Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

Very quickly the river loses its pace and begins to resemble the intestines of some giant beast. The banks of the river are scrubby savannah – thick patches of low trees. As it widens and loops the river’s speed of flow drops so low it would be very hard to say which direction it is flowing in. As with a patient in a coma only the most advanced equipment can detect if it is alive or not. We are entering the world’s largest swamp – the Sudd.

  Solitude of a stifling kind settles over the Sudd country. Here the Nile is almost lost in its wanderings and in the absorbent mulch of the world’s biggest marsh. In previous versions of the Nile, a million years ago, the Sudd would have been the true end of this part of the river, yet now it is only a hindrance, a massive hindrance, but one that the river finally overcomes.

  The river widens but keeps to its banks, even in flood times, the excess simply absorbed by the land. The floating islands are a sign of further swamps ahead. From Bor to Lake No, 300 miles north, swampland predominates. Flying low over it in a six-seater Cessna the red-brown Nile seems vaguely undulating, held together by white slime. Backwaters, pools and marshes unravel the river into shoals of heaving papyrus and elephant grass. Nourished by boggy soil, grasses predominate in the swamps.

  That the Sudd was not really conquered until 1900 is easily understood when the process of travel within the swamp is revealed. Though the first water crossing of the barriers of island, mud and marsh was made in the 1880s, it was the British in 1900 who decided to make it properly navigable. The process was laborious in the extreme. The first problem was to identify which part of the vegetation blocking the river was part of the bank and which part of a moveable island. If island, stakes would be driven in and attached by cables to the steamer, which would then reverse downstream ripping away the barrier of foliage. Like a dentist pulling teeth the blockages were torn away piece by piece. Sometimes islands could be burned first, then the roots would be hacked away by a hundred natives waist deep in water heaving with mattocks and spades. Five miles of swamp took three months to clear. It took five steamers and 800 Nubian prisoners – all surrounded by warlike tribes, mosquitoes and fever. This gigantic task of clearage has ever since always been under threat. The true path of the river always changes and still becomes blocked. In the 1990s, during the second civil war in Sudan the swamp again became impassable for months at a time.

  We fly over the white and grey, somehow dilapidated-looking towns and villages, but they are as nothing compared to the relentless pull north of the winding river. This is the defining feature of the region. Around each village and town there is nothing like the amount of vegetation we see along the river.

  From Bor northwards for 300 miles papyrus and elephant grass dominate the swamps. Papyrus is the Nile plant par excellence – it provided the first boats and the first paper. On the walls of tombs papyrus boats are depicted, similar to those still used on the Nile. The virtues of papyrus are recorded also on ancient pieces of papyrus mummified by the desert air at Oxyrhynchus and Fayoum. Papyrus in the Sudd grows over eighteen feet tall in places, forming dark-green forests, the younger lower plants a paler shade from lack of light. The papyrus rustles and creaks, forcing itself right into the Nile at the water’s edge.

  Elephant grass, with its stems like bamboo, looks much stiffer and less graceful than papyrus. It has a brown feathery crown and pointed upright leaves. Another grass is the ‘um-soof’ with its green hairy fur; its name means ‘mother of wool’. Towering above all of them is the ambatch, a fibrous pithy plant twenty feet high and six inches thick. Often it is festooned with huge blue-flowering convolvulus. With its tiny thorns it isn’t so easy to work as papyrus, but like papyrus this is a great material for making rafts.

  We swoop on over the flames of oil platforms – the Sudd was drilled for oil by Chevron in the 1970s, but ongoing troubles in the region have always made it a hard place to maintain production.

  After the swamps, after the oil-bearing swamps of the Sudd, the Nile begins again with a no, a giant no, Lake No in fact. This is the first lagoon after the great marsh. It is really the beginning of a new epoch in the Nile’s existence. From now on it is downhill all the way. Almost.

  Here, in the south of Sudan, around latitude 10 degrees North, the Nile regains a firm bed, which it keeps until it reaches the delta in Egypt. There are no more swamps. This is the region where the Bahr el-Ghazal – ‘the island sea’ – meets the Bahr el-Jebel – ‘the mountain sea’ – at the western end of Lake No. Though the Ghazal is the tributary and the Jebel the original continuation of the Nile, the Ghazal is a mighty river in its own right, dumping, on its earlier path through the swamps, as much water as the Nile itself. Another tributary is the Bahr el-Zeraf – ‘the giraffe sea’ – which, seen from a plane as it enters the Nile, looks like some malignant disease eating away at the land. This is the furthest point that anyone from antiquity reached on the Nile. The Emperor Nero’s men knew this point, as did, most probably, Greeks of an earlier age. Seneca wrote about Nero and the two centurions he sent up the Nile in the first century AD. He reports that they said on their return, ‘we came to immense marshes, the outcome of which neither the inhabitants knew nor can anyone hope to know, in such a way are the plants entangled with the waters, not to be struggled through on foot or in a boat, because the marsh, muddy and blocked up, does not admit any craft unless it is small and containing one person’. That this is a precise description of the Sudd swamp and its rafts of papyrus can hardly be disputed. It is remarkable that this feat of exploration was not to be replicated for nearly 2,000 years.

  The Nile now enters the dry lands, and it will never leave them. The earth is red laterite, and when it is damaged by vehicles you can see the scars scorching through the land and along the river banks. At the point where the Nile at last turns north again, the Sobat enters into it. The first of the Ethiopian rivers, it carries silt down from the south-western highlands. It is a powerful river supplying 14 per cent of the water carried by the White Nile to Khartoum. In this stretch the river is not deep – perhaps fifteen feet, though in places as little as six. On either side the land flattens out and acacia replaces papyrus. There are no rapids in this section of 750 miles – from Lake No to Khartoum – and low undulations on either side protect the land from floods and swamps, holding the stream within firm banks. There are eleven varieties of acacia growing on the plain along this stretch of the river and traditionally the Shilluk made everything from boats to waterwheels, firewood, tanning materials and gum from these trees that stand like black skeletons stark against the midday sun of the plains.

  This is the point where invading Asia meets escaping Africa along the Nile. The conical huts of the Dinka and Shilluk give way to the square houses of the Arabised northerners. Donkeys and camels walk by the Nile now and people cover their heads and bodies almost completely. The hippo becomes rarer and rarer. At Kosti there is the third bridge over the Nile since its beginning 2,000 miles away.

  It is here that the migrating birds of the north spend their winter: the swallow, the increasingly rare corncrake, storks, orioles, terns, snipe and lapwing. What is most strange is that the Egyptian swallow flies only a short length down the Nile. The ones furthest south are those who have come from the furthest north, and this is true of the cranes and storks who migrate further than the native species, as if this travel were necessary for some reason other than mere survival, as they too, like our ancestors, sought to penetrate as far along the Nile as possible.

  We arrive at Khartoum and observe the relentless spread of the city. If we are lucky and are hovering overhead sometime in summer we will catch a glimpse of the birth of the Red Nile, the powerful miscegenation of White and Blue, the Blue Nile so overwhelmingly powerful at this time that it punches the old White Nile back upstream. The silt – orange, red, pink depending on the exact conditions – pours into the widened river as it flows on towards the cataracts of northern Sudan.

  From above, rapids look like drippings of toothpaste on a gr
ey floor. By some curious optical illusion the river is stopped, freeze-framed, as you watch from a small plane window. Down on the ground the noise is deafening.

  We pass the 200 or more mysterious steep-sided Pyramids of Meroe, home to the ‘Black’ Pharaohs, who lived here from 800 BC to around AD 230. From on high these Pyramids look like a series of diagonal crosses; when the plane banks you get a side-view and they resemble somehow the tiny wooden houses left over from an old-fashioned Monopoly game.

  The Nile reaches Lake Nasser. One of the world’s largest man-made lakes – over 250 miles long – it takes an hour to fly over in a twin-prop Beechcraft. All that water! And so hypnotically blue, patterned with algal green around the shores. The lake makes mini-fjords along its banks, the dry valleys or wadis it has filled up. Surprisingly, for a lake less than fifty years old, there are already some sandy beaches developing along its edges.

  We swoop over the two dams, missing the ruins of Philae, camouflaged in their rocky brown from above. The agricultural benefits of the Nile are now apparent: bright-green fields about the darker-green belts of densely planted palm trees. Everything looks tilled, cared for, and then, without warning, it is yellow, pure sand – the desert. The life-giving river is never more apparent than when seen from above with its fragile fertile margins clinging to each side.

  We fly over the great temple at Luxor and cross the small dam, or barrage, at Asyut. The river widens and narrows for no apparent reason, waxing and waning. At Cairo there is a kind of explosion. The city is everywhere, the river dwarfed but still vital, still pumping away like the main artery it is. We cross the first dam ever built on the Nile – the barrage at the delta, which sits at the fork of the two main branches. The delta spreads out around us. It is the original of all deltas, shaped as it is like a Greek letter ‘D’.

  Finally the sea. The white line of surf appears stationary, like the rapids we saw earlier. Dots, or rather people, on the beach. The sea greenish – lighter now that it is denied the silt that used to flood into it, feeding the great schools of sardines that are now all but gone. The river spreads into the sea, its home, and is lost.

  3 • A river of change

  The person whom God has cursed trades butter in the hot season and salt in the rainy season. Sudanese proverb

  So, been there, done that. Having flown the Nile, skimmed its surface, it’s time to dig deeper, unearth what we can. For a start, the most interesting thing, I think, about the Nile is how young it is, how much it has changed, and continues to change. In a sense, all rivers are old, and the Nile is, in parts, an old river; but it is also, geologically, a young river. The Nile’s earliest valleys are millions of years old. Yet, in its current path, the Nile is shockingly new (in geological terms): only 12,500 years old. It is, above all else, a river that has been through many transformations and incarnations.

  If there is one idea I want to keep in mind when thinking about the Nile it is the utterly simple and all too slippery notion of change. The Nile has changed; it changes things. When people come into contact with it they change – by moving along it, settling by its side, inventing irrigation, writing, forming an embryonic civic society, or using it as an excuse to invade, convert, plunder, rule. The Nile changes; it is a catalyst for change. Is it too general a concept to be of any use? We’ll see.

  What remains? After the red river has flooded, what remains? The land, the black land. The land, black with silt, the nutrient-heavy silt that allowed ancient Egypt to flourish. In the water, suspended and moving, it appears red, like blood; again like blood, when it dries and congeals and ages it becomes black. There is always a risk with running such metaphors too far and for too long; but they seem to hold, and in the Nile’s case, with a river so vast in scope and length, it was the only way, with such flimsy strategies, that I could sort my own version of the nutrient silt, the mountains of research, story, history, science, myth and fiction that were piling up around me in my Nileside study. As I sat in my little brightly lit room at number 32, Road 100, just up from the gas station at Maadi I made sure, when I looked up from the computer, that I had a view of the Nile, an uninterrupted view. I took down the curtains, as they were of heavy material that intruded into my vision. The blank square was better, even better when I opened the metal-framed window. The river looked like a small swatch of greenish brown trapped in the gap between two buildings. One building was very high, over twenty storeys; it had been built only a few years previously. The other, suggestively I felt in the current mad phase of urban development in Egypt, was a home for the mentally ill. Often I heard them screaming and yelling. Well, once a week or so. I asked my wife about that and she said placidly, ‘It means one of them has escaped.’ ‘You mean it’s not the mad people who are screaming?’ ‘No, it’s the nurses.’

  The first building that blocks or curtails my view is, as I mentioned, a new block – for the newly rich, those richer than myself presumably. The proof being: they live nearer to the Nile than I. (Proximity to the river has always been a priority in Egypt, but the injection of high finance and the profits of real estate have elevated this concern to the same levels of hysteria you find in London and Paris with the Thames and the Seine. Strangely, New Yorkers seem still to prefer Central Park to the Hudson; tainted by commerce still perhaps.)

  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 superstit
ious 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.