Volume 3 / Book 6 — CHAP. XVIII. Inquiry about the Possibility of changing the Course of the Nile—Cause of the Nucta.

It has been thought a problem that merited to be considered, Whether it was possible to turn the current of the Nile into the Red Sea, and thereby to famish Egypt? I think the question should more properly be, Whether the water of the Nile, running into Egypt, could be so diminished, or diverted, that it should never be sufficient to prepare that country for annual cultivation? Now to this it is answered, That there seems to be no doubt but that it is possible, because the Nile, and all the rivers that run into it, and all the rains that swell those rivers, fall in a country fully two miles above the level of the sea; therefore, it cannot be denied, that there is level enough to divert many of the rivers into the Red Sea, the Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, or, perhaps, still easier, by turning the course of the river Abiad till it meets the level of the Niger, or pass through the desert into the Mediterranean.

Lalibala, as we have already seen, attempted the former method with great appearance of success; and this prince, to whom the accidental circumstances of the time had given extraordinary powers, and who was otherwise a man of great capacity and resolution, might, if he had persevered, completed his purpose, the thing being possible, that is, no law of nature against it, and all difficulties are only relative to the powers vested in those who are engaged in the undertaking. Alexander the Great would have succeeded—his father Philip would have miscarried—Lewis the XIV. would perhaps have accomplished it, as easily as he united the two seas by the canal of Languedoc, and with the same engineers; but he is the only European prince of whom this could have been expected with any degree of probability.

Alphonso Albuquerque, viceroy of India, is said to have wrote frequently to the king of Portugal, Don Emanuel, to send him some pioneers from Madeira, people accustomed to level ground, and prepare it for sugar-canes, with whose assistance he was to execute that enterprise of turning the Nile into the Red Sea, and famishing Egypt. His son mentions this very improbable story in his175 father’s commentaries; and he says further, that he imagines it might have been done, because it was a known fact that the Arabs in Upper Egypt, when in rebellion against the Soldan, used to interrupt the course of the canal between Cosseir on the Red Sea, and Kenna in Egypt.

Tellez and le Grande, mentioning the two opinions of the father and the son upon this subject, give great praise to the son at the expence of the father, but without reason.

In the first place, we have seen that the utmost exertion Don Emanuel could make was to send 400 men to assist the king of Abyssinia, whose country was then almost conquered by the Turks and Moors. It was not then from India we were to expect the execution of so arduous an undertaking. And as to the second, the younger Albuquerque is mistaken egregiously in point of fact, for there never was a canal between Cosseir and Kenna, the goods from the Red Sea were transported by a caravan, and are so yet. We have seen, in the beginning of this work, the account of my travelling thither from Kenna; this intercourse probably was often interrupted by the Arabs in the days he mentions, and so it is still; but it is the caravan, not the canal, that is stopt by the Arabs, for no canal ever existed.

The sum of all this story is, a long and violent persecution followed the conquest of Egypt by the Saracens, who were accustomed to live in tents, which, with their dislike to the Christian churches, made them destroy all the buildings of stone, as also persecute the masons, whom they considered as being employed in the advancement of idolatry: these unhappy workmen, therefore, fled in numbers to Lalibala, an Abyssinian prince of their own religion, who employed them in many stupendous works for diverting the Nile into the Red Sea, or the Indian Ocean, which I have already described, and which exist entire to this day176.

This idea, indeed, had subsisted as long as the royal family lived in the south part of Abyssinia, in Shoa, in the neighbourhood, and sometimes on the very spot where the attempt was made. When the court, however, removed northward, and the princes, no longer confined in Geshen, (a mountain in Amhara) were imprisoned, as they now are, in Wechné, in Belessen, near Gondar, these transactions of remote times and places were gradually forgot, and often misrepresented; though, so far down as the beginning of this century, we find Tecla Haimanout I.177 (king of Abyssinia) expostulating by a letter with the basha of Cairo upon the murder of the French envoy M. du Roule, and threatening the Turkish regency, that, it they persisted in such misbehaviour, he would make the Nile the instrument of his vengeance, the keys of which were in his hand, to give them famine or plenty, as they should deserve of him. In my time, no sensible man in Abyssinia believed that such a thing was possible, and few that it had ever been attempted.

As for the opinion of those, that the Nile may be turned into the Red Sea from Nubia or Egypt, it deserves no answer. What could be the motive of such an undertaking? Would the Egyptians suffer such an operation to be carried on in their own country for the sake of starving themselves? and if the country had been taken from them by an enemy, still it could not be the interest of that conqueror to let the inhabitants, now become his subjects, perish, and much less to reduce them to the necessity of so doing by such an undertaking.

Much has been wrote about a miraculous drop, or dew, called Gotta, or Nucta, which falls in Egypt precisely on St John’s day, and is believed to be the peculiar gift of that saint; it stops the plague, causes dough to leaven, or ferment, and announces a speedy and plentiful inundation.

I hope my reader will not expect that I should enter into the discussion of the part St John is thought to have in this event, my business is only with natural causes.

Memphis and Alexandria, and all the ancient cities of Lower Egypt, stand upon cisterns, into which the Nile, upon its overflowing, was admitted, and there remained till it had deposited all its sediment, and became fit for drinking. These cisterns are now full of filth; though in disrepair, the water, when the Nile is high insinuates itself into them through the broken conduits.

In February and March the sun is on its approach to the zenith of one extremity of Egypt, and of course has a very considerable influence upon the other. The Nile being now fallen low, the water in the cisterns putrifies, and the river itself has lost all its volatile and finer parts by the continued action of a vertical sun; so that, instead of being subject to evaporation, it becomes daily more and more inclined to putrefaction. About St John’s day178 it receives a plentiful mixture of the fresh and fallen rain from Ethiopia, which dilutes and refreshes the almost corrupted river, and the sun near at hand exerts its natural influence upon the water, which now is become light enough to be exhaled, though it has still with it a mixture of the corrupted fluid, so that it rises but a small height during the first few days of the inundation, then falls down and returns to the earth in plentiful and abundant dews; and that this is really so, I am persuaded from what I observed myself at Cairo.

My quadrant was placed on the flat roof, or terrass, of a gentleman’s house where I was taking observations; I had gone down to supper, and soon after returned, when I found the brass limb of the quadrant covered with small drops of dew, which were turned to a perfect green, or copperas colour; and this green had so corroded the brass in an hour’s time, that the marks remained on the limb of the quadrant for six months; and the cavities made by the corrosion were plainly discernible through a microscope.

It is in February, March, or April only, that the plague begins in Egypt. I do not believe it an endemial disease, I rather think it comes from Constantinople with merchandise, or passengers, and at this time of the year that the air having attained a degree of putridity proper to receive it by the long absence of dews, the infection is thereto joined, and continues to rage till the period I just spoke of, when it is suddenly stopped by the dews occasioned by a refreshing mixture of rain-water, which is poured out into the Nile at the beginning of the inundation.

The first and most remarkable sign of the change brought about in the air is the sudden stopping of the plague at Saint John’s day; every person, though shut up from society for months before, buys, sells, and communicates with his neighbour without any sort of apprehension; and it was never known, as far as I could learn upon fair inquiry, that one fell sick of the plague after this anniversary: it will be observed I don’t say died; there are, I know, examples of that, though I believe but few; the plague is not always a disease that suddenly terminates, it often takes a considerable time to come to a head, appearing only by symptoms; so that people taken ill, under the most putrid influence of the air, linger on, struggling with the disease which has already got such hold that they cannot recover; but what I say, and mean is, that no person is taken ill of the plague so as to die after the dew has fallen in June; and no symptoms of the plague are ever commonly seen in Egypt but in those spring months already mentioned, the greater part of which are totally destitute of moisture.

I think the instance I am going to give, which is universally known, and cannot be denied, brings this so home that no doubt can remain of the origin of this dew, and its powerful effects upon the plague.

The Turks and Moors are known to be predestinarians; they believe the hour of man’s death is so immutably fixed that nothing can either advance or defer it an instant. Secure in this principle, they expose in the market-place, immediately after Saint John’s day, the clothes of the many thousands that have died during the late continuance of the plague, all which imbibe the moist air of the evening and the morning, are handled, bought, put on, and worn without any apprehension of danger; and though these consist of furs, cotton, silk, and woollen cloths, which are stuffs the most retentive of the infection, no accident happens to those who wear them from this their happy confidence.

I shall here sum up all that I have to say relating to the river Nile, with a tradition handed down to us by Herodotus, the father of ancient history, upon which moderns less instructed have grafted a number of errors. Herodotus179 says, that he was informed by the secretary of Minerva’s treasury, that one half of the water of the Nile flowed due north into Egypt, while the other half took an opposite course, and flowed directly south into Ethiopia.

The secretary was probably of that country himself, and seems by his observation to have known more of it than all the ancients together. In fact, we have seen that, between 13° and 14° N. latitude, the Nile, with all its tributary streams, which have their rise and course within the tropical rains, falls down into the flat country, (the kingdom of Sennaar), which is more than a mile lower than the high country in Abyssinia, and thence, with a little inclination, it runs into Egypt.

Again, in lat. 9° in the kingdom of Gingero, the Zebeé runs south, or south-east, into the inner Ethiopia, as do also many other rivers, and, as I have heard from the natives of that country, empty themselves into a lake, as those on the north of the Line do into the lake Tzana; thence distribute their waters to the east and to the west. These become the heads of great rivers that run through the interior countries of Ethiopia (corresponding to the sea-coast of Melinda and Mombaza) into the Indian Ocean, whilst, on the westward, they are the origin of the vast streams that fall into the Atlantic, passing through Benin and Congo, southward of the river Gambea, and the Sierraleona.

In short, the periodical rains from the tropic of Capricorn to the Line, being in equal quantity with those that fall between the Line and the tropic of Cancer, it is plain, that if the land of Ethiopia sloped equally from the Line southward and northward, half of the rains that fall on each side would go north, and half south, but as the ground from 5° N. declines all southward, it follows that the river which runs to the southward must be equal to those that run to the northward, plus the rain that falls in the 5° north latitude, where the ground begins to slope to the southward, and there can be little doubt this is at least one of the reasons why there are in the southern continent so many rivers larger than the Nile that run both into the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

From this very true and sensible relation handed to us by Herodotus, from the authority of the secretary of Minerva, the Nubian geographer has framed a fiction of his own, which is, that the river Nile divides itself into two branches, one of which runs into Egypt northward, and one through the country of the negroes westward, into the Atlantic Ocean. And this opinion has been greedily adopted by M. Ludolf180, who cites the authority of Leo Africanus, and that of his monk Gregory, both of them, in these respects, fully as much mistaken as the Nubian geographer himself. M. Ludolf, after quoting a passage of Pliny, tells us that he had consulted the famous Bochart upon that subject whether the Nile and the Niger (the river that runs through Nigritia into the Western Ocean) were one and the same river? The famous Bochart answers him peremptorily in the true spirit of a schoolman,—That there is nothing more certain than that the Niger is a part of the river Nile. With great submission, however, I must venture to say there is not the least foundation for this assertion.

Pliny seems the first who gave rise to it, but he speaks modestly upon the subject, giving his reasons as he goes along. “Nigri fluvio eadem natura, quæ Nilo, calamum & papyrum, & easdem gignit animantes, iisdemque temporibus augescit.181” That it has the same soil from which the Nile takes its colour, the water is the same in taste, produces the same reeds, and especially the papyrus; has the same animals in it, such as the crocodile and hippopotamus, and overflows at the same season; this is saying nothing but what may be applied with equal truth to every other river between the northern tropic and the Line; but the other two authors, the Nubian and the monk, assert each of them a direct falsehood. The Nubian says, that if the Nile carried all the rains that fall in Abyssinia down into Egypt, the people would not be safe in their houses. To this I answer by a matter of fact, the map of the whole course of the Nile is before the reader; and it is plain from thence, that the whole rain in Abyssinia must now go, and ever has gone down into Egypt, and yet the people are very safe in their houses, and very seldom is the whole land of Egypt compleatly overflowed: and it is by no means less certain from the same inspection, that, unless a river as large as the Nile, constantly full, having its rise in countries subject to perpetual rains, and pouring its stream, which never decreases, into that river, as the Abiad does at Halfaia, all the waters in Abyssinia collected in the Nile would not be sufficient to pass its scanty stream through the burning deserts of Nubia and the Barabra, so as it should be of any utility when arrived in Egypt.

The next falsehood in point of fact is that of the monk Gregory, who says that this left branch of the Nile parts from it, after having passed the kingdom of Dongola into Nubia, after which it runs through Elvah, and so down the desert into the Mediterranean, between the Cyrenaicum and Alexandria. Now, first, we know, from the authority of all antiquity, that there is not a desert more destitute of rivers than that of the Thebaid. This want of water (not the distance) made the voyage to the temple of Jupiter Ammon an enterprise next to desperate, and so worthy of Alexander, who never, however, met a river in his way; had there been there such a stream, there could be no doubt that the banks of it would have been fully as well inhabited as those of the Nile, and the Thebaid consequently no desert. Besides the caravans, which for ages passed between Egypt and Sennaar, must have seen this river, and drunk of it; so must the travellers, in the beginning of this century, Poncet and M. du Roule. They were both at Elvah; and, passing through the dreary deserts of Selima, they must have gone along its side, and crossed it, where it parted from the Nile in their journey to Sennaar. Whereas we know they never saw running water from the time they left the Nile at Siout in Egypt, till they fell in again with it at Moscho, during which period they had nothing but well water, which they carried in skins with them.

The district of Elvah is the Oasis Magna and Oasis Parva of the ancients; large plentiful springs breaking out in the middle of the burning sands, and running constantly without diminution, have invited inhabitants to flock around them. These conducting off the water that spills over the fountain by trenches, the neighbouring lands have quickly produced a plentiful vegetation: gardens and verdure are spread on every side, large groves of palm tree have been planted, and the overflowings of every fountain have produced a little paradise, like so many beautiful and fruitful islands amidst an immense ocean.

The coast of the Mediterranean, from the Cyrenaicum or Ptolemaid (that is, the coast from Bengazi, or Derna, to Alexandria) is well known by the shipping of every nation; but what pilot or passenger ever saw this magnificent watering-place in that desert coast, where this branch of the Nile comes down into the Mediterranean? Besides, the author of this fable betrays his ignorance in the very beginning, where he derives this left branch of the Nile from the principal river, and says, that, after passing the kingdom of Dongola, it enters Nubia. Now, when it entered Dongola it must have already passed Nubia, for Dongola is the capital of the Barabra, every inch of which is to the northward of Nubia. I do not know worse guides in the geography of Africa than Leo Africanus and the Nubian geographer. I believe them both impostors, and the commentators upon them have greatly increased by their own conjectures, the confusion and errors which the text has everywhere occasioned.

As far as I have been ever able to learn, by a very diligent and cautious inquiry, from the inhabitants of the neighbouring countries, I believe the origin of the Niger is in lat. 12° north, and in long. 30° from the meridian of Greenwich nearly; that it is composed of various rivers falling down the sides of very high mountains, called Dyre and Tegla; and runs straight west into the heart of Africa. I conclude also, that this river (though it has abundant supply from every mountain) is very much diminished by evaporation, running in a long course upon the very limits of the tropical rains, when entire, under the name of Senega; or, perhaps, when divided under those of Senega and Gambia, it loses itself in the Atlantic Ocean. I conceive also, that, as Pliny says, it has the same taste and natural productions with the Nile, because it runs in the same climate, and like that river owes, if not its existence, yet certainly its increase and fulness to the same cause, the tropical rains in the northern hemisphere falling from high mountains.

I hope I have now fully exhausted every subject worthy of inquiry as to the place where the fountains of the Nile are situated, also as to its course and various names, the different countries through which it flows, the true cause, and every thing curious attending its inundations; and that as, in old times, Caput Nili Quærere, to seek the source of the Nile, was a proverb in use to signify the impossibility of an attempt, it may hereafter be applied, with as much reason, to denote the inutility of any such undertakings.