction of dams.

Three of the world’s greatest engineering feats are still to be found in Egypt: the Pyramids, of course, but also the Suez Canal and the Aswan high dam. And the last two (and probably the first) are not the result of a professional engineer, a committee of responsible technocrats or a government ministry. Both the Suez Canal and the Aswan high dam are the result of two amateurs who just wouldn’t give up. In the case of the Suez Canal it was the failed French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. De Lesseps capitalised on having been the tutor of the then ruler of Egypt, Khedive Ismail. This immensely fat royal was starved by his father but secretly fed spaghetti by de Lesseps. The Khedive never forgot, and forced de Lesseps’ plan through against, at first, stubborn French and British government disapproval.

One suspects, reviewing the history of the Red Nile, that history is not made by parliaments, committees, companies – it is made, rightly or wrongly, by determined individuals or small groups of determined individuals. Just as Lenin toppled Tsarist Russia with nineteen fellow revolutionaries, so too are many of the events we have examined the result of determined, if not obsessive, individual action by people who
might have no official backing. Outsiders in many cases, who find themselves through sheer persistence in the right place at the right time for their one-shot message to ring home.

In the case of the Aswan high dam, the British had for years considered Egypt’s section of the Nile to be just one piece of the whole river. They contemplated controlling the river nearer the source – using the Owen Falls dam to turn Lake Victoria into a reservoir, cutting a canal through the Jonglei, draining the Sudd and using dams on the Blue Nile, all to take complete control of the river from source to sea. But politics was never going to let this happen. Upstream countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda could be coerced into grudging co-operation but never really trusted with controlling Egypt’s water supply. The dam of 1902, its height raised in 1912 and 1933, was considered a brilliant work of engineering. But it had simply never occurred to anyone to build a second dam there so big that it would turn the whole of fertile Nubia into a giant lake. To the British, such an act of violence against the homeland of an indigenous people would have been unthinkable. Whatever else may be said about the British Empire, its track record of defending minority and tribal cultures within the countries it ruled is impeccable compared to the treatment many received after independence. The British treatment of the Nagas in India, the Penan in Borneo and the Nubians in Egypt was far better than what was meted out after the countries’ majority groups took power. That Egypt gained a hydropower system and a source of reliable water benefited the farmers downstream. It had no benefit at all for the 100,000 Nubians who lost a homeland that had been theirs since pharaonic times.

No, it was far too audacious an idea for a government-paid British engineer to come up with: to plug the Nile permanently and flood Nubia. Crazy. But one Egyptian, of Greek origin, Adrian Daninos, had precisely this idea. Rather like the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who claimed that his life’s work was just the physical completion of ideas he had had before he was eighteen years old, Daninos, an agronomist by training, came up with the first part of his plan in 1912 when he was just twenty-five. His father had been an archaeologist, and the son was trained first in Cairo in agronomy and then in Paris as a lawyer. He married a Welshwoman and lived his whole life in Cairo.

In 1912 he came up with the idea of adding a hydroelectric station to the 1902 dam at Aswan. Included in the scheme was a plan for a nitrogen-fertiliser plant. This scheme was presented to the Egyptian
government time and again, with improvements and changes, through the First World War and the Second, until in 1948 it had mutated into a scheme, the first ever mooted, to try and hold back the entire Nile flood behind a single dam. There was something preposterous and momentous about this challenge to nature. Daninos had made many journeys to Nubia and had calculated that above Aswan a single dam could stop up the whole Nile valley for hundreds of miles. A gigantic lake could be created. All earlier plans were designed to slow the river but at least deliver some of its annual floodwaters. The new plan insisted that everything could be stored and released when needed and not wasted during the high waters of the summer months. From previous schemes which planned to hold back 13 billion cubic yards of water he leapfrogged to one that proposed stopping in its tracks 186 billion cubic yards. The thought of the world’s greatest river penned up behind one wall of concrete was just too big a leap of faith – the leading government engineer Dr Harold Hurst wrote of the Daninos proposal, ‘the claims are somewhat exaggerated and the difficulties passed over. It is a very long way from this stage to the presentation of the final project . . .’ – and again the high dam looked likely to disappear. By this time Daninos had added to the plan a steelworks using the hydropower electricity generated and a lock to allow ships to pass through the dam.

If Nasser had not come to power in 1952, it is likely the high dam would never have been built. There would have been no destruction of Nubia, no problem with a lack of silt in the delta, no collapse of the sardine fisheries that thrived in the Nile flood as it entered the Mediterranean, no spread of bilharzia through the stagnant canals that could be used year round, and of course, no hydropower, no steelworks, no increase in agricultural yield, no freedom from African control of the river, no reduced harvests during the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s.

Those who say the dam was essential to the welfare of Egypt are talking nonsense; not one of the highly experienced British engineers with over a century of meddling with the Nile thought the dam was possible, let alone necessary. Only Nasser’s revolutionary zeal made such an audacious thing happen at all. Arguments about its overall utility miss the point: it is here to stay. The silt that used to cover and nourish the delta now spreads itself along the floor of Lake Nasser, which at 350 miles long is one of the world’s largest man-made lakes. In 500 years, it was originally estimated, the lake would have silted up and no dam
would be possible. But recent studies show siltation is far less than was previously imagined.

Strangely, once Daninos’ plan was taken up he was shouldered aside by the Russian and British and Egyptian contractors who finally built the dam. He ended his days in 1976 living in a small flat in central Cairo trying to interest the world in a new plan to crisscross the planet with canals that would end food shortages for ever.

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Inside the
dahabiya
with Sadat

On the day birds learn to speak they will say: ‘Disappear! Disappear!’
Egyptian proverb

But we’re ahead of ourselves again, carried along by the dreams of the likes of Daninos, Nile dreams which would be used by Nasser, and his successor Anwar Sadat, to make Egypt not only independent in terms of power and food, but independent too from the grand strategic aims of the great powers of the twentieth century.

Let’s take up from where we left off with Agatha and turn to a less romantic fellow denizen of the
dahabiya
: Anwar Sadat. Perhaps there is another way of looking at his life, a Nile perspective, that starts with his birth in the Nile delta village of Mit Abu el-Kom, travels upstream via a humble houseboat and ends with his traumatic assassination in 1981.

Sadat’s original name was el-Sadaty, which means ‘followers of the masters’. This refers to one of the many Sufi groups found throughout Egypt, and indeed throughout the whole of north Africa and the Middle East. Their proliferation and influence were noted by Richard Burton (himself a Sufi), and, years later, as we have already noted, it was during the 2011 revolution that Sufi groups resisted the fundamentalist Salafis, intent on destruction in the name of an Islam alien to most people of the region.

But Anwar el-Sadaty was no Sufi, which is probably why he changed his name after the first revolution in 1952. His father, though born into a very poor peasant family, was reasonably well educated thanks to the unceasing efforts of his mother, who sold butter door to door to the wealthier peasants. He came to the attention of a section of the British Medical Corps who were studying the alarming rise in bilharzia noted
in the delta since the introduction of perennial irrigation. They needed an interpreter and someone to liaise with local villagers. So a river disease was Sadat’s father’s, and Sadat’s, ticket out.