Burton and Speke naturally had different theories about where exactly the mountains were. It took the superhuman efforts of Stanley, however, finally to identify their true position.
Burton rightly pointed out the many holes in Speke’s argument for Lake Victoria being the source of the Nile, or even being one lake and not many, but he did not, after the RGS had backed Speke’s expedition, seek to prove his own theories on the ground. This was left to Stanley, who in his incredible 1874–6 expedition circumnavigated Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, thus proving that Speke’s inspired guess about the source was correct. The geography hinted at by Ptolemy’s map of the Nile’s source was proved to be substantially right. Only one thing remained – where and what were the Mountains of the Moon? In 1876 Stanley’s able assistant Frank Pocock claimed that he saw white-topped mountains through the mist as they camped near Lake Edward, which connected with Lake Albert to form a major reservoir of mountain water that entered the White Nile. But it would take until the end of the disastrous 1887–9 Emin Pasha expedition for the Mountains of the Moon to be properly discovered.
Emin Pasha was a German who pretended to be a Turk. Stanley was a Welshman who pretended to be an American. Emin Pasha was appointed to run the Equatorial area of Sudan, a replacement for General Gordon. Though he had left behind a wife and children in Germany, Emin Pasha had reinvented himself as a man of science and learning. When Gordon – who was now in charge of the whole of Sudan – refused to evacuate Khartoum he was overrun by the dervish army of the Mahdi. A dervish is, ordinarily, a Muslim seeker after truth, a kind of would-be mystic. Dervishes who have found what they seek become Sufis, and the whole of North Africa and Arabia is host to many different groupings of Sufis and dervishes. In the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Sufi orders provided moderate Islamic resistance to the extreme Saudi-influenced and -funded Islamists known as Selafis. So in general they are a force for good. However, in nineteenth-century Sudan the word ‘dervish’ became misapplied to Islamic fanatics – who we might call jihadists today. They allowed themselves to be whipped into a frenzy of anti-European sentiment by their leader, the ‘mad Mahdi’. These ‘dervishes’ became the core of the army which then persuaded local tribes to instigate a national rebellion.
Emin Pasha was sufficiently far south to be out of reach of the Mahdi’s supporters. Moving his Egyptian and European staff and army further south, Emin Pasha took to patrolling Lake Tanganyika in a steam boat. He also sent mixed messages of despair to the British government. In fact Emin Pasha was a great fool, something Stanley discovered only when he had spent a year trying to rescue him.
The British, anxious that they should not have another Gordon-type disaster on their hands, were only too pleased when Stanley was recommended to stage a relief expedition. Perhaps it was the semi-official nature of the expedition, or the fact that it would be transporting a large quantity of arms and ammunition to the embattled Emin Pasha – whatever the reason, Stanley departed from his usual practice of employing men of a lower social status than himself, people he could dominate totally. Instead he engaged several British army officers and sons of the moneyed classes. The decision was to prove a terrible mistake. When the expedition was forced to divide in two, the so-called rear column commanded by a Major Edmund Barttelot spiralled into a jungle-induced anomie and despair. The young aristocrats and soldiers beat their native servants mercilessly. All of them had native mistresses, a practice Stanley disagreed with.
Then things took an even more macabre turn when James S. Jameson, an heir to the Jameson whiskey family in Ireland, paid for a young female slave who was then given to cannibals to be cooked and eaten as he sketched the whole proceedings. Stanley could not believe this had taken place, but when he finally relieved the rear column he was able to open the now dead Jameson’s personal box, to find the drawings he had made. This, and the charges of murder and brutality brought against the other officers under his command, were to ruin Stanley’s reputation for ever. He was known as Mata Bulair, ‘the breaker of rocks’, because of his selfless work alongside native road-builders during his work establishing trading posts in the Congo, and this epithet took on a more sinister meaning when the ghastly events of the Emin Pasha expedition were revealed. Stanley, for all his obvious gifts, was fatally poor at judging the characters of those above him on the social scale. He was repeatedly duped by the psychopathic King Leopold of Belgium, he was tricked by the cunning adventurer Pierre de Brazza, and when presented with feeble specimens of the ruling classes assumed they would live up to their public school rhetoric of honour and duty.
Once Emin Pasha was contacted, it transpired that he wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to be rescued or not. Certainly, the amount of supplies and ammo brought by Stanley was pitifully low after all the depredations the expedition had suffered. Indeed it was Emin Pasha who had to feed Stanley’s men after they had been living for months by foraging in the Ituri Forest. But Emin Pasha’s hold on his men was more fragile than his sensitive ego cared to admit. When stragglers failed to keep up with the expedition he would not order them to do so. When his men openly revolted he did nothing to quell the rebellion. In the end, though, he did leave, along with the remaining members of his embryonic ‘government’ of Equatorial Sudan.
From Sam Baker to Gordon to Emin Pasha – an explorer, a soldier and a scientist, all defeated in the end by the country and its conditions. By the time they reached the Mountains of the Moon, Stanley could barely walk a hundred yards. The thousand-person-strong expedition crossed the Semliki river in three canoes – it took a day and a half, which was fast going, despite an attack by fifty members of the Warasura who killed two of Stanley’s men. The constant attritional warfare Stanley had suffered since leaving the lower reaches of the Congo now ceased. The people around Lake Edward were routinely oppressed by the Warasura and they welcomed Stanley’s column with ample gifts of food: ‘Not a bead or yard of cloth was demanded from us.’ The explorer established the Semliki’s source in Lake Edward, and since the Semliki fed Lake Albert it meant that the Ruwenzoris were one of the ultimate sources of the Nile – just as Ptolemy’s map had predicted. If Burton had not been so keen to shoehorn Lake Tanganyika into the role that Lake Albert played, he might not have exposed himself to being so wrong about the Nile’s source. In any case, Stanley had sewn it all up: the Nile really was solved – as far as the geographers were concerned.
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 • 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 E
quatorial 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 • 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.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 41
