Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (54 page)

The Ruwenzoris are formed by crystalline rocks uplifting some three million years ago. The same tectonic movement formed the rift valley of Lake Albert and Lake Edward – and shut off Lake Tanganyika from the Nile basin (Burton would have been right if he had speculated about the Nile of several million years ago). The range is some seventy-five miles long by forty miles wide and is most famously home, as we have seen, to an ‘Eden-like’ habitat unique in Equatorial Africa. William Stairs, one of Stanley’s officers, made one ascent to over 10,000 feet in the Ruwenzoris, but it was not until 1906 that most of the peaks were climbed by the Duke of Abruzzi’s expedition.

Stanley’s later life was curiously misshapen. Away from Africa he seemed to lose direction. He married Dorothy Tennant – a woman of superior social caste, as he saw it – who dominated ‘the breaker of rocks’ mercilessly. Stanley was offered the chance to be
de facto
ruler of an embryonic Kenya and Uganda, but his wife (echoing Florence Baker) forbade him, or at least put such emotional pressure on him that he turned the offer down. She was fascinated by politics and practically forced him to stand for parliament in Lambeth. He got in, and found politicians just as he had suspected – conniving and unreliable, all talk and no action. His greatest pleasures came in solitary walks and caring for his adopted son – also illegitimate but, unlike Stanley as a child, loved.

32
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The Mahdi’s sword

Men may say otherwise but the rains always come
. Ethiopian proverb

So Stanley leaves our story, for the time being. Meanwhile, back in darkest Africa, Sam Baker’s successor as ruler of Equatorial Egypt was, as already noted, none other than General Gordon. His success at subduing the slave trade was considerable; but it did nothing to inhibit a messianic vision of his own role in subduing the whole of Sudan for his masters in Cairo. Nominally this was the Turkish Egyptian khedive; in fact it was also the British government. Their enemy was the Mahdi, who had raised an army in Sudan against the Egyptian Turkish pashas who ruled his country. Eventually the Mahdi’s dervish troops would kill the British representative, General Gordon.

Like some mythological warrior, the Mahdi was empowered by carrying a special ‘lucky’ sword. It was a gift of the Sultan of Darfur, who did not read and therefore did not know that it was a Frankish sword, carried by a latterday crusader intent on liberating Tunis from the rule of the Ottomans. The sword weighed two pounds ten ounces. It had a hammered steel blade and a brass hilt and was inscribed ‘Charles V Holy Roman Emperor’. Its blade was 31.75 inches long and the handle 6.25 inches. That such a blade could be in an infidel’s hand was truly a mystery.

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, had ruled Spain, Austria and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, and paid for his reconquest of Tunis from the Ottomans with the gold that Francisco Pizarro had extracted from the Incas. This sword, then, was paid for by one conquest and used in another. When Tunis fell in 1574 the new rulers were the Beyliks, Turks who ruled on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. They were merchant adventurers, equipped with the best weaponry of Damascene steel, and had no use for the booty left behind by the fleeing Franks. The sword, though beautiful, was traded with a local Tuareg chief who carried it for sixty years and his son carried it for forty. The sword crisscrossed the Sahara, drawing blood in the raids of the Tebu of Tibesti. Once a
haddad
, one of the feared and despised yet most necessary iron workers of Africa, hammered and filed down a deep nick in its blade. He told the owner, a Garam tribesman, that it was a holy sword from the Franks, but this was soon forgotten. The
sword was cleaned in the sands, scoured of blood and sharpened with the circular grit stones left behind by prehistoric man, grinding stones for when the Sahara was a place well watered, overrun with game, with gazelle, giraffe and baboon. The climate grew worse in the eighteenth century, hotter and drier, and the tribes that lived around Uweinat, at the border of modern Sudan, Libya and Egypt, began to weaken. The Garam dispersed and some were conquered by the Darfuri tribes. The sword, in its elaborately sewn leather scabbard, was captured and given as tribute to the Sultan’s great-grandfather. That it was a sword of Frankish origin was now widely known, though no one could read the inscription, and it was thought that one day it would have a special significance. It was said to be the sword of Richard the Lionheart, who had proposed that his sister marry Saladin. In a sense it was a crusader’s sword, and using it against the English, who backed the Turkish Egyptian ruler, was seen by the Mahdi as right and fitting.

Gordon was killed on the steps of his palace, fighting bravely to the last. He may have lacked foresight but he was no coward. The Mahdi had intended that this sword be the end of Gordon. He wanted to sever Gordon’s head with it. In the end the head of the blue-eyed, fair-haired Scot was brought to him poked on to the end of a dervish lance. This was set outside Gordon’s palace to be pelted with stones by all passers-by.

When the Khalifa, the Mahdi’s successor, was eventually hunted down, a year after the battle of Omdurman and the reconquest of Khartoum, there was no sign of the sword. The Khalifa was shot while he sat with his men. There was only one survivor of his inner circle – Osman Digna, who escaped while wounded early in the battle. Digna had earlier inflicted the humiliation on the British of being the first foreign commander to break their famous infantry square. At the battle of Tebai, Digna’s men surprised the British into allowing an opening in the square, the military formation that had remained unbroken since before the defeat of Napoleon. The confused soldiers then retreated in disarray, though they did ultimately win the battle. When asked how they had managed this great feat one of Digna’s lowliest soldiers replied, ‘Because we did not know the square was invincible. No one had told us.’

Digna was captured a year later and spent eight years in prison at the place where the Nile flows into the sea, Rosetta – the same prison from whose walls the Rosetta Stone had been plucked a half-century earlier.
He always maintained he had returned the sword to the desert, leaving it in the safekeeping of another tribal sheikh, waiting for the right time for it to be used again.

33
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Wild swim

God does not hurry. But what he sends to the earth, always arrives
.
Sudanese proverb

This is a long book so I decided to have a rest, let someone else take over for a while. My good friend Johnny West is a far better swimmer than I. In fact I had discovered that I was not only a poor swimmer, I was a cowardly one. But instead of lashing myself I decided to draft in the talent to complete my self-set mission: swim the Red Nile. Years ago I had shared a flat in London with Johnny West. He joined Reuters and I went to Japan to teach English and study aikido. His first posting was Cairo and, on his invitation, I visited him there. It was the start of an excitement and interest aroused by the city that led to me moving and living there. Since this book is partly a result of my life in Egypt, Johnny West could be called its instigator.

By chance he was visiting Khartoum and agreed to a bout of wild swimming far beyond my meagre capabilities. What follows is all-round clean-cut war correspondent, and now oil consultant, Johnny ‘Two Niles’ West’s version of his Red Nile swim – his attempt to swim the junction of the Blue and White Niles. Sensibly he had chosen a time before the main flood (when White is more powerful than Blue) in early May. Later on the vast flow of the Blue Nile would have made the attempt even more foolhardy than it already was.

‘I took the hotel driver Mahmoud the day before to do a recce. I’d already decided to start on the Blue Nile, flowing sharp west in its final stages, and swing round where the two Niles met to end up in Omdurman on the other side. So first we looked for the entry point, just by a large public garden with several tea houses. Mud banks fell away precipitously from where we were standing, covered in modern consumer crap – squeezy juice bottles with straws, plastic bags, biscuit packets forming a wave of human flotsam you had to wade through on dry land to drop three yards down to water level.

‘“The currents are treacherous,” Mahmoud said as we looked down. I smiled politely. The seatbelts in his taxi didn’t work and it was clear from the way he had woven through the traffic that he only had loose control over the steering of his old battered mongrel taxi. He wasn’t exactly Mr Safety.

‘“Did I tell you about the electric fish?” he asked, as we sped over the bridge to Omdurman to find the destination port. “If there are enough of them, they can paralyse you. Oh, and the fishermen’s nets. Bound to drag you down,” he said, avoiding a stout woman and her many shopping bags by inches as he sped up to overtake an even crappier taxi.

‘Mahmoud was having fun. Why not? When you do this kind of thing regularly, you recognise that you are fodder for other people’s paranoias, and even their schadenfreude. Once I was recceing swimming the River Derwent which flows through Hobart, Tasmania, and struck up conversation with an angler on the banks. “Aw, the sharks’ll get you, mate,” he said. “River’s full of ’em.” Research later showed that the last time anyone was known to have been attacked by a shark in the estuary was 1878. OMG, I thought as I looked at him. This bored old man is sledging me, recreationally. Since then, I’d learned to factor in schadenfreude as a motivation when you ask advice about swimming any body of open water.

‘And that was what Mahmoud, and several others, had been doing. Currents, electrocution, fishermen’s nets. Eventually we found the spot I thought I could hit, amid the remains of the fort which had hosted the Mahdi’s last stand in 1898. We drove back and agreed I would find Mahmoud outside the hotel at six the next morning.

‘Khartoum was already busy by then, or at least the thoroughfares across the bridges that connect the three dislocated limbs of the city. I climbed out of the cab and waded through the plastic tide down to water level. Gave my glasses and clothes to Mahmoud at the top. And struck out into the Blue Nile.

‘My original plan, informed by anxiety over how wise it was even to be attempting this in the first place, was to swim straight across the hundred-yard stretch to Tuti Island, then walk round, or over, the rich alluvial farmland, find the right spot the other side, and strike out across the White Nile to the agreed landing spot in Omdurman. Once I could actually feel the Blue Nile, though, its current brisk and no-nonsense but lacking in any malicious intent, I devised a new plan.

‘I would just stay midstream and be carried down to the meeting point of the two Niles, round Tuti Island, then just swim fast and obliquely across the White Nile. If I struck out about a quarter of a mile downstream of the intended landing point, I should be able to make it.

‘So I floated along gently, the warm muddy waters peacefully enveloping me. As always, the city just fell away once I was in the river. I’d had the same sensation swimming across the Thames at Tower Bridge. It doesn’t happen at water level. It’s only once you are
in
the water. The river becomes the filter through which to see the city, not the other way round. The muted hubbub of Khartoum’s seven million denizens on their way to scrabble their livings for another day became the backdrop to the curious birds – some kind of pigeon? – flying overhead and following me down the river. A couple of fishermen’s boats bobbed past and then – moment of panic – my foot hit one of the nets. It’s always a shock to strike something in the water when you think you should be free, and I wished sorely that 9/11 hadn’t happened and I still carried my Swiss army knife everywhere. But I shook loose and came down to the junction of the two Niles. By this time I’d been in the water perhaps fifteen minutes, travelling the best part of a mile but scarcely swimming more than a couple of hundred yards.

‘At the junction, the current really picked up. The White Nile comes crashing in against Tuti – you can see from old maps that the shape of the alluvial island has changed quite considerably even from colonial times – and the two rivers funnel past the western edge of the island north towards Egypt and the Mediterranean. By now the current was perhaps at the speed of a gentle jog – which feels fast when you judge your movement against the land.

‘But it’s a river! The current runs parallel to, not against, dry land. If you don’t mind where you land, the fastest river current in the world in a straight-banked river is actually irrelevant. Just be ready to walk a couple of miles in your trunks. I listened to the ever more insistent traffic. I could see waves of it passing over the six-lane bridge to Omdurman to the south.

‘The current was so fast it seemed best not to plop along. Conserve energy midstream, then, when the time is right, plough quickly to the shore, fast and furious. When I could see the Mahdi’s fort ahead of me, I whirled my arms and gave the two Niles my best front crawl. In the middle of large bodies of water you lose real perspective so I just
couldn’t tell how far across I was. I saw Mahmoud and his battered yellow taxi waiting . . . then I backstroked a little, looked up again, and he was gone. I was already overshooting.

‘I no longer had any fear the river would drown me. But I had a keen interest in limiting how far north I landed and in how much of the city’s effluents I’d be exposed to. I buried my face in the water again and whirled into my best front crawl. I looked up and looked up and I was still offshore hundreds of yards down from where I’d intended to land. A bridge was coming up and beyond it some kind of industrial complex which wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun, but I still seemed quite far out to midstream.

‘Until I put my legs down.

‘And discovered that, even though I was fifty yards off the shore, the water was only thigh deep. A meander had cut out a huge swathe of shallow bank on the western side. So I waded ashore to wait for Mahmoud, who had driven round; he was performing his prayers. He was all smiles and appreciation in time-honoured sledging tradition – respect to the event. Ten minutes later we were back at the Acropole Hotel in time for breakfast, nursing our secret, debriefing George Pagoulatos, the nervous proprietor, a little pleased with ourselves.’