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.
9 • 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.
10 • 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.
The primary effect of bilharzia is tiredness and pain. The disease eats away at the body for years. Your health is broken, your strength gone. I was told in Nubia that the spread in the habitual use of bango (grass) and hashish coincided with the spread of bilharzia in the upper Nile – it dulls the pain wonderfully.
Previously there had been only tiny pockets of bilharzia in the delta, which increased as a result of the first perennial irrigation introduced after the building of the first dam on the delta, the barrage of the 1880s. But with the high dam at Aswan, the barrage at Asyut and all the other clever stoppages and diversions the snail spread throughout the much increased network of canals and ditches.
Since time immemorial the Egyptians had irrigated their land with the one-off rush of the Nile flood in the summer. Now the dams held back some of the water all year, allowing the canals to be fed year round. There was no longer one great surging, cleansing flood, ripping away the nooks and crannies beloved by the bilharzia snail, carrier of the disease bilharzia, also known as schistosomiasis.
This snail-carried parasitic trematode emerges (usually only during the day) and penetrates any human skin in its vicinity. Once inside the human being the creature visits the lungs and then makes a home in the liver and begins feeding on red blood cells. The parasite matures into a worm less than half an inch long which starts laying hundreds of eggs. Such worms may persist in the body for up to twenty years, resulting in chronic lethargy, liver ailments, fever and malnutrition.
Throughout the ditches and canals of Upper Egypt the snail spread and the disease spread. It reduced the strength of the Upper Egyptian workers in a measurable way. The P&O coaling station at Port Said had the highest recoaling rate anywhere in the world in the 1900s, when it was manned by hardy Upper Egyptians used to hours of back-breaking work. By the 1930s the Upper Egyptian population was raddled with bilharzia and the recoaling rates had fallen to a miserable level.
A cure was developed in Britain in 1918; the medieval compound of antimony known as tartar emetic was found to be effective. There were side-effects – odd seizures and vomiting – but in Nasser’s new Egypt these were considered trifling. A huge programme of injection ran from the 1950s to the 1980s. There was another coda: unwashed needles were used again and again on the entire rural population of affected areas. This spread hepatitis C in Egypt, which today has the highest levels of infection in the world at around 10 per cent of the population. Bilharzia is now cured orally with an annual treatment of praziquantel.
Bilharzia had been present even in pharaonic times, though it peaked in the later periods, perhaps when knowledge of the need for fast-moving water to keep it at bay was lost. In ancient times myrrh was considered a cure. A modern drug containing myrrh, called Mirazid, was finally dropped in 2005 – because, though it worked, the current cure praziquantel was eight times more effective.
The bilharzia/injection/hepatitis C fiasco is another case of the iron law of unintended consequences. Yet, despite his lack of foresight, Willcocks was a fascinating man. Apart from his monumental work in two volumes, The Nile, he produced one of the most interesting books ever to be written on the adventures of Moses. Willcocks decided to look at the Bible from the viewpoint of hydrology and irrigation. Since the earliest civilisations were based on irrigation, it was an eminently sensible departure point. Look at the world from Moses’ point of view, not our own. Despite his or her earnest training in flint knapping and ancient fire making, how is it possible for an archaeologist to look at the world – after the BA, the MA, the PhD and all the digs and volunteer jobs copying potsherds – with anything other than the eyes of an archaeologist? It seems peculiar to me that specialisation should involve developing a point of view that obscures the very subject you wish to study.
I knew from my time in the desert collecting stone tools that any place that looks interesting to us will have been interesting to ancient man. Caves, strange rock formations, interesting overhangs – in all of these places you will find the best artefacts – and these are all places a child, or someone still with the instincts of childhood, will gravitate towards. One of my best finds – three intact amphorae found in the Great Sand Sea – was the result of asking someone to climb on to an interesting rock for a photograph. The pots were buried at its foot.
Willcocks was an expert in irrigation, not in biblical studies, but his conclusions in From the Garden of Eden to the Crossing of the Jordan are never uninformed, never the flat-footed stuff engineers who chose to write about the mystery of the Pyramids tend to write. It is a fascinating, wonderful glimpse into the mind of a late nineteenth-century polymath.
He was of English descent though born in Mussoorie, a hill station in India. When I visited the place I recognised at once the steep hillsides and fragrant deodars that had been Willcocks’ playground in his youth. He attended Indian schools and an Indian college of engineering. His ambition was to be like his father, a Devon man who had raised himself up from simple soldier to irrigation engineer by sheer determination and hard work. His father believed that the success of the British abroad was down to the quality of their gentry. Though of humble yeoman by birth himself he claimed, with the experience of a well-travelled soldier who had fought for the Carlists in Spain and with the British in Afghanistan and India, that there was no more generous landlord than the British gentry. Therein, he told his son William, lay the secret weapon of the British.
Willcocks lived an austere and disciplined life. ‘Hardships and alertness, in my opinion, go together,’ he wrote. He was fond, when out on a survey, of living in a tent as humble as those of his workers, if not more so. When local landowners came by to pay visits they assumed that no European boss was in charge and turned away, leaving Willcocks to get on with his precious work. Even late in life he would often be mistaken for a clerk rather than the chief of a large hydrological project. Described by his superior and eventual father-in-law Colonel Colin Scott-Moncrieff (brother of the Proust translator) as a human dynamo, without whom the indentured slavery known as the corvée would not have been ended nor the Aswan dam built.
A typical day for Willcocks started at 5.00 a.m. with him rising in his shared lodgings in Helwan, a health resort built about fifteen miles south of Cairo. His neighbours included the venerable German explorer Georg August Schweinfurth, whose path will crisscross with ours throughou
t the book. After a hasty breakfast of porridge Willcocks would spend twenty minutes doing his Sandow exercises. Willcocks was an early follower of Eugen Sandow along with another early bodybuilder, Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed Sandow staged the world’s first bodybuilding exhibition in the Royal Albert Hall in 1901 with Sherlock Holmes’ creator as the head judge.
The half-Russian, half-Prussian ‘father of modern bodybuilding’, Sandow wrote books with the titles Strength and Health and Movement is Life. He was filmed in 1894 by the Edison film company (we will later encounter Edison making the first elephant snuff movie: he filmed the death of a rogue elephant). The Sandow film was a huge success and people marvelled less at his strength than at the bulge of his muscles. Sandow’s fame was so great that a statuette of his resplendent physique is the first prize for Mr Olympia, the world-famous bodybuilding contest that Arnold Schwarzenegger won six times in a row. It seems appropriate that the man who did more than any other to wrestle the Nile into submission should be a fan of bodybuilding.
Anyway, with his exercises finished by 6.20 a.m., Willcocks would spend the next hour walking very fast ‘in a bee line up hill and down dale’ in the nearby desert. At 7.30 a.m. he would leave for Cairo and return home at 5. From 5.30 to 7.30 he again hurried through the desert. Walking was his favourite pastime and when surveying a new canal or irrigation he walked tirelessly. He boasted of once walking twenty-five miles a day every day for 107 days in temperatures of over 80 degrees. Truly a man of steel. Back home he would dine at 8.00 p.m. and be asleep in bed by 10, readying himself for another day at the office changing the course of nature and history.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 7