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

by Twigger, Robert

  When a hippo turns red you really need to take care.

  That the ancient Egyptians depicted Set, the god of storms, the desert and chaos, as a red hippo suggests they knew about the so called ‘red sweat’ of the hippopotamus. As humans do, the hippo sweats during the heat of the day, but, unlike us, also when he – or she – is angry. And unlike any other animal studied the hippo even sweats under water. The red sweat has been shown to be both antimicrobial and UV protecting – a combination suncream and antiseptic, Savlon meets Soltan – and it is effective. Hippos do not have the scales of many water dwellers (in fact they share a common ancestor with whales and porpoises), and the many cuts and abrasions they endure heal remarkably quickly despite constant immersion in mud and water. According to Kimiko Hashimoto and Yoko Saikawa, who devoted an admirable seven years to studying the red sweat of the hippopotamus, the active ingredients in the sweat have been named as a combination of hipposudoric and norhipposudoric acids. These acids suffuse the red secretion which turns brown as it gradually dries.

  The other ancient Egyptian god represented by the hippo is Taweret, ‘the great goddess’, who appears as a pregnant female – often, interestingly, with a crocodile on her back.

  It is easy to mistake a pod of hippos for something else. I once saw what I was sure was a grey rock. In fact it was a pod of hippos in a circle with their heads on the inside of the wheel. Even at a hundred yards their line of backsides looked just like the rounded limestone boulders of the upper Nile – until they heard the splashing of our oars and came swimming over to investigate. Hippos swim at 5mph so a kayaker can outpace them, but it’ll be a close-run thing. If you are in a raft it is best to travel close to the bank even though that could be seen as an incursion into a bull’s territory. The reasoning is that even if the boat is battered on the river side you can jump off on to the land and beat a hasty retreat while the hippo eats your rubber raft. But if the craft is upset midstream the hippo is quite capable of taking enraged chunks out of your splashing body. And unlike the crocodile the hippo can chew.

  In a strange couple of incidents, Diana Tilden-Davis, a South African former beauty queen, was attacked by a hippo in the Okuvango swamp in 2007 only two weeks after another woman (on her honeymoon) had been killed. Ms Tilden-Davis survived but was still on crutches two years later. Both these attacks took place at the end of the dry season when water levels were low and food scarce. This is when males traditionally are most aggressive. If one sticks to deeper water and wetter conditions an attack is less likely.

  Hippos often skulk in thickets during the day, and get aggressive if surprised, so it’s best to avoid such places. The oxpecker bird has a distinctive alarm call – if you hear it there may well be hippos about.

  If a hippo does attack, making a noise or clapping your hands is of no use at all. This is a creature that can break a crocodile’s back in one bite. It has no fear. Your best bet is to climb a tree or hide behind a termite mound. A big termite mound.

  8 • The biggest killer

  Fighting a leopard is learned by watching the person who deals with them most: an owner of goats. Sudanese proverb

  So you avoid the baboons and the hippos, which, despite everyone saying are so dangerous, you always thought were just a trifle overrated. Now, at last, you’re facing the real killer. The land-going equivalent of the great white shark: Nilus crocodilus. Dolphins may be more efficient killers than sharks (and certainly sharks fear dolphin attacks), but there is something deadly and primeval about a shark that hits the fear button in a way a dolphin never could. It’s the same with crocs.

  The first croc I saw I thought was a stick, a six-inch stick with two bumps, the bumps being where further sticks may have sprouted from. I didn’t know, I wasn’t watching, I didn’t really care – I was admiring the shimmering width of the river as I passed the Sobat tributary in Sudan. But I knew enough not to be trailing my fingers in the water. The stick was drawn to my attention – it was going upstream, against the current, raising the tiniest of ripples in front of it. And it was drifting broadside on – unusual, to say the least. Then the head appeared, not slowly, but all at once, as shocking as something being born, some memory long buried in the oldest parts of the human brain. I’ve seen a lot of crocs since then, even eaten them at a restaurant (fishy tasting), but I still remain cautious. Something to do with their eyes.

  Hendri Coetzee, killed by a crocodile at thirty-five, had already achieved what no other explorer had: a complete descent of the Nile river from its furthest source, the Kagera river, to the Mediterranean Sea. He had traversed the famed Murchison Falls area which has the highest concentration of massive Nile crocodiles anywhere on the planet. He had had years of experience paddling African waters. I first heard about him when I was rafting the Zambezi for a travel magazine. A kayaker making a video of the descent was a friend of Coetzee and spoke of his efficiency, helpfulness and coolness under pressure in awed terms. It was something that rang a strange bell down through the ages, reminding me of what people said about another explorer dead before his time – Arctic explorer Gino Watkins, who also died in a kayak but in the frozen north, not in the steaming jungles of central Africa.

  Hendri Coetzee said that ‘If I wanted surf I would never leave home. The nature of the beast is risk.’ The beast was exploring uncharted rivers in the Nile/Congo headwaters in tiny creekboats – eight-foot-long kayaks with more space than a playboat for food and gear, balancing the risk of greater weight against the need for supplies in such a remote spot. Like Watkins, who died at twenty-seven when his kayak was sunk by a freak calving ice floe in Greenland, Hendri had no warning when he was snatched from behind by a giant Nile crocodile on the uncharted Lukuga waters, once considered a possible source of the Nile (they actually drain into a source of the Congo).

  I had wanted to meet Coetzee as he had more knowledge of the real conditions on the White Nile than anyone alive, and yet it seemed in some weird and atavistic way that his very challenge of the river, his domination of it by making the first complete descent (purists aside, who cavilled that by doing it in two stints it didn’t really count), an achievement which could be seen as yet another act of arrogance by man towards the natural world, had angered the river gods in some way. And the greatest of the Nile river gods has always been the crocodile.

  I could not escape the oppressive feeling that Gino Watkins had also courted his own death in some way. Watkins was the man who brought the Eskimo roll to the developed world. Before his year-long stay in Greenland it had been considered ‘impossible for a white man to perform such an acrobatic manoeuvre in a craft of mere skin and bone’. But Watkins became so good at rolling his kayak – essential in the frozen Arctic seas – that he was often mistaken for a native hunter. However, he did one thing no native would ever do: he hunted alone, and when he was tipped by a plunging ice floe from his frail craft of sealskin-covered sticks and bones he had no one to help rescue him from the freezing waters.

  I mention Watkins because that technique that he showed could be perfected (I, too, had benefited, learning years ago how to roll in a tiny canoe in a swimming pool in Oxford) was what enabled Hendri Coetzee to make his incredible journeys in such a tiny boat.

  Coetzee knew the risks and he knew crocodiles, though it is possible that he subscribed to a myth about their stupidity that is undeserved. The Nile crocodile has the most complex brain of any reptile on the planet, but it is not the most recently evolved; the crocodile has remained more or less unchanged in sixty million years, and close variants of the crocodile have been around as long as the dinosaurs – from 200 or more million years ago. Walking thirty miles from the current Nile valley I have found the polished teeth of Laganosuchus, one prehistoric ancestor of the crocodile. At first you think they might be belemnites, a good size at an inch or an inch and a half long, but then you see the unmistakable shiny patina of fossilised enamel, and the cutting edge, like a slanting chisel on even the most pointed teeth, and you rea
lise that this long-dead creature was designed like a living cudgel or nailed club, that one strike from this density of sharpened nail-like teeth would result in being mercilessly taken. And a Nile crocodile has sixty-six teeth. Strangely, in the upper White Nile, when the river is low, crocodiles of immense proportions will hide themselves away in comparatively tiny potholes and puddles in the river bed. Their self-imposed incarceration, mired in clay and quite immobile, makes our smallest zoo cages look quite commodious.

  Hendri Coetzee warned his team to stick together – as one of them put it, ‘You appear not as one eight-foot-long kayak, but as a grouping that is larger; you appear as a larger organism.’ Crocs, it seems, don’t think quite like this. Though this tactic had served Coetzee well through such croc-infested areas as the Murchison Falls, these were areas where people and river craft were not unknown. It is possible that the ‘picking off’ strategy of the Nile crocodile had been blunted by the experience that a group of people may react differently to a group of deer, or pigs or Nile perch.

  It is one of the other great survival mechanisms of the Nile crocodile that it can live off a frog or consume a zebra. By basking on warm riverside rocks it conserves energy and can go long periods without feeding.

  The ‘picking off’ strategy works for the croc in conjunction with noise and splashing. Noise doesn’t scare them away, it attracts them, and here Coetzee was undoubtedly right in his constant injunction not to panic when confronted by this sort of danger. With noise comes the promise of a herd of wildebeest or a class of schoolchildren crossing a river. The lamest, the slowest, the one at the back, that is the one the Nile crocodile aims for. Coetzee and his two fellow paddlers were so close they had to be careful their paddle blades didn’t clash. They were doing everything right if the theory of ‘appearing big’ worked. But Coetzee was slightly to the rear and that was where the attack came from. He was picked off by a crocodile which perceived this as a splashing group of potential victims.

  People constantly underestimate the intelligence of wild animals. Often it is only the hunter (and the biologist who hunts with his dart gun) who realises just how canny a creature that has survived sixty million years can be. Not that the attack on Coetzee should mean that kayakers should adopt a different strategy. Nile crocs are the biggest animal killers in Africa, taking over a thousand people a year; no one knows for sure, but these are the estimated figures. They seem to only coexist happily with people who worship them – ancient Egyptians and the Ghanaians living in the small town of Paga, who feed them catfish and are so at ease with their crocs that they dry their clothes on the crocodiles’ backs as they bask in the sun. Could it be that the seeming stupidity of worshipping a killer predator is actually a very smart strategy for coexistence with something that we can neither outrun nor outthink in the game of survival?

  The Nile crocodile, it must never be forgotten, has the highest bite pressure per square inch of any animal recorded. Over 6,000 pounds. That compares to about 300 pounds for a German shepherd dog, 600 pounds for a lion, 1,820 pounds for a hippo, 600 measly pounds for a great white shark and 1,000 pounds for a snapping turtle. A human bite is about 100 pounds per square inch.

  It is interesting to discover that the ancient Egyptian crocodile cult of Sobek built temples and sanctuaries at places – rapids and widening bends – where crocodiles would be most dangerous and most numerous. In fact this is the only Egyptian deity whose dedicated temple location is the result of an observable and pragmatic reason. For the other Egyptian gods we are still more or less ignorant about why one site rather than another was chosen. That the worship of the crocodile was sincere and thorough is attested to by the huge crocodile cemetery found in Tebtunis in the Fayoum oasis. The greatest development of Sobek’s worship was in Ptolemaic times with the establishment of Crocodilopolis in Fayoum. Given that this was the largest lake in Egypt (until Lake Nasser was created by the high dam), one can guess that it might have been a practical response to the quantity of crocs in Lake Qarun.

  Crocodylus niloticus is the animal par excellence of a bloody river. Yet the crocodile does not choose to bite arteries and veins, though one might try and club you with its tail. In fact the croc’s preferred method of killing is to grab the victim swiftly, without fuss, and drown him, and it’s usually a him – male deaths due to crocodile attacks outnumber female four to one. Though it’s tempting to use this as prima facie evidence of male stupidity, the more likely reason is that women, though they may visit the river banks, don’t in traditional societies tend to go swimming and fishing in spots far from human habitation. Saltwater and Nile crocodiles cause more human deaths than any other creature that swims, crawls or runs upon the earth. It has always been so. The nineteenth-century traveller John MacGregor, who was brave enough to canoe the Nile in 1849, reported seeing two men killed by a twenty-six-foot crocodile swinging its tail like a giant cudgel. A decade earlier Irish traveller Eliot Warburton wrote that he found a lad crying beside a dead crocodile, which had eaten his grandmother. He sold the crocodile for 7s 6d, with the old lady inside.

  It is little wonder that the croc was worshipped, and is still worshipped. Sobek was the ancient crocodile god who achieved his greatest popularity during the Ptolemaic era, around the third century BC. The oasis of Fayoum, which was fed by the Nile, was called Crocodilopolis, the Greek word from which the modern name for the beast derives. Oddly enough, giant crocodilian fossils have also been found in the same oasis, extinct remnants of a proto-Nile. In apothecary shops in the spice bazaar of Cairo you will still see a stuffed croc hanging from the roof beams – for protection. Indeed you can buy one, for luck, in Khan al-Khalili souk. Mostly they come from Lake Nasser, the dammed Nile. It is damned in another sense: with a glut of over 70,000 crocs, it’s not a place you want to explore in the dark. Still, the dam does keep them from floating down to Cairo. Most of them. Indeed, when there is a croc scare in town, it is usually the result of an unwanted pet being liberated into its natural environment.

  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.