Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (9 page)

A stuffed croc gracing a magician’s den is a familiar sight in many supernatural films or TV programmes. This derives from the magical and alchemical traditions of Egypt, themselves inheritors of the cult of Sobek. Most ‘magical’ practices are debased forms of some practical endeavour. There are convincing arguments that prayer forms were originally sophisticated bodily movements designed to achieve optimal mental and physical health, rather in the manner of tai chi. The cult of Sobek, as we have seen, most probably derives from a desire to placate the biggest predator on the block, and from a sensible strategy of observation and appeasement that is maintained by elevating its status to the supernatural and ritualistic.

That the Nile is supremely important can be judged by the fact that it has no god; Khnum is the local deity of the Nile at the first cataract, near Aswan in modern Egypt, a place favoured by François Mitterrand and the Aga Khan, not to mention Agatha Christie and Winston Churchill, as a place of perfect climate in winter. It was also traditionally the source of all ivory – hence Elephantine Island, where the great mounds of tusks coming out of Africa were stored before being despatched in barges down the Nile. In a sense the first cataract is the gateway to Egypt, the first place where the flood will be noticed – and on the flood rested the prosperity and health of the nation. Sobek was seen at certain times as a primeval creator god, the one pulling the strings. This almost certainly pre-dates the cult of Ra and the sun gods and the association of light with the monotheisms, because earth religions are almost always displaced by light religions as civilisation develops. I have seen a clear example of this in northern Borneo where I was shown, by a now converted (to Christianity) Lundaiya tribesman, a
crocodile-shaped mound where they used to worship (and hang the heads of their enemies). There were no crocodiles left in that region, if there had ever been; nevertheless the primal representative of the earth religion had held firm until the light religion of Christianity had replaced him.

A Nile crocodile can weigh up to a ton – the weight of a small car like a Honda Civic or a Ford Fiesta, but a Ford Fiesta can’t rise up nine feet on its back legs and tail, using the swinging tail to maintain buoyancy as it lunges upwards from the water, jaws snapping, jaws that have the crushing power of a machine press. People who jumped from boats into the lower branches of trees have been pulled from those trees even though they were more than their own height above the water. On land, say strolling along a riverine beach, one needs to be a fair distance from the shallows. A stick with eyes can lunge thirty feet up on to a beach from its submerged position. And they’ve been doing this a long time. Remains of
Homo habilis
have been found at the Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift Valley with tooth punctures from the Nile crocodile in their fossilised, million-year-old skulls.

The crocodiles – mother and father – will guard the nest until the piping of their young warns them to dig up the eggs to hatch. The mother will then scoop up the wriggling babies and carry them in a pouch in the bottom of her massive mouth. The babies are released in safe water and watched over for six to eight weeks. This is not a usual reptile strategy – where it is mostly a case of quantity over quality. If, over millennia, crocodiles which care for their young have outlasted those that simply have lots of eggs, then we must assume they are pretty good at it.

Crocs have huge mouths and are capable of over a ton of crushing power. However, the jaw-
opening
muscles are comparatively weak, allowing hunters (with more than a trace of Tarzan) the chance to hold the mouth shut until it is bound with rope. Crocs can’t chew – the side-to-side motion needed means that the straight crushing power would be weakened; instead they settle for tearing off chunks, violently shaking a victim to rip off a piece, or, with a large animal, spinning round and round to tear off a morsel. There are cases of a snatched human spinning with the crocodile and being disgustedly dumped, alive, by the croc who cannot remove anything to eat. Once a chunk has been ripped they adopt the characteristic posture of neck back, throw the bit up and gulp it down.

That the eyesight of a crocodile is paramount in its attacks is shown by the way they are caught. Herodotus wrote that mud applied to the eyes of a Nile croc would render it passive; this echoes modern hunting techniques where a sack is thrown, at night, over the eyes of a crocodile. This is its Achilles heel, so to speak, or seems to be, the beast remaining passive until it is bound up and captured. Why doesn’t it simply shake off the obstruction over its eyes? Like that other natural hunter – the falcon – it seems to switch off in darkness, accepting this as a signal to rest. Crocs have a third transparent eyelid, the nictitating membrane, that allows them to see clearly under water. Perhaps it is the presence of this third eyelid that has something to do with their passivity when deprived of any light. What is a fact is that this ability to see under water allows the croc to drown its victim and lodge it under a convenient rock and then return and feast on it when the meat has rotted down and become more pliable. A croc can routinely stay under for fifteen minutes during a struggle with a victim, and, if unstressed, for much longer – for hours in fact. There is one case of a crocodile remaining for eight hours in very cold water, which slowed its metabolism right down, allowing it to conserve oxygen.

Crocs love deep water since drowning is a preferred method of despatching a victim. That Hendri Coetzee was drowned is certain; his remains have sadly never been found.

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Croc yarns

Running water, over time, will make even a stone talk
. Ethiopian saying

Herodotus mentions a bird, the trochilus, which he relates is the only bird allowed near a basking croc. It enters the mouth of the giant beast and devours the leeches there. The bird has been identified with the Egyptian plover –
Pluvianus aegyptius
– the only member of that genus. Uniquely this plover has a spur on each shoulder, something like a vestigial claw and reminiscent of the pterodactyl; this, according to myth, was used to scratch the inside of the croc’s mouth should it forgetfully close its jaws on its helpful friend. Modern ornithologists are rather sniffy about the crocodile bird, or siksak as it is known along the Nile, though the reliable James Augustus St John, writing in 1840, relates,
‘it is very certain that the crocodile is rarely seen unattended by one or more of these birds’. Dr Livingstone, further south, reported that its name south of the Sahara was setula-tsipi, the ‘hammering iron’, on account of its tinc-tinc-tinc alarm call. He mentioned its affinity to the crocodile but never saw it enter a crocodilian mouth. Some accounts suggest it lives on the parasites on a crocodile’s back rather than in its mouth and that it is the alarm call that benefits the croc. Herodotus says that the Nile dwellers at Aswan, far from worshipping crocodiles as those lower down the Nile do, actually eat them. A piece of swine flesh is affixed to a hook and thrown into the middle of the river. Meanwhile, on the bank, a tethered hog is beaten with a bamboo rod until it squeals. The croc, confusing the two events, swallows the baited hook and is then drawn easily to the squealing hog. When it is near to the bank wet clay is slapped on both its eyes – rendering it quite docile, certainly passive enough to be killed without a fight. The famous Australian croc hunter Steve Irwin was fond of demonstrating just how easy it was to catch a croc by first dropping a jacket or cloth over the croc’s eyes before roping it. Without this precaution a croc will fight for its life.

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Death kiss of the Nile

The river flows all day, never waiting, but it still gives a share to each person
. Sudanese proverb

It’s been fun running through all the dramatic ways the natural world can do you in on the Nile, but we’ve been skirting the real killer, the banal killer: disease.

It has always been disease. Illness spread less by the water than by what lives in and around water made the Nile of 10,000 years ago an inhospitable place. Ancient man preferred the drier savannah that later became the Sahara Desert. The desert is preternaturally disease free. The sodden, marshy river: the opposite. As the weather changed the Nile became more hospitable. Yet it was still a major vector in spreading disease. Bugs, flies, spiders, mosquitoes, amoebas, parasites, worms, mites. Welcome to the dangerous micro-world of the natural Nile.

Think of the noise of two camp actors greeting, kissing air in the
vague vicinity of each other’s face – mbwa, mbwa. Now try and tinge it with horror and foreboding. Hard, eh? Yet never again would I hear that (until now) empty ritual with anything other than distinct apprehension. Father Oswald told me, ‘Beware the mbwa, mbwa.’ Father Oswald was a Spanish missionary working the Sudd swamp with the kind of infinite patience that is needed in Africa if you want to avoid drink or high blood pressure. He did not smile when I explained the joke, the kissing allusion. Mbwa, mbwa was serious business. It is a fly:
Simulium damnosum
, a fly that hovers over the river in clouds easily mistaken for the smoke of a burning tyre. In the Sudd and the upper reaches of the river towards Lake Victoria,
damnosum
damns all. Known locally as mbwa, the sound of kissing air, these gnats are really blackfly – with a mean bite that harbours an embryonic parasitic worm. The worm causes tumorous growths that can cause great pain, disfigurement and, in extreme cases, blindness. Father Oswald told me all river rafters should beware as the fly lays its eggs in water and the larvae attach themselves to the kind of rocks it’s handy to grab hold of in rapids and cataracts.

A benign cousin to
damnosum
inhabits the river beyond the Sudd, between the third and fourth cataracts in Sudan (a cataract is a rocky obfuscation, a short series of micro-ledgelike waterfalls across the river). This biting fly, onomatopoeically called nimiti, is designed to bite birds and donkeys – but men do just as well. It can, in its cloud-like swarms, invade the nose and eyes and ears, ‘like putting your head in stinging water’. To keep this pest at bay, the people of the river can be seen carrying the end of a smoking rope like a priest with his swinging censer, said Father Oswald.

When I became ill I was in Cairo. No flies or parasites were involved; I simply aged overnight about fifty years. Was it the swim, an incautious jump, slightly fortified by drink, from Zamalek Island in Cairo to a moored houseboat on the western shore of the river? I couldn’t be sure but I felt . . . very strange. Fragile, ninetyish. I felt my back might break if I bent too quickly or too far; even tying my shoelaces was an operation fraught with danger. My insides turned everything to water, river water perhaps. Had I swallowed anything in that innocuous splashing about that evening? You always do. I had friends who regularly swam in the Nile and never got sick. Fishermen and their kids do it all the time. And a sewage expert told me that apart from the heavy metals in the river it’s probably clean enough to drink, now that Cairo pumps
its raw sewage out into the desert down five-foot-diameter pipes. Probably? I wouldn’t drink Thames water either.

Maybe it was just a rare case of food poisoning (if you steer clear of Nile cruise boats in Aswan, it’s rarer in Egypt than in England, I’ve found). But maybe it was the river. The canals in Cairo look horrible – rimed with garbage, and used for washing knackered dray horses and donkeys – but the river always looks clean. You hardly ever see floating rubbish on it and the banks have less plastic flotsam than the sea. It looks like a clean river, and, because it is a fairly fast river – maybe 3mph midstream in Cairo – it remains a clean river.

The Nile floods and lies stagnant in pools, yet malaria does not and never has proliferated along its length. The reason is that silt-laden water is immune to the breeding of mosquitoes. In Bengal, when silt-laden irrigation was abandoned and irrigation by rainwater introduced, malaria proliferated. In areas where building proceeds apace – so-called New Cairo out in the Eastern Desert – there are many more mosquitoes than you find by the Nile. The stagnant pools on building sites and in newly built gardens are to blame.

The ancient Egyptians planted along the banks of the Nile
bersim
, or clover. Every cart you see trundling around Cairo picking up garbage or selling fruit has a sheaf of the stuff on the back – it’s the rocket fuel of a donkey-powered economy. It is also, like citronella, a mild mosquito repellent. And, just as importantly, it blooms repeatedly and can be cut repeatedly, and this action further keeps away mosquitoes from the ditches along the river that would otherwise be fertile breeding grounds. Some pharaonic cures – those involving goose excrement and turtles’ testicles, for example – run counter to modern notions of medicine. But other diktats from the palace still make sense: it was forbidden for people in public service to eat uncooked vegetables, another guard against the spread of disease through eating plants nurtured with nightsoil and watered with stagnant water.

We might mention here William Willcocks, the mastermind behind the great British dam, the forerunner of the high dam at Aswan. Willcocks was straight as a die and wholly honourable, a worker, a builder. He irrigated vast parts of India, Iraq and Egypt. He developed the grand plan for controlling the Nile in its entirety. And he spent the latter part of his life occupied not with what he had achieved but with the Pandora’s box he had opened in the form of spreading bilharzia and hookworm.

These diseases inhabited the canals he had made possible with perennial irrigation. With year-round water in the canals, the level of groundwater, and of cesspools, rose; this enabled the debilitating hook-worm to prosper. And as a kind of insult-to-injury coda, when the high dam was built the reduction in silt travelling downstream meant that mosquitoes could proliferate again.

Bilharzia is another nasty parasite, this one spread by a snail. The snail cannot live in flowing water, it needs a sultry ditch, a lake, a dull pond to make its mark, to increase unto the next generation. It is recorded even in the time of the Pharaohs that swift water was needed to avoid the disease.