AND ANOTHER THING
Sinister serpents of old Nile
PAUL JOHNSON
Aphotograph published this week shows Japanese tourists braving a blizzard to visit the Acropolis. It has been snowing in Jordan too. The eastern Mediterranean, and adjacent parts, have had one of the coldest winters on record. Earlier this month a great wind swept over Cairo, killing people and raising an immense dust- storm. We felt the effect many miles up the Nile, where we were cruising, witnessing crimson sunsets of unusual intensity. The wind was cold too, but that I did not mind, disliking heat more. Travelling slowly by boat up the Nile is still one of the most voluptuous of human pleasures, and I enjoy sitting, well muffled up, on deck, making endless watercolour sketches as the banks slip by, with their egrets, camels, donkeys and minarets, and peasants gorgeously attired in lilac and heliotrope, tangerine and sanguine.
Discount tales that the low level of the Nile makes cruising it impossible. Nor is it true, as a Times leader put it, that 'mass marketing of exotic travel has turned the Nile into something as cheaply nasty as the traffic jam at Boulter's Lock'. Of course there are difficulties, and firms which run these cruises should come clean with trav- ellers in advance. But the Nile has always posed problems, as Kitchener and others discovered. The British built barrages, and even shallow-draught boats find negotiating their locks tricky, sometimes impossible, when there is not enough water. Our boat had a tremendous tussle with the lock at Nag' Hammadi and at one point appeared truly stuck, but we got through in the end to a tremendous huzzah. In Egypt, as in Ireland, suspenseful activities always attract a lot of idlers, who generously provide unsolicited advice. I had time to paint a group of these experts as they stood or squatted on the lockside.
Egypt is, or ought to be, the paramount symbol of continuity, since in some ways things have not changed much since the 4th millennium BC, when our detailed know- ledge begins. The country rejects the unsympathetic innovator. When the young pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaton and carried through a reli- gious revolution, he found the Theban establishment frostily unco-operative. So he removed himself and his followers to a horrific sun-trap down river at a place now called Amarna, and there they all lived in a kind of concentration camp. I imagine Akhenaton as a pseudo-intellectual, his head full of half-formulated notions, rather like Prince Charles, but with more will- power.
While he lived, his leading sculptor, Tuthmosis, did a good trade, for it was doubtless the thing for a member of the Amarna ruling class to have the king's head prominently displayed in his villa, just as today images of President Mubarak are found in countless humble homes. When Akhenaton died, the regime collapsed, Tuthmosis disappeared and men with ham- mers disfigured his images of the king, which were found in the rubbish of his stu- dio thousands of years later, alongside unsaleable model heads of Amarna digni- taries. A model of Queen Nefertiti's head was left, literally, on the shelf. The shelf collapsed, centuries later, and the head fell safely onto a soft pile of mud rubble from the walls, and so was preserved, minus one eye. It is now in Berlin, a reminder of the fate of those who try to change Egypt.
The present troubles of the Nile are due in part to another heedless revolutionary, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was that most dangerous political type: the man who is good at public relations and nothing else. The British had treated the Nile with respect. Their barrages, which did not essentially change its annual flooding sys- 'You'll love Nigel, he's a real brick.' tern, culminated at Aswan in a dam, built in 1898-1902, and thereafter twice height- ened.
Nasser was not content with this but, soon after he came to power, announced he would build an enormous new dam which would harness the river and transform the country. When the British and the Ameri- cans declined to finance it, Nasser nation- alised the Suez Canal and brought down on his people a ruinous war. So it was the Rus- sians who built and paid for the High Dam. As we are now learning, they have a long and disastrous record of trying to improve on nature by vainglorious schemes.
Harnessing the Nile in this brutal manner plainly brings some advantages. It supplies large quantities of electricity and, in theory at least, water wherever and whenever it is wanted. About 2 million acres, it is said, have been reclaimed or perennially irrigat- ed. On the other hand, the High Dam has created a huge, straggly expanse called Lake Nasser, which has increased not only the rainfall but, more importantly, the humidity of southern Egypt, making the summer unbearable. The lake offers warm hospitality to malaria-carrying mosquitos and the snails which spread that curse of Egypt, bilharzia. The rich sediment which the annual Nile flood once spread over all its fertile banks and was the key to the country's prosperity for most of its history — as Herodotus noted, the Egyptian peas- ant had an easy time — now settles on the bottom of the lake, and there has been a sinister increase in salinity. Deprived of natural fertiliser, the farmers use expensive chemical ones which, among other noxious side-effects, have produced a dramatic growth of weeds which disfigure the river.
Damming has forced the authorities to remove, at immense cost, some of the mon- uments of ancient Egypt, notably Rameses II's spectacular temple at Abu Simbel. But others are covered by the waters and will never be seen again. Moreover, water leaks from the lake and pops up in unwanted places, undermining and destroying yet more precious relics of the past. The unforeseen consequences of Nasser's hubris seem unending and there may well be other nasty shocks in store.
Far from being deterred by stories of boats getting stuck, people who have never seen the Nile and its matchless treasures should go as soon as possible, while they're all still there.
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