But Willcocks, despite his zeal, or perhaps because of it, managed to get on the wrong side of Lord Cromer, the dictatorial de facto ruler of Egypt. For the first time in his life Willcocks was passed over for promotion. It was enough, he wrote, to shake his conviction in a Creator God and persuade him to give up his wishful plans for the great dam. Indeed he was thinking these blasphemous thoughts while out speed-walking in the desert one morning. Suddenly he felt an arm on his shoulder and the ghost of his dead father appeared and walked with him for half an hour and argued with him, at length persuading him never to give up his dream. Willcocks wrote, ‘From then on I never looked back but went on straight with my project with redoubled zeal.’
The plans were accepted as first rate. The survey work in Aswan was pronounced faultless. He had thought of everything – designing the dam very high to accommodate archways through which the entire flood might run. This was Willcocks’ intention, so that the river would carry the silt-reddened Nile down to the delta and not back it up behind the dam. The dam could be raised further at a later date. Again Willcocks had foreseen that opposition to the yearly flooding of the temple of Philae would lessen once the multiple benefits of the dam were felt. His design was so complete it required only the Forth bridge engineer Sir Benjamin Baker to turn it into a reality.
But nothing happened. A year or two went by. He worked even harder; during one survey he never took a Sunday off in eighteen months and insisted that he and his men sleep in tents, the rougher sort of tent too, for that entire period. Finally in 1897 he asked Lord Cromer if his plans for the Aswan dam would ever be realised. Cromer rid himself of this troublesome employee by replying that all Egypt’s money was needed to reconquer the Sudan, and he doubted if the dam would ever be built in Willcocks’ time. So Willcocks resigned and took a job with the Cairo water board. A year later work on the world-changing dam began. Finance from the private investor Ernest Cassel had been found, but Willcocks was no longer there to be the midwife to his baby: ‘I well remember the feeling of humiliation which came over me when I stood on the four-foot diameter pipe which carried the whole of the water supply of Cairo and compared the dignity of looking after this water with that of designing structures for controlling the flood discharge of the Nile.’
Willcocks turned his back on building and started writing with a vengeance: his two-volume work The Nile is a masterpiece of detail and wonderfully drawn plans. He took up property speculation at the behest of the same Ernest Cassel who had funded the dam – and lost a lot of money.
But his zeal continued and he later worked in Iraq dealing with the irrigation problems of the Euphrates.
In later life Willcocks got into a dispute with Murdoch Macdonald, a man whom one immediately spots as a yes-man for the powers that be. The dispute ended as a libel suit, the traditional battleground of the English when all else has failed. Willcocks lost. The battle was about the flow rate of yet another dam to be built – this time on a major tributary of the Nile, the Atbara. Willcocks maintained that the figures were a lie. Whatever the truth of the matter, he lost. But the sheer venom of his attack seems unusual for this mild and industrious man. The reason, I believe, can be found in his realisation that dams can bring misery too. He simply didn’t want another built.
All through those last years, the realisation slowly dawned that all that work, mountains of work, would not bring unalloyed benefits to mankind. The mountains of work. The dams, the canals, the pumps, the barrages – if anyone transforms the world it is the water engineer. He can raise fertile land from barren sea with polders and dykes, he can rewire the oceans with a giant canal, he can feed a nation that is starving. Instead of building useless stone monuments he builds useful ones (later we’ll find just how close the Pyramids came to being demolished to make the first dam across the Nile). Instead of wailing about floods and famines he stops them dead in their tracks. Is there anything wrong with that? Is there a point beyond which one leaves behind honest agriculture and enters the vicious swerve ball of unintended consequences? Of building a dam that brings disease and misery as well as population growth?
We know that agriculture resulted in a drop in general health compared to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Hunter-gatherers, for example, routinely keep all their teeth until old age. Once flour was milled, dental decay became usual among agricultural populations. So every step up the technological ladder results in a drop in individual health but an increase in population. Egypt’s dams have coincided with vast population growth – from five million in 1890 to eighty-five million today. All living on the same strip of land – just better watered and more chemically altered than almost any black earth on the planet.
The connection, the symbiosis between exponential population growth and stopping the river, stopping the flow, seems important. There is no useful link, nothing a dedicated development official could get their teeth into, nothing solid like that. But if it was obvious we’d be fixing it already. If it was obvious the problem would be addressed. I wonder if all we are ever allowed is hints, vague associations, informal evidence, useful rumour. The world wants us to exercise judgement and we want to shirk it, we want it to be easy. Willcocks tried to make amends, but the damage was done, the path set, the die cast. Any way you turn you can’t undo a dam. Only time can do that.
I recovered from my strange illness. You usually do. Willcocks retired to Egypt. He quite clearly loved the country. I’m not sure how he died.
11 • The Nile evaporates
No matter how thirsty you are you can’t drink the whole river. Bugandan saying
Willcocks, like many, if not most, techno-idealists saw every advance as almost uniformly devoid of serious problems. So he missed disease, and his successors missed evaporation. The recent attempt to divert the Nile at Toshka, ‘to make the desert bloom’ around the western edge of Lake Nasser, has met with resounding failure. A mega-project, a long-held fantasy, of Egyptian leaders from President Nasser downwards (and the British before them) was to divert the Nile into the New Valley – the desert wadi system that contains the three major oases of the Egyptian desert.
There is some evidence that millions of years ago, before the Nile was formed, river systems crossed the Sahara in a number of places. One was the so-called Uweinat river – which is now covered by the Libyan– Egyptian Great Sand Sea. Such knowledge encouraged the idea that a new river could be built, a canal, carrying water, waste water if you like, from its holding tank in Lake Nasser into the desert. In the 1990s the project was hailed as saving Egypt. By 2010 you hardly heard a word about it. The canalisation around Toshka has produced far fewer acres of agricultural land than even the most pessimistic observers imagined. And salination is a constant problem that appears insoluble. Making the desert bloom has been a costly mistake.
Which makes the fact of the Nile – the sole river to cross the Sahara – even more remarkable. It does what no man has been able to imitate in his great works. Pyramids may mimic small mountains, but we have yet to build a river like the Nile. The Nile, as a living river, moving faster than any man-made canal, survives what kills all water in hot places: evaporation.
Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow and rivers evaporate – as long as they move slowly enough and widely enough. As the Nile does when it traverses the infamous Sudd swamp.
The Sudd swamp is remarkable because it is so flat. Indeed its flatness spreads so far it is hard to imagine how the river ever manages to leave. In 250 miles the slope is a meagre 0.01 per cent. Just enough to allow the river to dribble downhill to the Mediterranean 3,000 miles north.
Being so flat and slow moving, the Sudd drinks water. Willcocks and his team decided that a canal would solve the evaporation problem. But even a canal is subject to the sun’s merciless rays. Even with a canal carrying water in a straight line across the swamp, the increase in the river’s flow would only be a measly 5 per cent (or 7 per cent if you read other more optimistic reports).
Any way you cut
it, in a hot dry climate vast quantities of water are lost through evaporation. And when the Nile reaches the desert zone in the Sudan and then flows through Egypt, evaporation is further increased. Corralled in Lake Nasser before pushing through the turbines of the Aswan dam, the Nile loses 10 per cent of its volume each year as it sits in the lake. Naturally this is a very approximate figure. When you go looking for how evaporation is calculated you realise a lot of estimation is being used. For a start you have to guess the size of the storage container – be it lake or river bank. Then you have to reckon losses by other means.
It is quite obvious water is lost through evaporation, and when the water is shallow and the wind hot, then those losses can be very great indeed. People are concerned. One nutty plan suggests spreading a network of huge plastic sheets over Lake Nasser to curtail evaporation.
We have suggested that evaporation is to rivers what perspiration is to humans. Some sweat more than others. Some lose their entire strength through evaporation; others are scarcely troubled by it. The Nile spends the last 2,000 miles of its journey to the sea winding through the world’s largest desert. It loses so much through evaporation that despite its great drainage basin – over 10 per cent of Africa drains into the Nile basin – it enters the sea at Rosetta looking like a respectable European river and without the veritable lake-like width achieved by the jungle rivers of Asia and South America. The Nile sweats badly, and what it doesn’t lose through the sun it loses in the swamps of the Sudd.
The Nile loses most water in July in Egypt. In Sudan it loses more in April. In the south, in Uganda and southern Sudan, due to the summer rains, the minimum evaporation is in July and August.
Just as a sweaty man will leave a salty rime on his shirt, so the Nile deposits salts as it sweats its way through the deserts of Egypt and Sudan. Those salts accumulate rather more than they did, because the yearly flood, before the Aswan dam was built, used to sluice them away. Now the sweated shirt is never washed and the side canals are saltier. And now that silt is no longer laid down each year to dilute the effect of salt, the ground becomes less fertile, more in need of fertiliser, which leaches into the river and again raises its salt level.
But we have become diverted – natural enough when one considers that irrigation is the art of diversion. It is time to return to another Nile source, the source of all that is romantic and mysterious about Egypt – it’s ancient pharaonic past.
Part Two
ANCIENT NILE
Famine, pestilence and a severed penis
1 • The red and the black
The water jar wanted to test the river’s stones and broke itself.
Sudanese proverb
Red and black are the colours of ancient Egypt, and of earlier, pre-dynastic Egypt. In the potsherds one finds in the desert, red and black ware predominates in the oldest Neolithic pot fragments lying on the dunes. Red and black are easy colours to make – red from iron oxide – rust – or from red ochre, and black from charcoal or pitch, carbon essentially. Egypt was known as ‘the black land’ because of its fertile soil. Kemi means ‘black’ in ancient Egyptian, which, once Arabised, becomes al-kemi – which in turn becomes ‘alchemy’, the Egyptian magic that medieval Europeans sought to co-opt into their dreams of wealth or enlightenment. The red was the land of the desert and the water of the Nile. Red and black are still the colours of Egypt, still the colours of the national flag.
Red is the colour of revolution, radical politics, change – or the aspiration to change. The river changes, is never the same yet is always the same. To find the answers about the Nile follow the red.
Raymond Roussel, the French avant-garde writer, used to compose his poetry using a method in which mishearings and puns would suggest the subject matter. It is hardly less daring to suggest following a colour to reveal truths about a subject. And yet one needs to start somewhere.
One of my earliest questions, when reading about the Nile, had been: how did the ancients know so much about the Nile without visiting it? And by ancients I mean primarily the ancient Egyptians. This knowledge was later passed down through the priestly elect to such travellers as Herodotus, who dutifully recorded what they had been told. How did the ancient Egyptian know that the White Nile rose in the Mountains of the Moon? Since we know that any traveller going south would have to traverse the world’s largest swamp, the Sudd, and since we know that the Sudd defeated two legionaries sent by Emperor Nero to investigate Nilotic origins, we have every reason to believe that it would have defeated any Egyptian who might have travelled earlier.
Follow the red – in this case, perhaps, the evidence of the red-earthed desert. In 2007 Mark Borda and Mahmoud Marais discovered Egyptian hieroglyphics deep in the Sahara – deeper than any other known inscriptions have been found. Previous hieroglyphs found some forty miles into the desert near the oasis of Dakhla – getting on for 200 miles from the Nile – were thought to mark the furthest the Egyptians had ventured into the desert. Yet we know that in the earlier dynasties, more than 4,000 years ago, which is when these inscriptions date from, the climate was far less dry than it is now. The inscription deep in the desert, though miles from an oasis, was very near the mountain of Uweinat, a stopping-off point until half a century ago of nomadic Tebu tribesmen – until they, too, found it too inhospitable. The inscription relates a meeting between an Egyptian traveller called Tekhebet and someone from the land of Yam bringing incense. This suggests a quite normal trade route independent of the Nile that stretched deep into central Africa, the source perhaps of the aromatic woods used as incense at that time. If this trade route existed as far back as 3000 BC or earlier, which seems likely, we have a way into Africa that pre-dates anything previously considered. Supporting evidence comes from the account of Harkhuf, a pharaonic prince of the Sixth Dynasty, around 2300 BC, who recorded that he had started for the land of Yam along ‘the oasis road’. This was thought to mean that he then went back to the Nile from his oasis starting point. We now know that is not the case, that his reported four journeys to Yam – each taking seven months – must have been via the deep desert and further into sub-Saharan Africa, possibly via Chad. Harkhuf inscribed on his tomb details of his travels: ‘I returned with three hundred donkeys burdened with incense, ebony, hekenu perfume, grain, panther skins, elephant tusks, many boomerangs, all kinds of beautiful and good presents.’ He also talks of pygmies – who inhabit a region just below the source of the White Nile. This is extraordinarily accurate, since pygmies remained a myth until the first modern explorer – Stanley in 1887–8 – ‘discovered’ them in the Ituri Forest region during the ill-fated Emin Pasha relief expedition.
Uweinat, at the border of Libya, Sudan and Egypt, is home to numerous caves containing rock art that pre-dates, or perhaps coincides with, the journey of Harkhuf. The inscription found in 2007 lies on a boulder about forty miles south of Gebel Uweinat, the tallest mountain in mainland Egypt – only 6,345 feet high – but it rises directly from the desert which lies less than a thousand feet above sea level.
That an inscription should be found 300 miles from the nearest modern oasis is the strongest possible evidence that the Sahara was relatively fertile until only a few thousand years ago. There were no camels in Egypt then – they were introduced around 500 BC by invading Persians – so the only form of desert transport was the donkey. The German explorer Carlo Bergmann has found harnesses, pots and other evidence of pharaonic donkey travel along the route to Uweinat, confirming this mode of transport.
Other mysteries find their solution. In 1998 it was discovered that Tutankhamen’s chest pendant, a transparent scarab set in gold, was not as previously believed made of quartz. It was glass. But not man-made glass. This scarab was carved from natural silica glass, known as tektite, found in a remote region of the Great Sand Sea about 150 miles north of Uweinat. Tektites are natural glasses, formed in this case by a meteorite crashing into a proto-Sahara millions of years ago and fusing the sand into glass. But the fact that th
e glass, which is found in a small area 200 miles from an oasis, could be transported to the Nile is evidence again that the Sahara was not as arid or hard to travel across as it is today. Only the coming of the camel made travel possible in this region during the current dry era; it would not be practicable to travel there with donkeys now.
So, we have donkey trains stretching deep into the red land of the desert, circumventing the marshes of the Sudd, dropping through what is now the Central African Republic and the Congo to rejoin the Nile at Lake Albert, perhaps using the Mountains of the Moon to navigate.
Mark Borda’s discovery is one more link in the chain that confirms ancient knowledge of the Nile’s source. This knowledge was lost, mangled, reworked and ignored in the following millennia, surfacing now and again – in Roman maps, or in the oral traditions of the nomadic tribes of the Sahara.
I once asked a Bedouin in the Egyptian Sahara where the sand came from. He picked up one of the fossilised oyster shells that are common on the edge of the Great Sand Sea. ‘This is when the sea was here, then the sea went back leaving the beach.’ Modern thinking, knowing as we now do about the massive movement of the Mediterranean, tends to concur: the Sahara is the giant beach left behind after millions of years of seawater coming and going over North Africa.
2 • Paper and lead
The day it wishes death, the goat licks the nose of the leopard.
Ethiopian proverb
In the desert, rocks were used to paint and carve on, but it was the gift of the Nile – papyrus – that would allow writing to become private, efficient and capable of movement. With orders and instructions written on paper it was possible to control more than one city. Though there is reasonable evidence that ancient Mesopotamia was home to the first city state, it was ancient Egypt that invented the first nation state. And papyrus was the key. (Ironically, the papyrus plant had become extinct in Egypt by the 1950s and had to be reintroduced from the upper Nile by the archaeologist Dr Hassan Ragab, founder of the extraordinary theme park in Cairo, Dr Ragab’s Pharaonic Village – not to be missed!)
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 8