Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (5 page)

How to get enough of an angle on change, metamorphosis, transformation, evolution, revolution, mutation, transfiguration, translation, transmutation, alteration, rebirth? One angle: the river’s course as palimpsest – dig down deep enough and you will reveal successive layers of inhabitation, geology, agriculture. Simple enough. Or, ignore those layers. Be an anti-archaeologist, an anti-palaeontologist. While the academics deal with what is there, the evidence, another more radical form of research might be to focus on what isn’t there, the gaps in the fossil record, the glaring absences, the ignorance, the lost tribes and missing persons.

Perhaps the way forward is to look at the
other
. The river’s opposite – stagnation. A river flows, provides life. When it stagnates it becomes a lake or a canal – something that is held by some shape, some depression, some ditch in the landscape. It is as if the land has killed it, made it dependent instead of alive. And it is true – canals leak and have to be puddled with clay or else all the water will escape.

The stagnant may be useful, but it has a short shelf-life. Without attention, without gardening, without human intervention it gathers the surface decay of stagnancy, it harbours disease, it actually becomes a danger to man; it can, in the breeding of mosquitoes and the harbouring of parasites, become the death of us.

Yet, even knowing this, our first instinct is always to make the river stagnant – to turn it into a ‘useful’ lake. We want more, we want every golden egg and we’ll kill the goose for it.

It reminds me of Paul Celan’s poem ‘Death Fugue’ – ‘Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall’: we constantly want to exchange the living red river for black milk. Life seems to bore us. We need to know how much death we can imbibe, sip, tipple away on, unnoticed in the corner.

The word ‘alcohol’ comes from the Arabic
al-kohl
– the black powdered eyeliner so favoured by ancient Egyptians and later adopted by the Arabs. Making
al-kohl
involved distillation of antimony, so ‘alcohol’ came to mean any process involving distillation (a curious irony that those who oppose distilled spirits invented the process).

For all its blessings our favourite drink can also be a poison. In the form of methanol, alcohol can blind and kill. In the form of ethanol it simply makes us drunk. But pure ethanol is not very palatable, so all the preferred forms of alcohol contain varying amounts of methanol, pure poison. Death provides the taste.

Back to black. The kohl-lined eye is one of the most characteristic images of ancient Egypt – depicted in hieroglyphs as the eye of Horus. As befitting a falcon-headed god, Horus’ eye resembles that of a bird of prey. The eye watched over and protected the Pharaoh in the afterlife, and was painted, for similarly superstitious reasons, on the bows of ships, a practice that spread to the whole Near East. Even today you’ll see the eye of Horus on the bow of a dhow or felucca plying the Nile. The eye in ancient Egypt was thought of not as a passive organ of mere recording, but as an instrument of action, intention, wrath. The eye that guards against the evil eye. Perhaps from merely recording what I see I should take the hint and go out on a limb. Ride the river.

Black milk, evil eyes. At what point does change kill, become a form of death? At what point does tradition stifle and choke and become a cause of death? This is all too apparent in Egypt, where the ultra-modern butts up time and again against the immemorial. People living in the tombs in the city of the dead logging on with a Mobinil smartphone.

The black land, as the ancients called Egypt. The land remains the same – in the delta they farmed until the mid-twentieth century in the same way as they had 3,000 years ago. Even now there are many similarities in the poorer communities along the Nile. The land remains the same, the river changes.

Tradition is bad. That’s one dogma. But tradition could be called
a preservative, preserving ways of living, life. Change could involve killing what we need but temporarily no longer want. Because it has slipped out of sight.

One thing I am sure about, though: the piloting of the material, the navigation down the river from my little cabin-like study, lined with books, no curtains, view of the Nile night and day (the sunsets are amazing), the documenting of that journey, the pilot’s log so to speak – that will be as vital a journey as the log of any real journey I might make. There had been any number of Nile trips recently, from the very adventurous to the strictly televisual; some had recorded changes in the river, some had not. Some had sought to emphasise that nothing had really changed. Others that everything had. It was all about what you looked at, where the black, kohl-rimmed eye looked.

Certainly, looking at the life of the Nile, over the longest period of time, will help us delineate better the roles of rebirth, death, change and tradition. These are the real questions, aren’t they? I am hoping for it, sipping my Sakkara beer, alcohol of a refined kind, courtesy of the Al-Ahram brewery, sitting at my little window watching the sun set in my own little square of eternity.

4
•
A child of the Rift

Only two things in this world are innately good: water and one’s mother
. Sudanese proverb

Alfred Wegener, a German explorer and scientist, was disbelieved and ridiculed for his continental-drift theory – the theory, put forward in 1912, that the world was fissured, like an infant’s skull, and yet that these fissures were actually fruitful, fructifying with molten magma deep under the sea, expanding, sliding over each other. Wegener was ignored from his untimely death in Greenland in 1930 until the 1950s, a warning shot to those who would propose a theory that looks right but can’t be easily explained.

Wegener, from an early age, noticed what every schoolchild notices: South America fits into the right angle of west Africa; in fact the land mass of the earth all looks as if it was once joined. Wegener searched for evidence of his theory – finding rocks and fossils that matched on
either side of the Atlantic Ocean. He provided the evidence but no mechanism and was opposed heatedly by such august organisations as the American Petroleum Society. He sought solace in making expeditions to the frozen north. On his last trip to Greenland conditions were so harsh he had to amputate a team member’s frozen toes with his penknife. Temperatures dropped to 60 degrees below freezing; then Wegener, aged fifty, a heavy smoker who had spent too long in his study, died.

The discovery in the 1960s that the sea floor really did spread as Wegener had speculated, with magma bubbling up along tectonic plate lines, finally brought respectability to a theory that had been derided and lampooned. Scientists agreed that the circulating hot liquid centre of the earth was how the plates, with the continents sitting on top of them, moved. Just as rice in a pan of boiling water will circulate, so the surface of the earth was in constant movement, shoved by the circulating movement of the magma below.

I think it is salutary to note that the current theory about the birth of the Nile – in a valley made by tectonic plates shifting – was, until the 1960s, considered pure poppycock. I think we are all apt, especially non-scientists, to underestimate the transitory nature of scientific ‘truth’. By definition such truth can only be a groping towards better and better explanations. I think we need to maintain a sense of lightness, of the faintly absurd, whenever a theory becomes too heavy, too fundamentally essential. In a few years, it too could be poppycock.

But for the time being we have Wegener and his moving plates. The Red Nile and the Red Sea are two children of the Rift Valley, the tectonic twins. The Rift Valley starts in east Africa and shatters its way north to that other fracture zone – Palestine and the Levant. The Red Sea is one result. The Nile valley is the other.

This combination river, the Red Nile, was born in the extreme violence of tectonic shifts and climate change so huge it makes our present concerns look like a quibble over the thermostat setting. We’re talking aeons of time when whole seas disappeared alternating with floods in a manner that is starkly reminiscent not of hard science but of the chronicles of Ur and the Bible.

But long before the Bible was written, seven million years ago, the Mediterranean evaporated and became just another puddle. In those days Gibraltar was joined to Morocco and the global temperature was so frizzlingly high that most of the water just boiled away leaving
behind a giant saltpan and the aforementioned puddle. Because of the current worries over global warming it’s easy to think that the earth has never been very hot before, but, in between ice ages, temperatures have soared to 15 or 20 degrees above current averages. Fancy a day out when it’s 60 degrees? Naturally such high temperatures resulted in some serious evaporation. Add to this tectonic shifts resulting in new land bridges and you have the reason for the Mediterranean’s fickle nature.

With a tiny amount of water in the Mediterranean the sea level was much, much lower. This meant that any river flowing into the Mediterranean had a lot further to fall. This increase in drop speeded rivers up and meant they cut deep canyons as they approached the coast. The Nile in Egypt – it was wholly contained within Egypt then, fed by the rains of the lush plains (it was not yet a desert) – cut a canyon miles deep. Cairo sits on that canyon, now silted up by subsequent Niles. If we could go back seven million years or so we’d see something like the Grand Canyon, spewing into a dried-up sea. At Cairo the canyon would be more than a mile deep, at the delta it would have been an incredible two and a half miles deep. You could comfortably BASE-jump off the top and have a cigarette on the way down. Or two, even.

Life on the banks of the Nile seven million years ago would include giant crocodiles sixty feet in length, long-extinct ancestors of the lion replete with huge teeth and bigger appetites, giant turtles and perhaps a few primates.

The Mediterranean eventually recovered – much to the pleasure of all future holidaymakers. The land bridge between Gibraltar and Morocco that had corked up the Med and allowed the evaporation was overwhelmed by rising Atlantic sea levels. This was about five million years ago. Sea levels continued to rise in a dramatic way. The canyon river was flooded hundreds of miles upstream. The entire River Nile became a huge bay, a gulf, over seven miles wide at Aswan, 525 miles upstream.

Then it became dry again, very, very dry. I know this is all getting a rather Old Testament feel, but this is really what happened according to the best science we have available. Two million years ago the entire Nile river dried up and became a dusty valley, a wadi; all was desert, all was sand.

Then 800,000 years ago the earth began to move, or rather its surface
began to shift in a different way; slowly the Ethiopian plate lifted up and tilted towards the Nile and away from the Red Sea. So instead of water running into the Red Sea it started to drain into the Nile. Remember, up to this point the Nile had been confined to Egypt, but now, with the favourable tilt of Ethiopia, and its new rivers feeding the Nile, the great river stopped being a dry valley and was extended backwards into Africa as a living waterway.

Meanwhile, in central Africa, water flooded from what would become the Congo basin and the future Nile basin in Sudan to create the Sudd – the world’s biggest dead end. The rivers all turned inward and had nowhere to exit, no route to the sea. So they simply water-logged an area bigger than France, creating the world’s largest marsh. Imagine putting on your wellies in Boulogne and squelching all the way to Marseilles, with a few muddy swims in between. That was the Sudd.

The name Sudd comes from the Arabic for ‘barrier’ – and it would remain a barrier until the ice, during the maximum period of glaciation, some 15,000 years ago, began to recede. In this last ice age the mountains of central Africa such as the Ruwenzori would have been snow white all year round. They would have looked to ancient man like something alien and glowing in the morning sun. Perhaps their mythical name, Mountains of the Moon, dates from some ancient story preserved from this time.

New rivers formed to take the melting snows away. The new mountain rivers, enhanced by glacial water, were like a giant dam burst, pumping through the Sudd swamp and connecting it up with the Ethiopian rivers of the Nile.

At this point the Nile started at Lake Tanganyika, flowed through Lake Albert and finished up at the sea in what would become Egypt. Further tectonic activity shut off Tanganyika, leaving the start of the Nile in the area of Lake Edward and Lake Albert.

This was the Nile, almost as we now know it. Finally Lake Victoria – some 12,500 years ago – rose sufficiently high to overwhelm the rocky slabs at its northern end. The lake overflowed and broke through to the Albert Nile drainage, to create the modern Nile. This period was extremely wet – vast torrents unblocked the Nile of sand dunes and reeds making a huge, wide, dangerous river, a river to be feared and avoided.

This wet phase – from 12,500
BC
until 4000
BC
– meant people lived
in the desert in preference to living beside the river (the desert was still much more hospitable, much more like savannah as late as 2450
BC
during the Fifth Dynasty of ancient Egypt). Desert remains, hundreds of miles from the Nile, indicate wells and rain-fed lakes in country that is now completely desiccated, pure sand and rock.

These desert dwellers fled the rolling plains as they dried up, and found that the raging river had become quieter, more manageable. They brought with them their desert iconography: pyramids that mimicked star dunes, sphinxes that looked like wind-formed yardangs or ‘mud lions’. They found they could manage the river’s yearly flood, and invented irrigation methods still in use today. Civilisation grew and the world’s first nation state formed along the banks of this river. The taming of the Red Nile had begun.

Along with the settlement of the Nile came the stories – myths about its origin, stories about its source which have a semblance of truth about them even now. The stories fed into the traditional tales of Africa, Egypt and even Greece. As they were passed down orally and then set down in texts, the Nile became the first river of ancient literature.