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

by Twigger, Robert

  Part Five

  THE NILE DAMNED

  Elephants, exploration and Agatha Christie’s trunk

  1 • The discovery of Mougel Bey

  Do not fear the person who talks much. Eritrean proverb

  Napoleon long gone, Muhammad Ali slowly fulfilled the impatient Frenchman’s dreams and dammed, or barraged, the Nile. The year he started operations was 1840 – and this initial barrage was not completed until twenty years later in 1860, and was not functional until 1889. It was a damn slow dam. But the act of damming the Nile was a turning point. Man, at last, knew, or thought he knew, that he could conquer the river.

  The desire to dam the Nile started, as we’ve seen, with the Pharaohs, peaked first with the mad plans of Hakim the Caliph and Ibn al-Haytham, then receded until the arrival of Napoleon, who immediately saw the utility of damming the river, but never got round to fitting this enormous plan in with all his other enormous plans. There is a strong correl ation between big dams and megalomaniacs. Just as one may conquer countries to satisfy a desire for extending the dominion of the self, so one can conquer nature, most obviously by stopping up its greatest and most powerful rivers.

  That Muhammad Ali should have sought to dam the Nile is, in a way, entirely predictable. That his heir across the centuries, Gamel Abdul Nasser, should also seek to dam the Nile was also entirely unsurprising. But, to succeed, both attempts needed European help.

  The barrage was the first dam across the Nile. But was it a dam or even a barrage? For its first fifty years it was neither, having failed to hold back water without ominous cracks appearing. So, reluctantly, its builders asked for its gates to be left fully open. From then until the early 1880s it served as a picturesque and very useful bridge across the Nile.

  The Frenchman Linant Bey was the first European engineer enlisted to get the project off the ground. In fact it was he who saved the Pyramids as we know them. We’ve already alluded to this fact, but it deserves repetition: without Linant Bey there would be no existing seventh wonder of the world. Just as the Taliban put an end to the Great Buddhas, so Muhammad Ali desired to replace the greatest works of the past with one of the present that was even greater. We can imagine his joy when he realised he could kill two birds with one stone (or many), kill off the competition provided by the Pyramids and use their stone to build something even bigger and better. But unlike the great pyramid builders he was in a hurry. Perhaps this is how megalomania always reveals itself in the end – its practitioners are always in too much of a hurry to achieve their ends. Napoleon’s hurry to conquer the world resulted in a failure to build up a large enough navy – a prerequisite of world conquest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hitler’s hurry to replicate Napoleon in Russia resulted in an unwinnable war on two fronts. Though speed brings many benefits – Napoleon’s rapid marches and Hitler’s blitzkriegs are testament to that – in the end both of those leaders overextended themselves and ground to a halt. But the pyramid builders just worked as meticulously as ever, day in, day out, until their great monuments were finished. What a torture to build the Pyramids in a hurry! But slowly, painstakingly, that made it all possible.

  Linant Bey, though eager to build the dam – actually two: one on the Rosetta Nile branch and one on the Damietta branch – was not so eager to go down in history as the man who levelled the Pyramids (though the mad Caliph Hakim came close). But Muhammad Ali ordered him to do so. Linant then did what anyone under the command of a madman does, he took the job seriously, so seriously that he felt compelled to make a comparison of the costs and time – time being the most important and persuasive factor here – involved in a pyramid demolition versus cutting the stone in an ordinary quarry closer to the Nile and floating it in the correct size downriver. The savings in time and money were so great that reluctantly Muhammad Ali agreed to keep the Pyramids.

  But something of his earlier enthusiasm had left him, as if, deprived of the chance to make his mark doubly – through gigantic destruction and construction – he was depriving himself of a motivation he sorely needed. With this failing interest in the project, Linant was soon to be pensioned off and his place taken by another French enthusiast – Charles Mougel, soon to be Mougel Bey.

  Mougel Bey arrived in Egypt to help extend the docks of Alexandria. His success at this job led to him taking over the dam project. Mougel Bey improved on Linant’s plans and moved the barrage a fraction upstream so that both branches could be closed by the same structure. But still he was subject to the same pressure that Linant had endured. At one point Muhammad Ali ordered that 1,300 cubic yards of concrete be poured every day – regardless of whether it be needed or not. Now that is the sign of a megalomaniac.

  By the time Muhammad Ali died in 1849 the barrage was not completely finished, though they had been building it since 1843. Already it was showing cracks and springing leaks. Ali’s successors Abbas and then Ismail could not be persuaded to renovate those parts that had been built too quickly. Utterly exhausted and impoverished, Mougel Bey had neither the money nor the inclination to move back to France. He had married and produced children, and still his barrage had never been tested. But so much time had passed that times were, indeed, changing. When Egypt defaulted on its loans in 1876, Britain assumed a new and powerful role in its affairs, ousting the influence of the French.

  Egypt, under Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail, had spent so much on building the next big thing – the Suez Canal, as well as rebuilding Cairo on European lines – that it had become bankrupted. Britain exchanged debt for control of the Suez Canal. When there was a popular uprising in 1882 that threatened British expatriates, Britain shelled Alexandria and more or less assumed control of the country.

  The British already had big plans of their own for the Nile and the first of them was to dam it properly. Out with the old and in with the new; Colonel Colin Scott-Moncrieff, fresh from the Punjab, went out to the barrage to see if, as all the Egyptian staff recommended, it should be abandoned and a new system, perhaps using pumps, constructed to aid canal irrigation.

  What struck Scott-Moncrieff as he gazed at the forty-year-old structure was how well it was designed and how well it was sited, and this aroused his curiosity as to why it had failed. He found one answer in the hastily constructed floor that sealed the area around the dam’s base to stop seepage – all those tons of concrete had been washed clean of their lime before it had properly set, leaving a partially porous floor, the source of ‘springs’ in the dam further down. Iron grilles set into the base of the sluices created turbulence that further damaged the base of the dam; some of the structure leaked but could be fixed with a coffer dam. In short, there was no earthly reason not to proceed and make the barrage work properly.

  It was only after he had started work that Scott-Moncrieff heard a rumour – that the creator of the dam was dying in a Cairo slum. Taking time off from regrouting the barrage and building temporary earth dams to allow access to the dam floor, the Colonel went in search of the dam’s chief engineer. What he found was a sad sight: the former top engineer lying on a ratty divan in the winding streets behind Midaq Alley – the market area of Khan al-Khalili, later made famous by the novelist Naguib Mahfouz (who moved out when he was twelve). Mougel Bey was too poor to afford meat more than twice a month, his health had suffered and his eldest son was gravely ill.

  It is to Scott-Moncrieff’s credit that while working on the dam he tirelessly petitioned the British government in Cairo to provide Mougel Bey with a pension commensurate with his great achievement as the first man to dam the Nile. Realising that Mougel Bey also needed psychological help, Scott-Moncrieff regularly visited to ask his opinion of improvements that he might make. He was said to have treated Mougel with great deference, reporting progress on the barrage to the broken old man ‘as if to his chief’.

  On the day of a great test which the barrage had passed with flying colours, Sir Colin (he was knighted in 1887) hastened to the old man’s alley dwelling. There he
found a crowd of mourners – Mougel Bey’s son had died that morning. The old man was speechless with grief, rocking back and forth in a stupor. Sir Colin went to leave but was encouraged forward to make his condolences known. When he leant towards the old man he could think of nothing to say so he whispered the latest news: ‘The barrage is holding up three metres of water.’

  The result was unexpected, but illuminating of the kind of man who takes on the biggest projects. Mougel Bey rose to his feet and flung his arms wide in a gesture of exultation. ‘Vous entendez, mes amis!’ he cried. ‘Trois mètres! Trois mètres!’

  2 • Important information on irrigation (which can be skipped if necessary)

  Oh salt! For your own sake be tasty – or they will call you a stone and throw you away! Sudanese proverb

  Since the beginning of time agriculture in Egypt largely depended on a system of basin irrigation. The land was flooded in August when the Nile inundated the land. The great lakes formed by the flood and held in position by a series of dykes and raised levees were soaked for six months, allowing the all-important sediment to manure the land. Around November the waters had largely receded and the land was sown with a winter crop of wheat, barley, beans, clover – known as bersim and the standard fodder of all the donkeys plodding the streets of Cairo. Fenugreek too was planted in winter, as were lentils. Bersim, which was fast growing, could be cropped several times, but the other winter plantings yielded only one crop a year on the flooded land.

  Along the edge of the river, and needing extensive irrigation, a summer crop could be grown – rice, indigo, sugar cane and cotton were all grown in summer. Requiring an ox-powered sakia (waterwheel), or a swinging lever-and-bucket (shadouf), these crops were labour intensive with their need for constant water.

  One more crop could be grown when the Nile was rising, and this also required extensive irrigation, largely through canals connected to the Nile. In the reign of Muhammad Ali one of the first steps taken to increase crop yields was through the enforced digging of more canals. The so-called corvée of forced labour was not unpaid, though it was highly unpopular. Men were taken from their families, or else their families accompanied them, living off their meagre pay of a piastre a day plus a food ration of cereals and meat twice a week. As the number of canals increased so did the requirement to maintain them, also carried out by the corvée. This habit of employing farmers to dig and dredge provided a trained and experienced workforce for when the Nile barrage and later the Suez Canal came to be built using the corvée system.

  The Pyramids had been built using the same system – not slavery exactly, but not freedom either, a kind of focused effort possible only because of the holiday allowed by the Nile after its flood. Without the flood these great strivings of humanity would never have occurred, the Nile goading men to greater and greater efforts.

  A corvée has the potential of an army, albeit as an organisation dedicated to construction, to do something for the common good. An army too can protect, and does something for the common good that way. But we have got ahead of ourselves. The corvée provided Muhammad Ali with a new and compelling idea. He built an army to surpass the illiterate turf cutters: he formed a gigantic robber band to go pillaging far to the south of Egypt, eating up the Nile as they went. Their announced mission: to bring peace . . .

  3 • Control through terror

  He who refuses all advice will still take advice from Satan.

  Nubian proverb

  In 1820 Muhammad Ali sent his son to the Sudan to pacify the unruly southern tribes – in reality to take control of the lucrative African Nile trade routes. Accompanying the troops was his brother-in-law, an administrator known as the Defterdar who was greatly feared and loathed for his immense cruelty. Such was the barbarism of his acts it was a relief for the people to embrace a rebel leader calling himself the Mahdi who promised to rid Sudan of the rapacious Turk (which would result eventually in the killing of General Gordon, the last representative of the British–Turkish–Egyptian government of the Sudan).

  In one account, the Defterdar received a poor man whose sheep had been stolen by a Turkish soldier and who had been verbally abused into the bargain. Seeking redress from the Defterdar he had to wait as the evil tyrant caught several flies, snatching them from the air; it was his favourite pastime. After hearing the case the Defterdar exploded with rage: ‘How dare you bring such a trifling case before me? You will go before the kadi for such insolence!’ The poor man thought for a moment that at last he might achieve justice, for kadi is the Arabic name for a judge. But the Defterdar’s kadi was a cannon parked behind his divan. The man was strapped across its barrel and blown to bits for daring to complain.

  A man struck another man in the market and was brought before the Defterdar. ‘Which hand did you strike with?’ he was asked. ‘My right hand.’ To show what happened to people who take the law into their own hands the Defterdar had the skin of the man’s palm removed down to the ligaments. It was done scientifically with a small machine designed by the Defterdar himself. When the man screamed with pain as this atrocity was committed he was held down and his tongue was cut out for daring to rebuke the Defterdar.

  On the feast day of Bairam it is customary to be given presents by one’s employer. One feast day a score of the Defterdar’s grooms decided that if they asked for something en masse they would receive it. Each kissed their lord’s hand and asked for a pair of shoes for their naked feet. The next day each was given a pair of iron shoes which were nailed to the feet.

  In the end Muhammad Ali Pasha grew weary of hearing such tales in his court. He ordered that his monstrous son-in-law be poisoned with henbane. (Symptoms: twitching, dimness of vision, stupor, intermittent pulse, coma, death. Cure: stomach pump or emetic, a tiny hit of belladonna, mustard plasters, strong coffee.) Ah, poison and the Nile – one liquid supplies life, the other certain death. The order was quickly carried out and there was not the usual manoeuvring to avoid being the one who charged the cup with death’s liquid instrument.

  4 • The source code

  Though the hyena eats dark meat its dung is white. Ethiopian proverb

  But the Nile, the whole Nile, the full Nile, the Red Nile south of Egypt had been awakened. It would never be silent again. Its call could never now be ignored. But in 1840 the dying old Albanian sent another expedition further south, in search of the source of the Nile. He had succumbed at last to the dreams he had avoided all his practical life. It was this expedition, and the subsequent book by one of its European members, Ferdinand Werne (its leader was the Circassian officer Suliman Kashef), that fired interest in solving ‘the Nile problem’ – in other words, to find the source, once and for all, conquer the river and so control it. Werne, a German medical doctor, and his book are mentioned in Jules Verne’s 1863 book Five Weeks in a Balloon. Given that Verne’s book was a bestseller for many years, it would be like having a travel book referenced in a book by Frederick Forsyth or even J. K. Rowling. Despite being very definitely not on the map, such references made sure that the idea of the Nile was very much on people’s minds. John Petherick, Burton, Baker and others almost certainly read Werne’s book. Petherick tricked natives by placing gunpowder in a pipe so that it exploded by ‘magic’. He learnt this trick either from Werne’s book or from the crew of Werne’s boat whom he was able to meet later in Khartoum.

  Werne’s work, Expedition to Discover the Sources of the White Nile, has an even stronger vein of bigotry than is usual in nineteenth-century travel books: ‘The complete depravity of the Asiatic world, even in the lifeless and powerless form of a mass dissolved in corrupt fermentation, always effervesces strongly into cruelty with the wide-spread barbarians of the East, and displays itself in bestial vices, to the disgrace of mankind and scorn of the sacred bond of nations. A truly savage nature is theirs . . .’ But this dislike of Asia is turned as much on his Turkish companions in exploration as it is, as might be expected, on the African tribes they meet. Indeed Werne is observan
t and even sympathetic. Here he describes Capitan Selim (the boat’s commander), distributing gifts: ‘No beads are given gratis; the poor people must run, make the Turk laugh first, and give them entertainment, before it is determined to throw on shore these glass bits of paste, though Capitan Selim possesses an enormous stock of them, and then this generosity is only for the sake of seeing the bustle and noise . . .’ When he observes some Dinka dancing he writes, ‘the men shake their chests with such agility and force, as I had never witnessed in the dances of the Arabs. How inferior all our gymnastics are to the natural nimbleness, and lion and tiger-like flexibility of these freely developed limbs!’

  Werne notes that among the Shilluks who inhabit the sides of the ‘White River’, as the Nile is known, there are some who prefer to despatch prisoners with a knobkerry or club rather than a spear: they ‘beat them to death like a dog with the hassaie’. Only the King kills prisoners using a spear, which he does personally, without ceremony, while seated under a huge tree. There, we discover, he passes judgement with a heavy spear in his hand and ‘assumes a very angry look’. Perhaps the look frightens them. Already the expedition is getting nervous.

  Werne’s expedition with Kashef and Capitan Selim is really a turning point of Nile exploration. It is the first expedition where the shock value of firearms is fully realised. Werne plans another expedition with just two assistants who, if fully armed, would be strong enough to intimidate even a vast crowd of the natives. It will be Stanley and Frederick Lugard who will finally bring this bloodthirsty dream to fruition.