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

by Twigger, Robert

  He suggests making an infusion of alcohol with the herbal plant known as oxtongue. Oxtongue was used in Roman times as an elixir to dispel melancholy. Indeed European herbalists used it for this purpose, giving the herb the name ‘borage’. This was the same succulent as the nepenthe remarked on by Homer. This, according to Pliny, was a drug that left one with absolute forgetfulness – medieval Rohypnol by the sound of it. Maimonides advises the Prince to inhale aromatics, myrrh and nutmeg especially. He ends his sex treatise with a blessing: ‘May the Lord lengthen your days with pleasures, and may those delights be attached to eternal delights for the sake of God’s kindness and goodness.’

  7 • The well of Joseph

  Breasts are two but the milk is the same. Sudanese proverb

  Cairo was watered by the Nile and by a series of wells, not very deep, which reached below the Nile to the shallow water table beneath. But the Nile was no place to defend the Nile. Saladin needed a fortress. There was nowhere better than the site of Ibn al-Haytham’s imprisonment a century before: the edge of the Moqattam Hills. It was high, dry and rocky, with the vast quarries of the Pharaohs still in evidence.

  Here on the bluff Saladin built an immense fortress, the Citadel. The only problem was, it had no water. So near to the source of all water in Egypt, yet so far. This time he turned to his other sage and Mr Fixit – Karakush.

  Sadly, Karakush has been traduced by history. Karakush has had his name ruined. Imagine a great man, imagine a great builder, turned into a figure of popular fun, something so low as to have his name synonymous with Mr Punch in children’s puppet shows. Such is the name Karakush. In the East it was turned by one indefatigable enemy into a name to be ridiculed and lampooned. And this has obscured the real achievements of Karakush, eunuch and chief adviser to Saladin, builder of the Citadel and indeed the architect of the inclusive Cairo we see today.

  In the twelfth century the Nile lapped the edge of Abbasid Cairo. The Abbasids were the Sunni Caliphs of Islam whose capital was in Baghdad. Saladin was loyal to them rather than the Shia Fatamid Caliphs. The Abbasid part of modern Cairo is known for Khan al-Khalili souk and the Al-Azhar mosque. The Nile then bent westwards just above Old Cairo, which is where the Coptic churches were; only years later was this land above Old Cairo gradually reclaimed from the river. Where the British and American embassies now stand would have been under water most of the year in those days.

  Between Old Cairo and Islamic Cairo lay Fustat, the place where the first Arab invaders made their city of tents. Karakush joined all of these places to create the Cairo we know today – and linked them with the great fortress he built on the hills overlooking Cairo: the Citadel. Years later, it would be at the foot of the Citadel that the body of Egypt’s second female ruler would be found. And it would be at the Citadel that the Mamluks who had murdered Shajarat al-Durr, the Sultana of Egypt, would themselves be murdered by the Albanian brigand and future ruler of Egypt Muhammad Ali.

  But first Karakush had to build the place. There was no shortage of building materials in Cairo. Then. The old city of Memphis still had temples and pyramids. These are now long gone and Memphis is simply a string of villages on the west bank of the Nile – almost opposite my home in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. The stones of these monuments were used to build dykes, walls and palaces. But before the Citadel could be built to protect the new and greater extent of Cairo, stretching now from the Nile to the hills behind, a new source of water needed to be found.

  Smirkers imagine that eunuchs were weaklings, lithesome boy-men who would run hither and thither, perhaps good at cleaning and cooking. Far from it. A man made into a eunuch after he has reached puberty is like a clock with a lighter weight – it just keeps going. Eunuchs were often the biggest and strongest men in the palace, and Karakush was no exception. He towered over the diminutive red-headed Saladin like a great dark eagle, which is what his name meant: Black Bird.

  Karakush could not build the Citadel, perched as it was in the ideal position on the edge of the Moqattam Hills, without water. Many had seen the defensive advantages of the Moqattam ridge but none had dared build there. Without water, and a lot of it, no castle is secure. Saladin even doubted if a castle could be built there, but Karakush was adamant: ‘Where is the Nile? If the Nile is not five leagues away then there must be water!’ Not only was there the Nile, there was also the water that made the city of Cairo possible – an aquifer some sixty feet down that allowed so many wells to be dug in the city, making it unnecessary to go each day to the river to collect water in times of attack. Karakush knew he just had to dig. But where?

  Karakush was aware that a well dug only a few yards from another can produce twice as much or half as much as its neighbour. It was all luck, or God’s will. But Karakush favoured the old saying, ‘Trust in God, but tie your camel first.’

  God speaks through the world, thought Karakush, and employed a dowser to find the right place to dig. There have been dowsing rods found in ancient Egyptian tombs; cave paintings in the Sahara show men apparently divining with a wand of some kind; Herod otus wrote about the Scythians using a willow stick to dowse for gold; both Solomon with his staff and the Queen of Sheba were reputed dowsers for water and gold. But any kind of witchcraft was frowned upon by Saladin. Fortunately dowsing could be done at night, by the light of an oil lamp.

  The dowser came fully wrapped in a robe; it was a windy night and the lamp flickered over the bare rock of the Moqattam Hills. He withdrew an ancient stick of myrtle wood, the origin of the magic wand used by magicians in the popular imagination. He sensed Karakush’s agitation and raised a hand to still his impatience.

  ‘Every mistake in this field is a mistake of greed: greed to discover, or greed to discover quickly – they are the same thing. We will take as many nights as we require to find what may be here.’

  The dowser held the wand lightly in his fingers, explaining that the spirit of the water would speak to his own vitality and that would cause the wand to waver.

  Back and forth he marched over the entire area of the proposed Citadel. Nothing.

  ‘There is no water here?’ asked Karakush. ‘Not anywhere?’

  ‘Oh, there is water, but it is too deep. Over two hundred feet or more.’

  Karakush laughed. ‘I will dig, just as my Lord has fought. We fight the easiest battles first and by the time the hard ones appear we have so much force behind us we will win.’

  The dowser rubbed his scraggly beard and covered his chest against the cold wind. ‘I will walk again, searching to any depth.’

  Within a few minutes he had found the spot. ‘Here is the most water, it is 250 feet down – not a foot more, not a foot less.’

  ‘How much water?’

  ‘How wide will the well be?’

  ‘As wide as it needs to be.’

  ‘I think eighty bushels a day for a six-foot shaft.’

  ‘Not enough. For a twenty-foot shaft?

  ‘450 bushels . . .’

  ‘That will suffice.’

  The dowser accepted his money without looking to count. Without a word he had turned and gone.

  The next day they started to dig. The workers were not the most motivated in the land. There were, as the historian Jubayr noted, more Europeans building Cairo than Arabs. These were prisoners from the crusades – put to work in destroying the Pyramids of Memphis and building the wonders of Karakush’s Cairo. Twenty burly Franks manned the drilling tortoise. This was a giant jig made of palm wood which held drilling rods in place – two men taking it in turns to hammer while a third turned the drill swiftly by hand, moving himself out of the way in case of a missed blow to the drill base.

  Karakush looked down one day to see men idling at their crowbars and picks. The hole was wide enough for twenty men to work side by side, breaking the limestone – but slowly, ever so slowly, as raising and lowering the tortoise to clear the stone took time. It was while walking in the vast ancient quarries of Moqattam, the quarries that gave the P
haraohs their stone for the Pyramids, that Karakush evolved the idea of using a step principle to excavate the rock. Narrow shafts were pushed through the rock and then linked by drilling sideways. The drill was simply an iron rod pounded and turned and pounded again. In the Moqattam quarries one could see how wedges of wood had been used to split the rock. It was into these drilled horizontal shafts that porous cedar was introduced, then watered. As it expanded, fissures opened up across the shaft enabling whole blocks to be lifted out with a crane made of palm trunks. Joseph’s well got deeper and deeper. The name came from Saladin’s own first name, Yusuf. Over time the place became confused by some travellers with another well, in Gallilee, supposedly built by the biblical Joseph.

  Saladin came to inspect when the well was seventy feet deep. ‘Still dry,’ he remarked.

  Karakush smiled, ‘We are a third of the way down, perhaps less.’

  Saladin looked thoughtful. ‘If it is dry we will say nothing about it ever again.’

  At a hundred feet it was beginning to get dark at the bottom of the hole. Karakush installed a giant, highly polished, tinned-copper mirror at the wellhead. One man was instructed to reflect the sunrays down the hole, providing light and a little warmth to the labouring men.

  At 130 feet down Saladin heard a whisper. ‘He has the place wrong. He is moving the well.’ He said nothing to Karakush, he knew better than to question his most trusted aide. If one lost trust everything fell apart. But he did, a few days later, go and inspect the well, making his way at dawn down the spiral path half carved into steps that encircled and descended deeply downwards.

  At the bottom a cave of sorts had been excavated, was being excavated, from the oolitic limestone. Some thirty feet from the shaft, in a westerly direction, tools discarded indicated a new and slightly narrower hole. So the rumour was right. Confounded, Karakush had been reduced to drilling in another place.

  Still Saladin said nothing to his deputy.

  The work continued. Month after month they dug and chiselled and split rock deeper and deeper. An ingenious second mirror was set up at the foot of the first shaft. This reflected light a short distance to a third mirror above the second shaft.

  Finally at 250 feet down Karakush began to lose faith. The hole was completely dry.

  At 260 feet he called the water diviner. Saladin heard and asked if the well was dry. He asked also why they had started a second shaft.

  Karakush answered carefully. ‘The second shaft is directly below the place indicated by the water . . . expert. The first shaft is deliberately thirty feet east of the right spot. Halfway down that cave you refer to is a reservoir, since I calculate it will take too long to bring water to the surface by a single bucket chain 250 feet long.’

  Saladin nodded and Karakush understood this to be an apology for having questioned him. The diviner could not, however, explain why the hole was still dry. It was a principle of Saladin’s to pursue the same goal whatever the opposition, as long as the original reasons for embarking on that course of action remained. Karakush saw no reason to stop digging.

  At 270 feet they finished work for the day in a dry hole. The next day, by some miracle, it was full of water to a depth of ten feet. It has never been empty since.

  In 1976 the well was closed to the public as the steps had worn into a slope that was tricky and dangerous. I came across a poem that gave some indication of what it was like to descend the old well five centuries after it had been built (though the depth is wrong by a factor of ten – the well is eighty-five metres or 280 feet deep).

  We entered by the broken door,

  atop the high hill

  surrounded by strong walls,

  to keep the city safe.

  Full eight hundred metres deep

  we must descend;

  clinging to the creviced wall,

  down slippery ramp.

  Black abyss on our right.

  I dare not look down.

  Wrapt in silence,

  candles flickering,

  we delved those inner depths

  with unknown steps,

  down until there seemed no more

  way, and uncounted ages had passed.

  But wait,

  one bush, and into its tangled branches

  we must slide, ever down

  to that clear pool beneath

  where the coins shine.

  So many before us

  had ventured here?

  And from how long ago?

  Giza El Aala, 1973–4

  8 • Shajarat al-Durr, shadow warrioress

  The lower lip despises the upper lip. Ethiopian proverb

  The long era of Islamic rule over the Nile continued. Many of the Sultans were bad and quite a few mad – but only one was a woman. In AD 1250 Shajarat al-Durr became the first and only Sultana of Egypt. Her life is even more venomous and convoluted than Cleopatra’s, whom she perhaps rivalled in looks, as she certainly did in ambition. Shajarat’s life was seriously complicated: she ruled after the death of her first husband, then murdered her second husband (she was his second but most important wife), but then she was killed by a slave woman owned by the first wife . . . of the second husband!

  They said Shajarat al-Durr was born more beautiful than the moon when it is just reappearing as a sliver of light in the night sky. They said she was as a young woman more exquisite than the remembered flight of doves in the wilderness. She was called the ‘Tree of Pearls’ because she was like a willow adorned with the greatest treasures of mankind. She had a voice so low and seductive, they said, that milk never curdled in a place where she could speak or sing. Shajarat al-Durr had green eyes, blonde hair and skin as white as mare’s milk. Though she was born in Turkmenistan she came from a tribe whose ancestors had migrated west thousands of years earlier, one of the anomalous groups of the white-skinned and blonde-haired that exist in the world. In her life she was quiet and pious and known for never being deceitful.

  She also murdered her way to becoming the ruler of Egypt.

  Shajarat al-Durr started her career as a bondmaid to a rich man. What would she be today? A talented personal assistant? Someone ready of course to sleep their way to the very top. How she made it to the Levant we do not know, but it was there, as a slave, that she was bought and entered the life of Ayyub Salih, an Arab warlord of high standing. But Ayyub’s luck took a turn for the worse, and in 1249 she loyally accompanied him to prison. Not very surprisingly, despite the presence of his mistress turned fourth wife, Ayyub’s health seriously weakened while he was incarcerated. That she, alone of his wives, had accompanied him to his gaol was a sign of her loyalty, and of her steely character.

  A year later everything had changed. Ayyub had recovered his health, stage-managed his release and was Sultan of Egypt – which was now under attack again. The Nile was in danger of being overrun by King Louis IX of France. It was the Mamluks who would defeat him.

  Who were the Mamluks? Recall the loyal slaves of Saladin – Mamluks were slaves from eastern Europe and central Asia who maintained their own extraordinary non-hereditary caste of warriors whose sole purpose was to serve the Islamic Caliphate. They were born as infidels (no Muslim can enslave another) and then offered the chance to make their fame and fortune as mercenaries. In Egypt their base was the fortress on Roda Island, symbolically in the middle of the River Nile in Cairo. Used by the Sultans of Egypt, they gradually achieved such power as to eclipse their nominal slavers.

  They care only about raiding, hunting, horsemanship, skirmishing with rival chieftains, taking booty and invading other countries. Their efforts are all directed towards these activities . . . In this way they have acquired mastery of these skills, which for them take the place of craftsmanship and commerce and constitute their only pleasure, their glory and the subject of all their conversation. Thus they have become in warfare what the Greeks are in philosophy . . .

  The key is in the reference to horsemanship. The Mamluks were, in fact, the mirror imag
e of their one-time oppressors, the Mongols. Many were recruited from the Kipchaks, a Kazakh tribe, some of whom had been driven west by the Mongols to settle in parts of Europe. They were far from the illiterate hooligans certain crusader chronicles have portrayed them as: there is a considerable indigenous Kipchak literature, understandable even now using the Codex Cumanicus, a dictionary compiled by later Christian missionaries. The Kipchaks later absorbed their Mongol neighbours, and also provided the first Mamluk rulers of Egypt – Baiburs and Qalawun. Not that all Mamluks were Kipchaks; even before the later reliance on blond Circassians, Albanians and Balkan slaves there were Prussian Mamluks. Any sufficiently warlike tribe seemed able to convert to the military meritocracy practised by the Mamluks.

  It has long puzzled historians, the wave after wave of warlike tribes rushing westwards from the Eurasian steppes. The answer is simple enough when you pause to consider it: horses. The steppes, like the American West during its brief tenure under the Plains Indians, were perfect horse country. The steppe tribes were able to leverage their natural warlike tendencies a hundredfold through mounted assaults on the largely foot-bound western peoples. The Mongols and, in sincere imitation, the Mamluks were masters not only of the mounted attack but also of the mounted attack by massed archers. The methods of controlling a battle were simple – banners carried by each war group were visible to the commander, who could, at a glance, tell how his troops were performing. Add to that a small manual of tactics that revolved around superior horsepower and you have a virtually unbeatable force. The tactics added vastly to the possibilities of battle. Outflanking is easy if your men are so used to fighting on horses that can outrace anyone over any terrain. The fake retreat can even derive from a real retreat when the enemy is being stretched in pursuit, so you never suffer the psychological difficulty of stopping a retreat turning into a rout – that age-old military problem. If you can retreat faster than they can attack, you can regroup and counter-attack when they are slogging up the hill to meet you.