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

by Twigger, Robert

  I gave them money, about four pounds, which was a lot for that kind of place, and took the older boy’s mobile number, explaining that I wanted to take some pictures of the act. Two days later I was waiting in the same place at four in the afternoon but they didn’t turn up – and after answering my first call they did not return my calls or pick up when I phoned. The owner of the café, a man with a cast in one eye, remembered me and asked what I was doing as he riffled through an immense wad of grubby currency. He told me that the magician boys were homeless and the phone was probably stolen. They had got scared. ‘But he can tell you how they do those tricks.’ He gestured at an incredibly thin man in a grey galabiya sucking on a waterpipe with what looked like a toothless mouth. It wasn’t – the man smiled and revealed a couple of blackened stumps. He beckoned me over, patting the plastic chair next to him. He was keen to talk, wired on tea and shisha. He told me he knew about these tricks from years of watching. ‘Only watching.’ Judging by the condition of his teeth he looked like he’d done his share of fire eating too.

  ‘So why do you think they always come here?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because this spot is famous for such fire acts since the time of the first Arabs, even before, since the fire-eating Persian priests came to Egypt. I tell you I learnt as a boy all those tricks – though those lads are good. Take the fire eating – that’s easy as long as you exhale all the time, not too strong or people can see. Then when you shut your mouth on the flame it goes out instantly. As long as the gasoline isn’t dripping it won’t hurt – and you keep your mouth wet drinking water and yoghurt beforehand, all day in fact.’

  ‘What about biting off the steel?’

  ‘That was iron, not steel. They get it from old barrels. Beforehand he’s bent that iron back and forth a hundred times to weaken it so that it will drop off almost if you touch it. Granted, it’s red hot when he grips it in his teeth, but if you don’t touch the lips or gums the teeth can hold something very hot for a second or two. When he spits it out he is really just dropping it from his mouth with a little extra force by swinging his head. Easy to make a mistake on that one though, I would say.’

  ‘But the burning coals – how was that done?’

  ‘Without you seeing, he’s dropped some pieces of soft pine in among the coals. It burns up and goes as black as charcoal but remains soft – that’s why he uses a fork. The only one that he can stick the fork into is a piece of black pine. Unlike charcoal it loses heat very quickly and you can chew it up and swallow it easily. But there’s one they didn’t do which I always like. If you see someone drinking boiling lead this is how they do it – they add bismuth [same word in Arabic] and tin to the lead – this makes it melt at less than the boiling point of water. So they cast a spoon from this metal and produce it as an ordinary teaspoon. They demonstrate by stirring some tea with it (which it will just about stand). Then the showman melts the spoon into a ladle over the brazier and pretends this is white hot. Then he takes the molten metal into his mouth where it cools and hardens again.’

  ‘Isn’t it poisonous?’

  He laughed. ‘These boys don’t care about such things as long as they get a pound for it. The older one is ill anyway, he has bilharzia.’

  One of the customers, who was listening in, raised his lips from his waterpipe to say: ‘When he was a boy he played with water too much, now he plays with fire.’

  Part Four

  THE NILE EXTENDED

  Raw steak and Napoleon

  1 • The Fountain of Eternal Youth

  A deer goes to the clever hunter and a woman goes to the man who waits. Nubian proverb

  Herodotus mentions, quite casually, in his Histories that the Fountain of Eternal Youth is in Ethiopia and attributes to it the extreme longevity of the Ethiopian people. Is it any surprise that one source of the Nile, the Blue Nile, is also in Ethiopia?

  The Blue Nile feeds the White Nile. We’ve seen how it creates the lower Nile through the massive influx of summer floodwater. In an image central to this book, it backs up the river near Khartoum for five miles or more, reversing the current of the White Nile and spewing out sediment – turning the White Nile red.

  So the Blue Nile is just as much the ‘source of the Nile’ as the White Nile is. Much of the confusion in ancient times stems from not knowing that there were two equally important sources. True information about both was seen as contradictory rather than equally true.

  But the Blue Nile as the water of life? There are rivers such as the Ganges that have endemic microbial infestations that actually aid healing or at least stop one from becoming ill from drinking their otherwise dirty waters. The Nile is something like this. Swift flowing, when not dammed, there is evidence of a mild antiseptic effect.

  However, nothing suggested that the ‘Little Blue Nile’, the river which feeds Lake Tana which in turn becomes the Blue Nile proper, was anything more than another spring. I naturally approached it with high hopes but little real conviction. The water of eternal youth is a persistent myth across many cultures. It appears in the Alexander Romance, a collection of legends about Alexander the Great, where the mysterious guide to Moses, Khidr, who also appears in the Koran and in much oral storytelling material in the East, knows the way to the fabulous fountain.

  The hunt for eternal youth shifted to the New World with the discovery of the Americas, where Juan Ponce de León was sure he had found it. Bimini in the Caribbean became associated with the fountain of youth and even David Copperfield, the magician, has recently got in on the act, claiming that scientists are testing the waters in his Caribbean mini-archipelago (which cost him $50 million) that are supposedly capable of rejuvenating . . . leaves. But then David Copperfield is the man who paid Claudia Schiffer $100,000 to say she was engaged to him.

  That the Fountain of Eternal Youth is a useful symbol, a mythical thought experiment, and is not meant to be taken literally doesn’t occur to otherwise intelligent folk as often as it should.

  Eternal life is often cited as a mixed blessing. The tattered old crow who drinks from the fountain and cannot die though he wishes to. The cursed sailors who rampage around the earth with no peace – most lately in Pirates of the Caribbean 4 – are new examples of the myth’s fecundity.

  The Tis Abay is actually the waterfall (also called the Tissisat Falls) usually taken to be the start of the Blue Nile. Now its thunder has been stolen by another hydroelectric plant, and only on odd Sundays and when foreign dignitaries arrive do they turn on the water to make the falls smoke as they did when the early Jesuit explorers first reported them.

  Interestingly, Gish Abay – the ‘calf Nile’ – competes as the real source of the Blue Nile as it fills Lake Tana, from which the Blue Nile exits. However, there is no discernible current across the lake from the outlet of the ‘calf Nile’ to the start of the Blue Nile, which for many rules it out (recall the Kagera’s current successfully crossing Lake Victoria). The Gish Abay, or ‘little Abay’, spring waters are associated with healing. If mythology is a cartoon version of reality designed to burn into our cultural retina, what better way to ensure that a spring with healing powers remains unviolated than to credit it with being the source of eternal life?

  The sacred spring of Gish Abay, which is about twenty-two miles from Lake Tana near the town of Sekala, lies in the grounds of a monastery. I had been warned at the guesthouse that I should not eat that day. The thin, serious man at reception who sat over his huge bookings tome like a man reading a great Bible wagged his skinny finger and said, ‘Go early, for they will not believe you have not eaten if you come after noon.’

  Something in me, the same kind of silliness that makes me put false information on the pointless forms you have to fill in for joining video-rental clubs and the like, drove me to avoid breakfast – in case of spies – but to munch secretly and joyously on a Cadbury’s hazelnut bar before I set off. How could those monks know?

  It was a long walk along dusty ways t
o reach the fabled, rather dilapidated monastery. I arrived at 8 a.m. but there was already a microbus disgorging some irritable Germans – who were no doubt missing their morning coffee. I felt pretty good myself because as I walked I had kept up my spirits with some winegums and another chocolate bar.

  I was relieved of several hundred birr at the entrance to the monastery and more money at the wooden fence by the marsh that signified the source of the Blue Nile. I could see the baptismal pool where I planned to swim later. The spring itself emerged from a rusty pipe, about an inch in diameter. It was housed in a stone dwelling with a low wooden door. There was a cheerful guard on the door – a monk with a Bible.

  ‘Pure?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You understand no food?’

  ‘Yes, no food.’

  He looked away. ‘300 birr.’

  ‘But I’ve already paid!’

  ‘Perhaps you have already eaten too!’

  He knew. Maybe I had chocolate stains on my teeth.

  ‘I just want to take some water for luck.’ I showed him my French lemonade bottle with its wire-bound pop cork.

  The hard, Bible-holding hand barred my way. I paid and ducked in.

  The water looked clean enough as it dribbled into the bottle. As the guard wasn’t looking I took a swig, without siphoning it. It had to be clean, this high up the food chain. And moving water is usually fine as long as it has no floating matter in it; it’s the stagnant water that gets you. This is what I always tell myself when I’m thirsty. Still, the water had a slight seaweedy smell, somewhat iodine-like too.

  Then I stripped off behind some white-and-green-robed Ethiopian pilgrims who were about to be baptised. The stone steps were slippy, slimy. The water was cold. Cold! It was, I thought, markedly different too from the White Nile water. It wasn’t the clarity of the water so much as the air around me, the atmosphere. Probably the altitude contributed, but I felt energised, revitalised. Yes, healthy. I could see my limbs distorted in the water, I had the feeling I was suddenly tiny, floating on the amniotic fluid of the Nile, a child about to be reborn.

  2 • The lands of Prester John

  A camel resembles the land where it lives. Somali proverb

  We have seen how the Islamic world consolidated its grip on the Nile through Egypt – going both up the Nile and in from the Red Sea coast from the seventh century onwards. Christianity was now on the run. Coptic Christianity had made its way before Islam, or was driven ahead of Islam. In Ethiopia it found a stronghold. Monks lived in caves high up on cliff faces, hauled themselves up in baskets banging against a rock wall 200 feet above the ground. Churches were carved from rock. This was the land of Prester John, the mythical Christian king of the East. Here the Copts would be safe, or so they thought.

  In the sixteenth century Europe woke up. It decided to go looking for things. Africa was an obvious choice, as was America. Mythical rulers were as attractive as lost cities. Raleigh gave his life looking for El Dorado. Others searched for Prester John. What they found was almost stranger than the myth.

  I first came across the Prester John myth, as many do, in T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Conversation Galante’. Then there was the John Buchan novel Prester John – though it was set in South Africa, not Ethiopia, the traditional location of this mythical king. Rumours of a Christian king in the East undoubtedly spread from the Coptic Church’s presence in Ethiopia, perhaps magnified by the distorting echo provided by the conversion to Islam of all the surrounding lands.

  But it was the Portuguese explorers of the sixteenth century who believed, when they encountered the Christian kings of Abyssinia, that they were in fact meeting the royal family of Prester John. In Francisco Álvarez’s 1540 work Ho Preste Joam das Indias. Verdadera informacam das terras do Preste Joam we discover that before they die the sons of Prester John are ‘shut up in a mountain and heard of no more’. Burial alive? Certainly, for in Ethiopia Europeans would find a culture far odder than they could imagine.

  These Portuguese explorers, burning with a missionary purpose, had entered Ethiopia from the Red Sea. Unable to penetrate the upper Nile through Islamic Egypt, Europeans now attempted to reach the land of its source from the Indian Ocean coast of Africa. As we have discovered, though the White Nile is the longer river, the Blue Nile supplies 85 per cent of the water in the high flood of summer, the flood on which Egyptian agriculture depended. So, in the hunt for mythical sources, the source of the floodwater was found.

  During these great bursts of exploratory activity, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the obsession arose that there was a Christian kingdom hidden in the East. In a sense there was – Ethiopia – which followed the same Coptic religion as the Christians in Egypt. In 1621, expecting to find Prester John, Pedro Páez, a Jesuit missionary, found instead one source of the Nile, that of the Blue Nile. He also encountered a Christian people who wore the entrails of cows as ornaments, who carried on their spears a fragment of red cloth bearing the testicles of the men they had killed, who put out the eyes of their captives before any interrogation. One source of the Red Nile had certainly been found.

  The Portuguese, under Vasco da Gama, had circumnavigated Africa and found their way to Abyssinia in the closing months of the fourteenth century. They then began the task of establishing a trading presence on the Red Sea coast. This coincided with a Muslim invasion in 1527 from Danakil country led by the imam Ahmed Gran, ‘the Left-Handed’, who with 10,000 men turned what was possibly a looting expedition into a religious war. The Abyssinian King, in his desperation, called for help from the only other Christian nation he knew of, the Portuguese, who in 1541 sent 400 musketeers under Cristóvão da Gama. By the time the men with guns arrived the Abyssinian King, Lebna Dengal, had perished as a fugitive and all seemed lost to the Islamic world. As many ancient manuscripts dating back to the first arrival of Coptic priests in the fifth and sixth centuries were destroyed by Gran’s invasion, we can be sure that the Portuguese arrival probably saved a good deal of the cultural artefacts of the Ethiopian Church.

  Cristóvão da Gama, whom Richard Burton called ‘the most chivalrous man of a chivalrous age’, was the son of the explorer Vasco da Gama. When Ahmed Gran heard of his intentions, he sent a messenger to da Gama with instructions to quit Ethiopia or submit to his rule. The message came with a present – a monk’s habit. What kind of insult was that? Perhaps the implication was that da Gama was no warrior and would be better off praying for deliverance like the other monks in Ethiopia. Da Gama was up to this game, however, and sent back a refusal, a counter-suggestion that Gran leave or submit, and the gift of a large mirror and a pair of tweezers – the implication being that Gran was a woman who needed his eyebrows plucking.

  Gran was far from pleased with this message and sent for a thousand musketeers from southern Arabia courtesy of the Ottoman Empire. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, da Gama’s men fought on, only to discover that Lebna Dengal’s son and successor King Gelawdewos had only sixty men to his name and was still in hiding up in the hills.

  After skirmishes and small battles the Portuguese managed a major confrontation with Gran. Here the valiant da Gama was shot, his arm broken, and he was captured by the ‘Left-Handed’ warrior Ahmed Gran. The dreaded tweezers were produced and Gran pulled out every one of da Gama’s beard hairs. This did not have the desired effect, so worse torture was applied: he was strung up by his broken arm which was agitated until it tore apart; he was gashed and mutilated and his tongue removed. Still he did not recant or change religion. Finally his head was removed and thrown in a spring, which according to legend thereafter provided health to the sick. Hearing about the reputation of the spring Ahmed, with an unerring sense of the despicable, ordered a dead dog to be thrown into it and a large rock placed on top to block it up.

  That done, Ahmed Gran felt rather pleased with himself and assumed that the war was over. He sent home all but 200 of his Arabian musketeers and retired to Lake Tana to enjoy the relative c
alm of the rainy season.

  It seems appropriate that the source of the Nile should be the scene of a bloody battle, one that determined the precise extent of the religious map of Africa.

  Queen Sabla Wangel and her son Gelawdewos, encouraged by the remaining Portuguese and by the stock of arms they still carried, rallied and went to do battle. It was fiercely fought on both sides with many falling. There is a persistent story that one Portuguese warrior was so intent on avenging the hideous mauling of da Gama that he rode with his loaded arquebus right through Ahmed’s front line until he could fire at almost point-blank range on the Muslim leader. The wounded imam fell and his troops turned and fled.

  One account of the battle states that a champion Ottoman fighter refused to run away with the others. Once he saw that

  the Moors were giving way, he determined to die; with bared arms, and a long broadsword in his hand, he swept a great space in front of him; he fought like a valiant cavalier, for five Abyssinian horsemen were on him, who could neither make him yield nor slay him. One of them attacked him with a javelin; he wrenched it from his hand, he houghed [hamstrung] another’s horse, and none dared approach him. There came up a Portuguese horseman, by name Gonçalo Fernandes, who charged him spear in hand and wounded him sorely; the Turk grasped it [the spear] so firmly that before he could disengage himself the Moor gave him a great cut above the knee that severed all the sinews and crippled him; finding himself wounded, he drew his sword and killed him.

  By 1543 the Arab-backed invaders had been repulsed and Ethiopia remained a Coptic anomaly in a Muslim east Africa. Prester John had triumphed.

  3 • A kind of Blue

  The morning is for work; the rest of the day depends on the person.

  Ethiopian proverb