Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (61 page)

After sixty years of thinking about it, the digging started in 1979. All great dams seem to acquire iconic machinery. Almost like mechanical
gods these machines promise great things but are ultimately defeated. In Canada, the Bennet dam on the Peace River, which created the largest open water in the Rocky Mountains, required that the area to be flooded should be logged first. Two super giant log crushers/manglers/pushers were employed to clear the area. One got stuck and lost beneath the floodwaters. The other remains outside the town of Mackenzie – a giant yellow behemoth, part rotovator, part Transformer, part gigantic mechanical folly. Neither did the work they were designed for, since the ground proved too bumpy for the giant machines to traverse. Like some doomed First World War tank they got stuck in every ditch and ravine they encountered.

The Jonglei scheme had a truly monumental digger – it looked like a Meccano monster fashioned from breaking up a Mississippi paddle steamer and mating it with an agricultural feed plant. The huge scooping wheel at the front, however, seemed to work. Called Sarah, the giant cutter ploughed through the soft laterite soils and lower clays at a goodly rate. By 1984 seventy-five of the 225 miles were all that remained. But though Sarah worked, the world around her collapsed into war.

Thirty years on, Sarah is still there, rusty, but not as rusty as you would think considering she was also hit by a stray missile during the long-running civil war between the south and the north of Sudan. You can peruse her bulk on Google Earth at the point she reached furthest south. Now peace has been signed, there is revived talk of completing the Jonglei. Let us hope not. Let Sarah rust in peace.

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Love on the Nile

When they like the mother, they kiss the daughter
. Nubian proverb

The Jonglei Canal may never happen, especially as the new country of South Sudan has the more pressing concern of war with the North on its hands. This element in the chain of river control is missing, but slowly, throughout the twentieth century, the other elements fell into place.

Sir William Willcocks, the great engineer responsible for the first Aswan dam, the dam that really changed the way the Nile was
perceived, was not sure, at the end of his life, whether damming rivers was quite the complete good he had thought it to be. In his retirement he tried to stop yet another dam happening in the Sudan. And failed.

We may have had enough of the well-documented ecological impact of dams, the spoiling of the fishing and the spread of bilharzia, but there is an often overlooked benefit: their impact on romance. The dam’s effect on passion.

The first dam at Aswan was built in 1902, as mentioned earlier. It heralded a new era of steamboat travel previously made difficult by the cataracts between Aswan and Wadi Halfa. The era of the affordable Nile cruise, the ultimate romantic getaway, was made possible by the dam. With a railway link from Cairo one could avoid the longueurs of Middle Egypt, which hard-core travellers such as Flaubert took in their stride, take ship at Luxor and steam upriver to Aswan and Wadi Halfa, now submerged by Lake Nasser but in those days a thriving Nile port. The first dam raised the river and half submerged some of the temples, allowing tourists a unique amphibious experience, seemingly doomed like any good romance.

The second dam, opened in 1970, but effectively filling up for the previous six years, completely submerged a country: Nubia. This was the romantic country that interwar tourists such as Agatha Christie were the last to travel through.

Christie visited Egypt many times. The first time she fell in love with her first husband Archie Christie. But she had, for some reason, an aversion to sailing the Nile until her marriage to her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist fourteen years her junior. In 1933, when she was forty-three, they took a romantic cruise up the Nile, which naturally became one source of inspiration for the archetypal Agatha Christie mystery
Death on the Nile
.

Agatha Christie made her Nile journey a decade after the discovery of Tutankhamen. The excitement of that find provided a new impetus to Nile tourism. Christie visited almost all Nileside sites, including that of Akhnaten’s palace at Amarna. She was so taken with Akhnaten she wrote a play about him. It has been performed only rarely – by amateur and repertory theatre groups. It has never opened in the West End, which may have something to do with its having eleven scene changes and over twenty speaking parts. I think, though, there is an excellent case to be made for turning
Akhnaten
(or maybe it should be
Akhnaten!
)
into a musical; with Nefertiti, Akhnaten and Tutankhamen all involved it would make a spectacular production.

Christie’s love affair with the Nile not only resulted in the Poirot novel
Death on the Nile
, she also collaborated with the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville on a whodunnit set in ancient Egypt called
Death Comes as the End
.

With Glanville she had an intimate correspondence, reflecting a relationship that remained platonic but emotionally was every bit a love affair. Ten years younger than Agatha, Glanville had, she always said, ‘a talent for living’. Glanville would confess to friends that he was in love with the homely detective writer; and she kept his letters bundled with those from her husband. When Agatha wrote of Stephen to Max Mallowan she always sandwiched any praise of the Egyptologist with extravagant praise of her husband. Stephen would jokingly refer to his attraction to Agatha with his friend Max, who perhaps chose not to be too aware of what was really going on.

Mallowan himself was an Assyriologist not an Egyptologist, and there is no doubt that Agatha loved him. Perhaps
agape
and sex went well together for him, whereas
eros
and a shared dream of love on the Nile were reserved for Stephen.

Christie’s Egyptian novel
Death Comes as the End
(‘a novel of jealousy, betrayal and murder in 2000
BC
,’ my 2001 reprint warns me) contains some of the clunkiest dialogue she ever wrote. Usually her characters speak entirely convincingly in their narrowly defined but acutely observed surroundings. In ancient Egypt Imhotep, the world’s first architect, paces up and down saying, ‘Can I not do as I please in my own house? Do I not support my sons and their wives? Do they not owe the very bread they eat to me? Do I not tell them so without ceasing?’ Imhotep as Victorian Dad, perhaps, but not a patch on her usually precise capture of contemporary mores, speech and character. Agatha should have stuck to the present, and she knew it: only her love of the Nile allowed her to stray.

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Agatha’s trunk

When the bull is in a strange country it does not bellow
.
Sudanese proverb

It felt almost as if I had cruised the great river, after watching again, following a long gap, the 1978 film of
Death on the Nile
. The novel and the film are quintessential Christie material, as if the mystery of the past, the archaeological subtext so to speak, parallels in some necessary way the forensic exertions of the rotund but astute Poirot. A Frenchman called Auguste Mariette was the founder of Egypt’s first archaeological museum, the French having always had, since the debut of the
savants
under Napoleon, a proprietorial attitude to ancient Egypt. It was another Frenchman, François Champollion, after all, who worked out the key to reading hieroglyphics. And, strangely, it was in Champollion Street, just behind the great museum in Cairo, that some of the bitterest fighting of the 2011 revolution took place, as if control of the country should be decided under long-departed French eyes. So French, or even Belgian, intellectual superiority in mystery solving is a key part of the Poirot/Nile scenario, one ramping the other up to a sort of critical mass – for just as
The Hound of the Baskervilles
defines Sherlock Holmes, so
Death on the Nile
seems to define not just Agatha Christie but some essential element of Nile romance.

There may be a simpler explanation. The Nile is
the
river of death. As we have seen, crossing to the western side, where all the tombs are, was the fate of all who had died, the Nile becoming a veritable Styx. One might even say that Christie had stumbled upon the red nature of the Nile – because
Death on the Nile
is, of course, a story of thwarted passion as well as murder.

I had always assumed that Christie made only one visit to Egypt, but actually she made several. I became intent on tracking down some of the details of her own Nile experience, not so much as a further insight into her work but rather because of a fellow feeling for another confirmed Nilist.

Agatha Christie’s favourite Cairo hotel was not the Mena House, which is out by the Pyramids and always touted as ‘her hotel’ (in fact she only ever stayed there briefly and didn’t enjoy her stay); she much preferred what is now the Marriott on Zamalek, a place previously
known as the Gezira Palace Hotel. Agatha had first stayed there in 1910 with her mother. They remained for three months for ‘the season’. It was Agatha’s coming-out season – far cheaper than a similar affair in London and considered almost as good. On the same island was the celebrated docking facility for Thomas Cook. From here one could travel to Luxor or Aswan aboard the SS
Setti
, the PS
Tewfik
or as Agatha did, the PS
Karnak
, which became the model for the paddle steamer in
Death on the Nile
. It was at this wharf that the celebrated archaeological booty from Tutankhamen’s tomb was unloaded in 1923, en route from Luxor to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Agatha’s hotel, the Gezira Palace, stood, in her day, in sixty acres of beautiful gardens. It borders the Nile, and was formerly the palace built for Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, when she arrived for the opening of the Suez Canal and, reputedly, had an affair, consummated in one of the gazebos in the gardens, with Khedive Ismail. The Gezira Palace is today, in its nucleus, very similar to what it must have been like in Agatha’s time. The ceilings are high and the fans turn the air lazily, high above you. But when Agatha returned in 1933 with Max Mallowan she would have been disappointed not to stay at the Gezira; in the early 1920s it became the private residence of Habib Lotfallah Pasha, returning to its hotel role only in 1961. But the island of Zamalek, also known as Gezira (which means ‘island’ in Arabic), was always the start of any journey up the Nile. From here she would have proceeded up to Luxor and another favourite hotel, the Cataract at Aswan. On all these journeys she was never one to travel light, and it is interesting to glean from her own accounts what she actually packed.

In her memoir about helping her archaeological husband Max,
Come, Tell Me How You Live
, she recounts the humiliation of having to buy ‘O.S.’ clothes – ‘outsize’ – for her journey. She resorted to the ‘tropical department’, first for a sola topee (‘brown, white and patent’), though she is tempted by a double terai hat, which was available in pink. The double terai was a much esteemed traveller’s hat as it had a double skin, thus protecting your head from the sun. Being too large for sailing trousers or jodhpurs, Agatha plumped for plain coats and skirts made of shantung. This was a woven raw silk cloth, with a rough texture, hard wearing and favoured by the wives of empire builders. ‘I am transformed into a memsahib!’

Other specialised clothes would include a Burberry coat and skirt – most useful for the cold winter nights one can experience on the Nile.
This set of garments ‘unites the freedom of the upper part of a Norfolk jacket with expanding pleats, and the smartness below the waist of a skirted coat’. It was recommended for shooting, walking and golf – and Agatha was a keen golfer, especially in her youth. She had even tried surfing when, on a world tour with her first husband, she stopped in Hawaii. Strangely, she is probably the first Englishwoman ever to have stood up on a surfboard.

But there will be none of that on the sedate Nile cruise. She might include, again for the surprising cold of the Egyptian night, a pair of ladies’ fleeced knickers bought from Dickins and Jones. Agatha was a keen motorist and for wet weather included her motoring rainproof made of gabardine with a camel fleece lining.

She would have quite a few evening dresses for special occasions, and these would require the dress shield, or dress preserver – essential when few dresses were washable and dry cleaners might be few and far between. The dress shield went under the armpits and stopped the dress becoming drenched in smelly perspiration. It was especially useful for ballgowns. In this era before the widespread use of deodorants the smell of ladies’ perspiration was not considered offensive. Indeed in Agatha’s ball-going youth ‘gentlemen used to like what we called a “bouquet de corsage”’.

Then there were the accessories: hat guards, motor scarves, puggarees (hatbands for further sun-protection), night socks and night caps, garters and eyeglass cords, bootlaces and dressing-gown girdles; cork soles, belts, several fans from Liberty, two ‘housewives’ (handy collections of needles, thread and tiny scissors), hairbands, Indian gauze combinations, Milanese silk knickers, cream Japanese silk petticoats, linen knickers and a tea gown. Then there were a dozen fancy cambric handkerchiefs and a dozen bordered handkerchiefs with the monogram ‘A.M.’ and not ‘A.C.’.

Agatha hated zips but bought a zipped travelling bag: ‘life today is dominated and complicated by the remorseless zip’. In the trunk would also be several ‘fountain and stylographic pens’. Agatha always believed that a pen could work for years without giving trouble in England, but the moment you went abroad it would go on strike, ‘either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper’. She took just two pencils, as pencils are ‘fortunately not temperamental’.

Next would be not one but four wristwatches. One to wear, three to pack. The sandy winds that blow around ruins were deadly for an ordinary wristwatch of the 1920s and 1930s. She would reckon on a watch lasting a week at best.