Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (19 page)

‘In Syene I was lowered down a deep odoriferous well, swinging on a rope until I could check
for myself
that there was no shadow – the sun was truly overhead.

‘In Alexandria I had earlier measured the angle of the sun at noon as 7 degrees 12 minutes. The difference told me, along with the distance along the Nile I had travelled, that the world was round, was 252,000 stadia in circumference.

‘In Syene I questioned all who would profess some knowledge of the river and its mysteries – why it should flood in summer and not in winter when every other river does. The answer was clear – the waters rise in mountains that trap the summer rains; in Ethiopia there are such mountains that receive the rains charged with water from the sea between Africa and India. It is said that Alexander himself did not know this and desired to – it is sad I was never at his service to relieve his ignorance.

‘So it is my time too. It is strange, when one has studied the world one arrives somehow, also, at knowledge of oneself. Such knowledge tells me it is my time to die. I will not eat, instead I will rely on the light of the sun to nourish me. I have a feeling it may be longer than I planned. Perhaps I will live for ever.

‘I have looked too long and too often at the sun, I am told. That is why, in my eighty-second year I am a blind man dependent on a boy’s shoulder on which I rest my hand as he leads me around. But better to have at least glanced at the sun than to have hidden from its enlightening rays all one’s life.’

15
•
Carry on Cleo

One does not climb a tree to welcome the rain
. Sudanese proverb

Eratosthenes measured the Nile and then the world. And, at that point, 194
BC
, the intellectual centre of the world was probably wherever Eratosthenes cared to lay his hat, even if it was down a deep smelly well. A hundred years later, things had moved inexorably away from Alexandria and towards Rome, the high Greek Egyptian culture he knew in Alexandria in decline. It is thought that casual pillaging had begun to reduce the stocks of the library. So much so that by the time the library was burned (by whom, it is not entirely clear – Arabs blame Christians, Christians Arabs) there were hardly any books left at all.

But all that was in the future. In the time of Caesar and Cleopatra in the first century
BC
the city of Alexandria was still a great centre of the ancient world. It has come down a notch or two since then, as has the whole north coast of Egypt.

The much developed north coast is where I am, and right now I am swimming in Cleopatra’s bath. No milk in this one – it is the outdoor version, where she disported herself with Mark Antony in 40
BC
. It is hewn from the rocks but is recognisably rectangular and man-made and very near to the beautiful white-sand beaches of Mersa Matruh (where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had his HQ in the cliff caves overlooking the town during the Second World War; in the little museum there they have his full-length leather coat donated by his son Manfred). Cleo would never have dreamed of swimming in the bright sun as I am – it would have destroyed her famous light complexion. In her day the pool would have been ringed with a hundred candles guttering in the sea breeze. There are no candles here today and no people except me. The water is chilly; it is all rather thrilling. The waves are still able to come in, and they fill the bath as the tide rises. The water is heavy, moving like a lazy body rising, salty, not really bathlike. In Roman times this natural harbour was called Paraetonium. It’s 150 miles from Alexandria, so for Cleopatra and Antony to have used the bath they most probably did so during one of their many sea voyages along the coast.

Carry on Cleo: Cleo was a murderer, Cleo was a tart, when Tony lost to Gussy boy, she ran and broke his heart. When Cleo married Jules
she did it to save the realm, when Cleo married Tony she was loath to leave the helm. Cleo was a murderer, she topped her dearest bro, and had her sister poisoned, the poor old Arsinoe. Cleo was a tart, she even slept with Herod, he fancied her so much he refused to leave her bed. Cleo was a ruler, the lastest Pharaoh ever, more beautiful than anyone and almost twice as clever.

Cleopatra VII was the last Egyptian Pharaoh. After her death in 30
BC
the country was ruled by invaders of one sort or another until Gamel Abdul Nasser seized power on behalf of the army and the people in 1952. Cleo was the last Queen of the Nile who was proud to be known as an Egyptian ruler.

Not that Egypt hadn’t been going downhill for a while. After Alexander had invaded in 332
BC
and installed his own rulers, the Ptolemy family, there was a natural movement towards Greece. For a century at least the Ptolemys refused to speak Egyptian, preferring Greek – which is why the Rosetta Stone was written in both hieroglyphics and Greek (and was thus, much later, able to be used by European scholars to deciper hieroglyphics). But Cleo spoke Egyptian (which later survived as Coptic and in loan words to Egyptian Arabic). She was proud to walk like an Egyptian, and beautiful enough to carry it off with style.

The Romans had already landed, offering their services as security for Cleo’s father Ptolemy XII. In order to ingratiate himself with Caesar, Ptolemy executed Caesar’s enemy Pompey. Instead Caesar saw this as impudence and would have annexed the whole country to Rome after his successful battle of the Nile if it hadn’t been for a twenty-one-year-old woman who charmed him so much he decided to live in Egypt with her for two years. And to let her rule instead. Imagine if Saddam had been a woman, so devastatingly beautiful that she was capable of persuading George W. to live in Baghdad and father a few more nippers? One suspects that the only way ever really to pacify a country is to marry into the ruling family . . .

When Cleopatra and Julius Caesar visited Italy for the first time together, he fifty-four, she still only twenty-three, he had a brilliant golden statue made of her, set shiningly in the temple of Venus in Rome. She donated the Nile Mosaic, which is still in the temple of Isis in Pompeii. That Isis, an Egyptian god whose tears caused the Nile flood, should be venerated in Rome shows how influential in the ancient world Egypt was. In this extraordinary mosaic, it is quite apparent how the Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt, how the river’s current
and counter-winds make it the most efficient transport system in the ancient world. Yet Cleopatra, though drawn into the Roman world, was happy enough to desert it from time to time for Alexandria and the idyllic azure waters of Paraetonium and its outdoor bath. Her balancing act, a necessary one to keep Egypt from invasion, became in the end simply a delaying of the inevitable.

It was inevitable when Caesar, soft enough to give Cleo her own country, was not soft enough to give her his empire. Their son, Caesarion, was not named by Caesar as his successor (not a carte blanche to rulership but a distinct help nonetheless). Instead Caesar named his great-nephew Octavian, later to be known as Caesar Augustus.

Octavian knew enough to understand that there could be only one Caesar. After the murder of his great-uncle he eventually became allied with Mark Antony. Mark Antony, like Caesar, sought to rule Egypt – which, after Rome, was the richest prize in the ancient world at that time. But Cleo again proved seductive. Time, however, was running out. Octavian wanted everything for himself. He defeated Mark Antony at Actium and Cleo ran away – some said. Eventually both of them were run to earth in Alexandria, which only a year earlier had been the scene of such amazing feats of debauchery and dining the world still thrills to hear the details. But Cleo’s time was up.

One might say that when Cleopatra deserted the Nile she lost everything, even her man. By living it up in Alexandria and abroad she forgot that rulers need ships and navies of greater strength than their enemies’. Perhaps she thought she could charm Octavian too. Not a chance; he preferred killing to loving.

Caesar, a greater warrior by far than Mark Antony, understood the need to remain connected to the Nile. When he entered Alexandria and was seduced by Cleopatra he did not resist, as Mark Antony later did, her suggestion of a triumphal cruise up the Nile to Memphis. It was a journey rich in symbolism and a natural act of unification in Egypt, where the Nile was the communication link, the transport artery and the source of all wealth in the form of the summer flood of silt and water. Three harvests a year made Egypt the richest domain in the Roman world. Cleopatra’s wealth was legendary. She intended to hang on to it by using her extraordinary powers of guile.

And poison. One thing we can say about Cleopatra is that she knew rather too much about poison for comfort. It unnerved even her most ardent lover, Antony. When he took to employing his own tasters at
the Alexandrian palace Cleopatra dipped her crown of flowers in poison and offered it to him to eat. As he was about to eat she snatched it away and threw the flowers to a prisoner, held in waiting for this purpose. As the condemned man writhed in agony on the floor, Mark Antony got the message: if she ever wanted to get rid of him she would – whatever precautions he might take.

Not that Antony was a nice man, either. When he lost the battle of Seleucas he asked Cleopatra if he might execute the general in charge of the Egyptian forces who had lost the battle on his behalf. And the general’s family too. And their horses. The intrigue, the poison, the execution of foes and the families of foes recall the demented last acts of Hitler’s Third Reich.

History remains fascinated by Cleopatra because she seems so unlike us. With her banquets that lasted until dawn and her extravagant actions she seems more like Elizabeth Taylor than a world leader. It’s fitting somehow that Taylor played her in the quintessential 1963 movie.

The Cobra Queen had children by both Caesar and Mark Antony. At thirty-nine she was dead, by her own hand. In life she and Mark Antony had partied hard, very hard. They had formed a society, the Order of Inimitable Life. As the end approached they formed another: the Order of the Inseparable in Death. Somehow one is reminded more of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love than the rulers of a great country.

The whole death scene is the final act of a melodrama. Or is it? Cleopatra would do anything to save Egypt. Two thousand years later and you see something similar in that modern Egyptian pharaoh, President Anwar Sadat. Someone who so completely identifies with their nation that they see no separation between it and themselves. And in that state of identification these people employ the personal as well as the political to achieve their own ends. This doesn’t mean they subjugate their personal wishes to the needs of the country. It just means the personal desires have the imperative of political decisions that affect thousands, and that the repertoire of techniques to ‘save the country’ includes the intensely personal such as having an affair or prostrating yourself before another leader (as Sadat effectively did when he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to solve the Sinai problem for Egypt).

Cleopatra used her obvious attractions to get what she wanted. But that didn’t mean she was someone who did not also fall in love and have some semblance of loyalty. She knew, though, that she was doomed in her alliance with Mark Antony: she could not simply desert
him. However, he had to go. He’d become an encumbrance. She loved him, but that love would not diminish if he died. This is to strip it of the sentimental vein developed by Plutarch in his account of their romance, and brought to a fine conclusion by Shakespeare; yet, given all her actions, one is forced to conclude that Cleopatra would rather live to fight another day than die in the arms of her lover. And yet she loved him enough not to murder him. She wasn’t a female Herod. She needed a way to force him to kill himself. At the same time, she dreaded being paraded through the streets of Rome as war booty if she were defeated. But would Octavian have done this? Surely he would have cut her a deal of some kind – this would have been her line of thinking, and yet his would have been – Do I need this troublesome woman?

Cleopatra was not yet forty, and perhaps still fantasised about charming Octavian. But for that to happen the first part of her plan needed to come off.

She had always made a great deal about poisons, her mastery of poisons, her ability to detect them. She had experimented on men condemned to death, and some who were not condemned who also died. Poison is the weapon of choice for those who have not the power to face down opponents openly. It is the weapon of court intrigues par excellence.

Though Plutarch, in his telling of the tale, makes much of her experiments with poison, it was a way of holding her own in the company of men. Mark Antony might challenge Octavian to man-to-man combat with any favourite warrior of his choice, while Cleopatra would lovingly finger her cobra or a phial of belladonna or wolfsbane extract. She knew precisely her bargaining chips: she had amassed great wealth in Egypt – indeed, as Egypt’s Pharaoh, one can see that her rule was the turning point of Egypt’s fortunes. It was the wealthiest country in the world at the time. Alexandria was a more impressive city than Rome. Octavian desired to mulct the Egyptians of all their wealth, their grain for sure but also their gold, their jewels, amassed over countless centuries of mining and trading with Africa and the East. That treasure hoard was the goal, and Octavian, being in debt in Rome, needed it. Did he need a queen? He did not, but he needed what she had. Cleopatra knew that this game would be played to the hilt – hence her mausoleum, which was, in effect, a bunker. It was built so strongly and cleverly that once someone was inside it was impossible for anyone to break
down the doors. But there was a window high up, restricting entry to a manageable scramble of one, allowing some communication, but not much.

In the final scene, we have Antony, deserted by Cleopatra’s navy and devastated, beaten by Octavian because he had tried to fight both on land and at sea. Octavian’s navy was the better, and Cleopatra’s sixty triremes soon turned tail and fled when the fighting went against them. As they had in previous battles. Cleo was a lover not a fighter. Antony knew this, and yet vanity led him to fight on Octavian’s terms rather than his own. If he had kept to a land battle alone, if he had resisted Cleo’s urge to help, history might have been very different: Egypt might have kept its wealth, largely as India and China did. There is every reason to believe that the Roman rule of Egypt, from 45
BC
until the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century, was an effective pillaging of the country from which it never really recovered. One might compare it to the delicate irrigation systems of Balkh, in northern Afghanistan, that supported a rich urban culture, destroyed by Genghis Khan and forever after condemning that land to a hand-to-mouth nomadic existence. Long waves in history, cause and effect, echoing down the centuries to the present day.