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

by Twigger, Robert

  13 • Powerstories: Aesop the Ethiopian

  Two sharp edges do not cut each other. Ethiopian proverb

  If there is one defining characteristic that separates the ancient and traditional from the modern, it is the store set by storypower. Though businessmen and scientists are rediscovering traditional stories as structures of advanced and subtle thought, this has yet to enter the mainstream of ‘official’ thinking. To traditional man, stories are the lifeblood of communication. To the modern man stories are, well, just stories.

  Herodotus’ text, like the Bible, Homer and Don Quixote, is just one story after another; indeed this was the form of all books until the modern era. One can see that the novel as an art form arises precisely when story begins to lose its official place and is being replaced by reasoned argument, logic, vaguely scientific opinion, politics, progress. The novel – as entertainment – is a suitable place for the story to retire to. And yet stories refuse to go away.

  In telling the story of the Red Nile I haven’t just happened on a mass of stories; it is as if the Nile itself is intimately associated with the generation of stories throughout history. It seems to attract the great story originators. One of these was Aesop.

  I had made most of my journeys into the lower parts of the White Nile, but I ensured I did not ignore Ethiopia – the source of the Blue Nile, the place where the fountain of youth is supposed to be situated. It may well also have been the birthplace of Aesop. Though some traditions place him as a Greek slave, the African animals in his stories and the happy etymology of his name – Aesop/Aethiope – have led many to conclude that the stories are of Ethiopian origin, and the Greekness of the tales (and the language in which they were written) merely the nationality of the reteller or even scribe.

  The Nile connects everything up: connections were appearing that I could not have predicted. Many commentators consider that the original source of Aesop’s fables was a set of tales ascribed to a mythical African known as Luqman, a slave of Ethiopian origin. Delving further into orally supported traditions we discover that Luqman, the hakim or wise one as he was known, originated in Nubia, in a village on the Nile.

  Luqman was captured by Greek marauders around 200 BC and taken back to Greece to work as a carpenter and boat builder – trades he had acquired in Africa. Most African slaves of Nile origin were known as Ethiopians, and when he started telling his fables and wise proverbs the collection became known as the Ethiopian’s/Aesop’s fables. A traditional tale has it that his rehabilitation to freedom and renown began when his master asked him to slaughter a sheep and bring him the ‘best’ pieces of the animal as well as the worst. Perhaps his owner planned to patronise Luqman by offering him the classy food in contradistinction to the inedible. Whatever the motive, Luqman carried out the task and arrived with a plate containing only the heart and the tongue. The slave owner was taken aback but kept his own counsel. He did not want a mere slave to get the better of him. However, the next day Luqman’s intrigued master asked him to slaughter another sheep – and Luqman arrived with the heart and the tongue again. ‘But how’, asked his Greek owner, ‘can these be both the best and the worst parts?’ Luqman replied, ‘In a sincere person the heart and the tongue are the best part of him, but in a hypocrite – the heart and the tongue are his worst parts.’

  This somehow connected with his master’s thoughts. The Greek was delighted and Luqman soon acquired a reputation for passing on stories which people wanted to retell. Eventually he was granted his freedom – to be able to wander and tell stories wherever he chose. When Luqman was asked how he had acquired his knowledge he replied, ‘By observing the ignorant.’ On another occasion he said, ‘By speaking the truth and avoiding that which does not concern me.’

  Many people, weary of the idea that such simple stories are merely for children, are naturally attracted to the Arabic tradition which states that Aesop’s fables often have the opposite meaning to their stated ‘moral’. The moral was the morsel needed to throw to the populace, and to kids, but that really each fable had a more useful, less obvious, more growth-inspiring meaning. Take the fox and the grapes story. A fox jumps and jumps to reach some grapes. Eventually he turns away disappointed and says, ‘They were most likely sour anyway.’ The standard moral is ‘sour grapes’ – we deride what we can’t reach. But the inner yarn has it that the fox, a creature who kills for curiosity, stands for the merely curious part of ourselves, the part that wants to know things just for the sake of knowing them. Instead of avoiding what does not concern us, as Luqman counsels, we plunge headlong into things which may indeed harm us. And this frame of mind means any attempt at real enquiry goes off half cocked, since we have taught ourselves, like the fox, to give up easily.

  Unlike a ‘moral’ tale, this reading of Aesop allows for any number of meanings. We have seen that it admits of a warning against casual, uncommitted interest. If we want real enlightenment – and grapes and wine turn up time and again in traditional tales as symbols of enlightenment – then we must relinquish something. This can also mean giving up on using ‘reason’ to create a justifying argument when things have not gone the way one wanted – giving up on a ‘sour grapes’ justification. By making up such comforting after-the-event arguments we insulate ourselves from the reality – which in this case is simply a failure to jump high enough. A really enlightened response is not the therapeutic use of argument but a practical response: go and get a ladder to reach the grapes. Get some assistance – a teacher, perhaps.

  The fox, unlike Luqman, is interested in things that cannot benefit him. Until he learns to pay attention to that which concerns him and ignore that which doesn’t, the benefit will remain out of his grasp.

  Naturally, in writing about such matters I had to consider my own conduct. Wasn’t I, on a more mundane level, acting out the worst kind of casual curiosity as I pursued endless leads that promised me enlightenment about the Nile? Perhaps. Yet I could not shake off the conviction, and it was only a conviction, that the Nile was the river of stories just as much as it was the river of history.

  14 • The last will and testament of Eratosthenes, 194 BC

  A hater hates even honey. Nubian proverb

  A story. Eratosthenes, his voice carried by his breath, not distinct from it, rising and falling, dictates to a patient scribe whose face he has never seen.

  ‘I am blind and I am old, and have been both for long enough to know these conditions as no more limiting than any other. Man is limited in his life, he carries his dreams of escape to his death. Now I have decided that the end is near enough: I will not eat again, to die by my own hand is of no interest to me, but to cease eating and to cease to be that way, is my way of leaving this life with some shred of dignity intact. The Library of Alexandria is where I shall continue to live – in my works – there shall the young meet me as their teacher when I am gone.

  ‘What did I manage? I have shown the truth about the Nile, stripped it of all its ugly superstition. I have shown the truth about the world, its size and extent. The distance of the sun and the moon – all these I have shown, correctly and for the first time. Will this knowledge ever be lost again? Not as long as the Library of Alexandria exists.

  ‘The Egyptian peasant still worships Amun, the sun, without knowing that the sun is impossibly distant. Nor does the peasant know, nor I, why the moon, which is so much closer and smaller, occupies in the skies a shape the same size – when seen from earth. Hence the moon can block the sun and the sun can block the moon – neither one nor the other can claim supremacy of size. It is as if the gods planned it that way. But the distances I know. There is no magic in that.

  ‘To find the true course of the Nile, which I have shown a thousand times more accurately than Herodotus the old liar, is derived from my famous journeying to Syene to see for myself the sun overhead and casting no shadow to left or right. I had with me four trained pacers – who would walk at the same step for a hundred or a thousand paces. They marched only
in a straight line, unless a bend of the river made that impossible. I measured the angle and course of any deviation and thus found the distance from Alexandria to Syene in Upper Egypt. It was knowing this that meant I could find the circumference of the earth.

  ‘In Syene I was lowered down a deep odoriferous well, swinging on a rope until I could check for myself that there was no shadow – the sun was truly overhead.

  ‘In Alexandria I had earlier measured the angle of the sun at noon as 7 degrees 12 minutes. The difference told me, along with the distance along the Nile I had travelled, that the world was round, was 252,000 stadia in circumference.

  ‘In Syene I questioned all who would profess some knowledge of the river and its mysteries – why it should flood in summer and not in winter when every other river does. The answer was clear – the waters rise in mountains that trap the summer rains; in Ethiopia there are such mountains that receive the rains charged with water from the sea between Africa and India. It is said that Alexander himself did not know this and desired to – it is sad I was never at his service to relieve his ignorance.

  ‘So it is my time too. It is strange, when one has studied the world one arrives somehow, also, at knowledge of oneself. Such knowledge tells me it is my time to die. I will not eat, instead I will rely on the light of the sun to nourish me. I have a feeling it may be longer than I planned. Perhaps I will live for ever.

  ‘I have looked too long and too often at the sun, I am told. That is why, in my eighty-second year I am a blind man dependent on a boy’s shoulder on which I rest my hand as he leads me around. But better to have at least glanced at the sun than to have hidden from its enlightening rays all one’s life.’

  15 • Carry on Cleo

  One does not climb a tree to welcome the rain. Sudanese proverb

  Eratosthenes measured the Nile and then the world. And, at that point, 194 BC, the intellectual centre of the world was probably wherever Eratosthenes cared to lay his hat, even if it was down a deep smelly well. A hundred years later, things had moved inexorably away from Alexandria and towards Rome, the high Greek Egyptian culture he knew in Alexandria in decline. It is thought that casual pillaging had begun to reduce the stocks of the library. So much so that by the time the library was burned (by whom, it is not entirely clear – Arabs blame Christians, Christians Arabs) there were hardly any books left at all.

  But all that was in the future. In the time of Caesar and Cleopatra in the first century BC the city of Alexandria was still a great centre of the ancient world. It has come down a notch or two since then, as has the whole north coast of Egypt.

  The much developed north coast is where I am, and right now I am swimming in Cleopatra’s bath. No milk in this one – it is the outdoor version, where she disported herself with Mark Antony in 40 BC. It is hewn from the rocks but is recognisably rectangular and man-made and very near to the beautiful white-sand beaches of Mersa Matruh (where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had his HQ in the cliff caves overlooking the town during the Second World War; in the little museum there they have his full-length leather coat donated by his son Manfred). Cleo would never have dreamed of swimming in the bright sun as I am – it would have destroyed her famous light complexion. In her day the pool would have been ringed with a hundred candles guttering in the sea breeze. There are no candles here today and no people except me. The water is chilly; it is all rather thrilling. The waves are still able to come in, and they fill the bath as the tide rises. The water is heavy, moving like a lazy body rising, salty, not really bathlike. In Roman times this natural harbour was called Paraetonium. It’s 150 miles from Alexandria, so for Cleopatra and Antony to have used the bath they most probably did so during one of their many sea voyages along the coast.

  Carry on Cleo: Cleo was a murderer, Cleo was a tart, when Tony lost to Gussy boy, she ran and broke his heart. When Cleo married Jules she did it to save the realm, when Cleo married Tony she was loath to leave the helm. Cleo was a murderer, she topped her dearest bro, and had her sister poisoned, the poor old Arsinoe. Cleo was a tart, she even slept with Herod, he fancied her so much he refused to leave her bed. Cleo was a ruler, the lastest Pharaoh ever, more beautiful than anyone and almost twice as clever.

  Cleopatra VII was the last Egyptian Pharaoh. After her death in 30 BC the country was ruled by invaders of one sort or another until Gamel Abdul Nasser seized power on behalf of the army and the people in 1952. Cleo was the last Queen of the Nile who was proud to be known as an Egyptian ruler.

  Not that Egypt hadn’t been going downhill for a while. After Alexander had invaded in 332 BC and installed his own rulers, the Ptolemy family, there was a natural movement towards Greece. For a century at least the Ptolemys refused to speak Egyptian, preferring Greek – which is why the Rosetta Stone was written in both hieroglyphics and Greek (and was thus, much later, able to be used by European scholars to deciper hieroglyphics). But Cleo spoke Egyptian (which later survived as Coptic and in loan words to Egyptian Arabic). She was proud to walk like an Egyptian, and beautiful enough to carry it off with style.

  The Romans had already landed, offering their services as security for Cleo’s father Ptolemy XII. In order to ingratiate himself with Caesar, Ptolemy executed Caesar’s enemy Pompey. Instead Caesar saw this as impudence and would have annexed the whole country to Rome after his successful battle of the Nile if it hadn’t been for a twenty-one-year-old woman who charmed him so much he decided to live in Egypt with her for two years. And to let her rule instead. Imagine if Saddam had been a woman, so devastatingly beautiful that she was capable of persuading George W. to live in Baghdad and father a few more nippers? One suspects that the only way ever really to pacify a country is to marry into the ruling family . . .

  When Cleopatra and Julius Caesar visited Italy for the first time together, he fifty-four, she still only twenty-three, he had a brilliant golden statue made of her, set shiningly in the temple of Venus in Rome. She donated the Nile Mosaic, which is still in the temple of Isis in Pompeii. That Isis, an Egyptian god whose tears caused the Nile flood, should be venerated in Rome shows how influential in the ancient world Egypt was. In this extraordinary mosaic, it is quite apparent how the Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt, how the river’s current and counter-winds make it the most efficient transport system in the ancient world. Yet Cleopatra, though drawn into the Roman world, was happy enough to desert it from time to time for Alexandria and the idyllic azure waters of Paraetonium and its outdoor bath. Her balancing act, a necessary one to keep Egypt from invasion, became in the end simply a delaying of the inevitable.

  It was inevitable when Caesar, soft enough to give Cleo her own country, was not soft enough to give her his empire. Their son, Caesarion, was not named by Caesar as his successor (not a carte blanche to rulership but a distinct help nonetheless). Instead Caesar named his great-nephew Octavian, later to be known as Caesar Augustus.

  Octavian knew enough to understand that there could be only one Caesar. After the murder of his great-uncle he eventually became allied with Mark Antony. Mark Antony, like Caesar, sought to rule Egypt – which, after Rome, was the richest prize in the ancient world at that time. But Cleo again proved seductive. Time, however, was running out. Octavian wanted everything for himself. He defeated Mark Antony at Actium and Cleo ran away – some said. Eventually both of them were run to earth in Alexandria, which only a year earlier had been the scene of such amazing feats of debauchery and dining the world still thrills to hear the details. But Cleo’s time was up.

  One might say that when Cleopatra deserted the Nile she lost everything, even her man. By living it up in Alexandria and abroad she forgot that rulers need ships and navies of greater strength than their enemies’. Perhaps she thought she could charm Octavian too. Not a chance; he preferred killing to loving.

  Caesar, a greater warrior by far than Mark Antony, understood the need to remain connected to the Nile. When he entered Alexandria and was seduced by Cleopatra he did not resist, as Mark Antony later d
id, her suggestion of a triumphal cruise up the Nile to Memphis. It was a journey rich in symbolism and a natural act of unification in Egypt, where the Nile was the communication link, the transport artery and the source of all wealth in the form of the summer flood of silt and water. Three harvests a year made Egypt the richest domain in the Roman world. Cleopatra’s wealth was legendary. She intended to hang on to it by using her extraordinary powers of guile.

  And poison. One thing we can say about Cleopatra is that she knew rather too much about poison for comfort. It unnerved even her most ardent lover, Antony. When he took to employing his own tasters at the Alexandrian palace Cleopatra dipped her crown of flowers in poison and offered it to him to eat. As he was about to eat she snatched it away and threw the flowers to a prisoner, held in waiting for this purpose. As the condemned man writhed in agony on the floor, Mark Antony got the message: if she ever wanted to get rid of him she would – whatever precautions he might take.

  Not that Antony was a nice man, either. When he lost the battle of Seleucas he asked Cleopatra if he might execute the general in charge of the Egyptian forces who had lost the battle on his behalf. And the general’s family too. And their horses. The intrigue, the poison, the execution of foes and the families of foes recall the demented last acts of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  History remains fascinated by Cleopatra because she seems so unlike us. With her banquets that lasted until dawn and her extravagant actions she seems more like Elizabeth Taylor than a world leader. It’s fitting somehow that Taylor played her in the quintessential 1963 movie.

  The Cobra Queen had children by both Caesar and Mark Antony. At thirty-nine she was dead, by her own hand. In life she and Mark Antony had partied hard, very hard. They had formed a society, the Order of Inimitable Life. As the end approached they formed another: the Order of the Inseparable in Death. Somehow one is reminded more of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love than the rulers of a great country.