Read Online Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River by Robert Twigger - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Twigger
Ads: Link
by competition with this Nile-dwelling primate, over a million years ago. Perhaps it was a near-run thing between baboons and early Homo sapiens too.
There is a compelling reason to believe that all our unfounded fears are the vestigial fears suffered by previous incarnations, evolutionaryforms. We deprive fears of their power by noting and observing them. Drawing pictures of them. In the end we may grow quite fond of them, give their form to something we venerate. Perhaps the baboon-bodied creatures painted on rock were tribute paid to an ancient enemy.
This was an intriguing river meander, a sort of baboon version of Bruce Chatwin’s thesis that a giant cat, Dinofelis , had threatened early man with extinction. Baboon paintings link directly with Thoth, though any connection with the Nile is indirect. The ancient Egyptians had a god of the flood, Hapi, but the Nile itself was simply known as Iterw – the river. Osiris, the Egyptian god most associated with the afterlife (and interestingly depicted as a greenman, thus linking up with greenman myths in Europe), is sometimes associated with the Nile, but the river’s sheer ubiquity seems to have caused the ancient Egyptians to overlook it.
All scribes worshipped Thoth, as he invented writing. So, in a book containing the written stories of the Nile, Thoth is the god to invoke here. The god who brought us, just as the Egyptians did, writing – as well as the hermetic tradition (Hermes was the Greek version of Thoth) of hidden knowledge, wisdom, mysticism, alchemy. It was Thoth who made sure that neither good nor evil had a decisive victory over the other.
There is an ancient Egyptian story which refers to a text known as the Book of Thoth. This book contains a spell allowing one to understand the speech of animals. The book was originally hidden at the bottom of the Nile, so the story goes, guarded by seven serpents. An Egyptian prince tried to steal the box containing the Book of Thoth, but when he did, calamity rained down upon him, his children and his children’s children. The message was simple: the knowledge of the gods is not for humans to obtain except at their own peril.
The baboons were skulking by as we drifted off that afternoon. No need to purify this water: I tasted its riverine stinkiness when Henry purposely flipped the raft on ‘Easy Rider’, a big friendly wave of a Class 4 rapid, a glossy green tongue of powerful water ending in a confusion of white foam and laughing people in helmets and orange lifejackets. Before this burst of excitement we’d watched a baboon troop, perhaps about thirty, loping along the bank like young thugs in an urban graffiti zone, looking for action, unworried, bigger than you’d think.
7 • Red sweat
The hippo coming out of the great lake licks the dew on the grass . Ethiopian proverb
Baboons may be the most feared by river guides, but the lumbering hippopotamus is supposed to kill more people. Yet, when I delved into the statistics to find the Nile dweller that was the most deadly, crocs also came up. And then I began to think – how exactly are these stats compiled? Some places, such as southern Sudan, don’t even know how many people are resident, let alone how many are bashed by hippos or gnawed on by giant crocs. Leave the dubious numbers behind and wade on, paying due attention of course to both hippos and crocs.
Though there are plenty of Nile crocodiles on the Nile even in Egypt – most of them being stopped by Lake Nasser – there are no longer any hippos. They were once so widespread as to be worshipped by the ancient Egyptians, along with the baboon-headed Thoth, and feared – Menes, the first ruler of the First Dynasty, the first Pharaoh in effect, was snatched and killed by a hippopotamus. The last one disappeared on the lower Nile in the early twentieth century after the construction of the first, British-designed dam at Aswan in 1900. Flaubert saw hippos when he travelled up the Nile in 1849,
There is a compelling reason to believe that all our unfounded fears are the vestigial fears suffered by previous incarnations, evolutionaryforms. We deprive fears of their power by noting and observing them. Drawing pictures of them. In the end we may grow quite fond of them, give their form to something we venerate. Perhaps the baboon-bodied creatures painted on rock were tribute paid to an ancient enemy.
This was an intriguing river meander, a sort of baboon version of Bruce Chatwin’s thesis that a giant cat, Dinofelis , had threatened early man with extinction. Baboon paintings link directly with Thoth, though any connection with the Nile is indirect. The ancient Egyptians had a god of the flood, Hapi, but the Nile itself was simply known as Iterw – the river. Osiris, the Egyptian god most associated with the afterlife (and interestingly depicted as a greenman, thus linking up with greenman myths in Europe), is sometimes associated with the Nile, but the river’s sheer ubiquity seems to have caused the ancient Egyptians to overlook it.
All scribes worshipped Thoth, as he invented writing. So, in a book containing the written stories of the Nile, Thoth is the god to invoke here. The god who brought us, just as the Egyptians did, writing – as well as the hermetic tradition (Hermes was the Greek version of Thoth) of hidden knowledge, wisdom, mysticism, alchemy. It was Thoth who made sure that neither good nor evil had a decisive victory over the other.
There is an ancient Egyptian story which refers to a text known as the Book of Thoth. This book contains a spell allowing one to understand the speech of animals. The book was originally hidden at the bottom of the Nile, so the story goes, guarded by seven serpents. An Egyptian prince tried to steal the box containing the Book of Thoth, but when he did, calamity rained down upon him, his children and his children’s children. The message was simple: the knowledge of the gods is not for humans to obtain except at their own peril.
The baboons were skulking by as we drifted off that afternoon. No need to purify this water: I tasted its riverine stinkiness when Henry purposely flipped the raft on ‘Easy Rider’, a big friendly wave of a Class 4 rapid, a glossy green tongue of powerful water ending in a confusion of white foam and laughing people in helmets and orange lifejackets. Before this burst of excitement we’d watched a baboon troop, perhaps about thirty, loping along the bank like young thugs in an urban graffiti zone, looking for action, unworried, bigger than you’d think.
7 • Red sweat
The hippo coming out of the great lake licks the dew on the grass . Ethiopian proverb
Baboons may be the most feared by river guides, but the lumbering hippopotamus is supposed to kill more people. Yet, when I delved into the statistics to find the Nile dweller that was the most deadly, crocs also came up. And then I began to think – how exactly are these stats compiled? Some places, such as southern Sudan, don’t even know how many people are resident, let alone how many are bashed by hippos or gnawed on by giant crocs. Leave the dubious numbers behind and wade on, paying due attention of course to both hippos and crocs.
Though there are plenty of Nile crocodiles on the Nile even in Egypt – most of them being stopped by Lake Nasser – there are no longer any hippos. They were once so widespread as to be worshipped by the ancient Egyptians, along with the baboon-headed Thoth, and feared – Menes, the first ruler of the First Dynasty, the first Pharaoh in effect, was snatched and killed by a hippopotamus. The last one disappeared on the lower Nile in the early twentieth century after the construction of the first, British-designed dam at Aswan in 1900. Flaubert saw hippos when he travelled up the Nile in 1849,
Similar Books
