AT 3:30 THE NEXT MORNING, I went out into the street in front of the hotel, where taxis sat lined up at all hours of the day. A few drivers lay curled on the front seats of their cars, wrapped in shawls and hugging themselves in the cool night air. I shook a driver awake and asked him to drive me to the sandy beach beyond Karnak. He blinked wearily at me, sat up, straightened his loosely wrapped turban, and turned the ignition key without asking why I wanted to go to the sandy beach beyond Karnak at this ungodly hour. Like most of the Luxor drivers, he was used to strange requests from foreigners — as long as you paid the fare, they would take you anywhere.
I climbed into the car with my bags, and the driver headed off up the corniche without turning on his headlights. That pleased me — the less attention we attracted, the better. I was trembling with anxiety, certain that someone or something would stop me before I could climb into my boat and row away. But for an occasional brownish light glowing dimly in the windows of houses along the way, the town was black and still beneath the starry sky.
We arrived at the beach. I paid the driver and lugged my bags of supplies and water around the fence to the restaurant. There, in the dark, I saw the figure of Muhammad, the waiter, snoozing in a wicker deck chair on the damp dock. The rowboat sat bobbing in the spot where I had left it the day before — the sight of it there was reassuring and exciting. One dim light on the porch of the restaurant illuminated the restaurant door at the far end of the dock. I jostled Muhammad’s shoulder and he leaped awake, violently tossing up his hands as if in self-defense and looking wildly around to see where exactly he was. He squinted at me through the dark. When he spoke, his voice was muffled. I gave him his forty pounds, fearing that he would insist on helping me with the boat.
He followed me to the edge of the dock, stumbling and yawning, counting his money, talking, and rubbing his eyes. “You work for company, madame?” he said. “Your husband works for company? Where you are going now? You want me to help you take its boat from the river? You want me to row its boat up to the beach? Where is your husband, madame?”
Anxiously, softly, I reassured Muhammad that everything was fine, that all the nice men who were going to help me load the boat onto the truck were waiting just downriver around the next bend, that I would row the boat the mere hundred yards down to them, and we would have absolutely no problem whatsoever removing the boat from the water ourselves and taking it on to Cairo for my dear husband’s big birthday surprise.
The story was absurd. It was completely ridiculous. If I hoped to remove the boat from the river, this would have been the best place to do it, and if there were in fact a bunch of men helping me, why weren’t they here? Why did I have all this luggage with me? Above all, why were we doing this job at three o’clock in the morning in the dark? If I had been Muhammad, I would have been deeply suspicious. I told him that he could rest his mind, that he was very kind, very generous, a nice young man, had done a wonderful job guarding the boat, and that I was comforted by his concern. My anxiety and my eagerness to get away had inspired in me an Egyptian unctuousness.
The sky was showing the slightest suspicion of light, its heavy black transforming perceptibly to a deep navy blue, and the stars were fading fast. I moved toward the boat, tossed my bags into it, lost my footing on the steep dock, and promptly slipped into the tepid river up to my knees.
Muhammad gasped in alarm, his dark figure swaying on the dock. “Madame! I worry for you!”
I placated him with false laughter, thanked him again, and climbed into the boat. He raised his hands at me.
“Don’t worry, Muhammad,” I said.
He took a step closer. “You work for company in Cairo, madame? You know beeble in Cairo? What you are doing in Cairo? I can do any job in Cairo, if you know some beeble who need my work.”
I untied the lines and pushed off from the pier. Muhammad was still talking at me as I lifted the oars into place. “Madame, I can drive the car. Look!” He pulled out his wallet and plucked something from it. “I have driver’s card.”
I began to row away. Muhammad stood at the edge of the dock leaning over the water toward me, waving his driver’s card in the dark. “Can you get me job in Cairo, madame?”
I wished that I could get him a job. “I don’t think so,” I said through the darkness.
“But you can try?”
“I can always try.”
“Can you call me? What your telephone number?”
I knew I was safe now. He was not the least bit curious about this weird mission of mine. Unlike Amr, he could not have cared less about my safety or about what I was really up to. All he wanted was for me to help him, to get him out of Luxor and his dreary job working for that know-it-all of a boss. I felt for him as I rowed away.
I was so Nervous setting off alone that I had trouble establishing a steady rhythm with the oars. I rowed fast down the middle of the river, trying to get clear of the cluster of houses and restaurants at the end of Luxor, praying that no one would notice me or come after me, praying just to get out of the reaches of the Luxor police and people. I was rigid with stress and kept catching the blade of one of the oars in the water on the backstroke. I hardly remembered to breathe. I pulled the oars gingerly to keep them from making too much noise in the water. I could hear myself panting. Then, shockingly, out of the mist-enshrouded mud-brick houses on the eastern bank I heard a voice shouting thinly, “Madame! Blease! I can help you! Madame!”
I recognized the spot the voice was coming from; it was the same place where I had met Shazly Fouad and the three young men the day before. “Madame! Blease!” It was one of the young witnesses from the sale of the boat. He was leaning recklessly far out a second-story window of a house above the ghat, but I was far enough away that I couldn’t tell which man it was, and that made it easier to ignore the pleading shrieks.
I kept rowing, resting only once to remove my hat and wrap a white cotton shirt around my head like a turban, tucking my hair up under the cloth to hide it. It was a feeble disguise but better than nothing. I was dressed in a white linen shirt and white cotton pajama pants, a combination that looked vaguely like what an Egyptian fisherman would wear. I had seen scores of fishermen from a distance, and I knew that from a distance I now looked more or less like one of them. Without Amr’s protection, I knew I should try to hide both my foreignness and the fact that I was a woman. If I were to be discovered now, I would have no Egyptian acquaintance to help me. It was one thing to have had Amr trailing close behind me but another thing entirely to be going it completely alone. Foreigners didn’t often travel on this part of the river. Few tour boats went downriver from Luxor. I felt that if I stayed in the middle of the river as far from the banks as possible, I could, with the help of this simple costume and vernacular boat, avoid undue notice.
I rowed with a little bit of fear and a great deal of joy. I was alone, finally, with no one to protect me. I wanted to sing for happiness — a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical situation, to my surroundings, to in-de-pen-dence, and to solitude. The happiness I felt that morning had nothing to do with the future or the past, with abstractions or with my relationships to other people. It was the happiness of entering into something new, of taking the moments simply for what they were, of motion, of freedom, and of free will. I loved not knowing what would happen next, loved that no one here knew me. I felt coordinated and strong, and the world seemed huge and vibrant. It was a relief to be alone, and I was accustomed now to the feel of the river and to the fact that I was actually pulling myself along it to a new destination, turning new bends that gave me new vistas, leaving behind what I had already seen. I felt optimistic. And I relaxed enough that my mind could wander. That was always the best part of rowing — the repetition, the simplicity of the physical task, the slowly and constantly shifting surroundings that inspired free thought. My happiness was a feeling of physical lightness, of weightlessness, like drifting on air. Months later when I read Flaubert’s travel notes, I recognized the same kind of happiness with a shock of surprise. He wrote, “I felt a surge of solemn happiness that reached out towards what I was seeing and I thanked God in my heart for having made me capable of such joy: I felt fortunate at the thought, and yet it seemed to me that I was thinking of nothing: it was a sensuous plea-sure that pervaded my entire being.”
Sunrise came, concentrated above the short spiky palms on the east side of the river. I thought of Florence Nightingale’s description of a Nile sunrise: “It looks not lurid and thick, as very brilliant colors in an English sky sometimes do, but so transparent and pure, that one really believes one’s self looking into a heaven beyond, and feels a little shy of penetrating into the mysteries of God’s throne.” Though I was surprised at the accuracy and currency of the bulk of Nightingale’s Nile observations, I couldn’t share her heady enthusiasm about the Nile sunrise. Years of industry and its attendant pollution had given this particular dawn a beefy, congested hue. It began in a muddy, livid way and grew to the color of uncooked bacon. The sky was full of soft gray smoke from garbage fires and brush fires that had smoldered all night amid the trees along the banks. At the edge of the river I could see fishermen laying down nets or rowing their boats slowly upriver among the reeds. The river steamed gently in the sunlight; soft yellow twists of vapor lifted off its surface and disappeared in the cool morning air.
A big grassy island in the middle of the river forced me closer to the shore, and as I passed near a rowboat that looked empty along the bank, a small boy suddenly sat up in it. He stared at me, squinting into the sunlight with freshly opened eyes, looked confused, and lay down again. I was close enough that he could see my face. Ten seconds later, the boy sat bolt upright again and stared harder at me; I could see that he sensed there was something unusual about me. He shaded his eyes with his tiny hands and peered, his mouth set in a figuring grimace. Then a heavy hand reached up out of the boat — the hand, I assumed, of the boy’s still-sleeping father — and roughly pulled him back down. They had camped there in the boat for the night.
At eight o’clock I stopped rowing, drifting on the current, to eat some bread and cheese and a few oranges. I checked my map and guessed that I had passed the village of Garagos and was now near Nag el-Madamud, which in ancient times was known as Madu. In the Twelfth Dynasty, during the reign of Sesostris III, there had been a temple here dedicated to Mentu, the god of war and sun who wore three feathers on his head, like an American Indian, and always had a spear in his hand. That temple was gone, replaced by a Greco-Roman temple, but I had no need or desire to see any of it. I had the water and the sky, the sun and the palm trees. That was enough. I lifted the oars and rowed on a little slower to make my trip last longer. Rowing for the sake of rowing was my only purpose. I wanted only to feel the water passing close beneath the hull of my boat, to hear it swilling around my oars.
Beyond Luxor there were surprisingly few boats on the river. There were no powerboats, no feluccas, and very few fishing boats. In six hours I had seen just two barges, burdened with raw lumber and steel, and two cruise ships. I had seen heavy farm animals being pushed into the river and men washing in that methodical, careful, graceful way. I had heard children shrieking with delight on the banks. I had seen men working the fields, bending and hoeing, hauling and pulling. In a few places along the Nile, they were still using the primitive shaduf to lift water from the river into their fields. The contraption was thousands of years old in design, the same tool the pharaonic fellaheen had used, a bucket on a string tied to a long swinging arm suspended between two poles. One end of the arm was weighted with stones to counter-balance the weight of a full bucket of water. In this way, they hauled water up over the riverbanks. How many bananas, how much alfalfa had this land produced over six thousand years, I wondered.
These working men never looked twice at me. The boat, the turban, the white of my clothes, and my standard rowing style were enough to suggest that everything was as it should be. My alien female presence in this particular boat in the middle of the Egyptian countryside was so unexpected that I passed through the farmland unnoticed. I perturbed nothing and no one. The only odd thing about me was that I was actually traveling; I appeared to the farmers on the southern horizon of the river and disappeared on the northern one. I was clearly going someplace, was not a local person, not one of them. Most fishing boats stayed within range of their villages, rowing back and forth across the river, or up and down the local banks, like horses in a corral. They always moved slowly; their goal was nets and fish. Few boats went off on journeys like mine. If I had been a farmer, I would have wondered at this skinny stranger rowing down the middle of the river so intently.
I had seen notably few women on the river. There had been a couple washing clothes or walking along the banks with baskets on their heads, disappearing in and out of clumps of trees in their long black gowns, but I had seen many more birds than women. I saw herons, egrets, kingfishers, black-and-white hoopoes with harlequinesque markings and fanning red crests, green bee-eaters, hovering kestrels, and scores of unidentifiable buteos soaring high above the river. The Egyptian sandpipers were so pretty that once, sailing with Amr, I had exclaimed at the sight of one, “Oh, what a good bird!” and Amr had responded, “Yes, that bird is delicious!” It shocked me that anyone could eat a bird so beautiful, but the people in Aswan would eat just about any bird they could catch, including the foul cormorant.
One afternoon at the edge of the Nile in Aswan, at the foot of the high sand dune that led to the Tombs of the Nobles, I had seen four young men crouching behind a low stone wall intent on systematically trapping sparrows in a fine net. One man would hurl a stone into a bush full of birds, the startled birds would fly up over the wall, and just at the right moment the other men would raise a long net directly across the birds’ flight path, ensnaring seven or eight at one time. They had shown me the sum of their catch: fifty or so tiny sparrows tossed into a cardboard box, a mound of bodies and feathers, damp and matted with blood. How did they kill the birds? They showed me the bloody steak knife they used to slit the birds’ throats. Did the sparrows taste good? They pointed their thumbs at the sky: Very delicious!
The birds I saw that day moved about the riverbanks and in the shallows of the river with the freedom and authority of long-term residents. They never seemed frightened when I approached, just curious. They stared at me, walked a little, pecked at the ground not two feet away from me, and stared some more. They had none of the skittish Nervous-ness of the birds I saw regularly at home.
Clumps of water hyacinth had suddenly begun to appear north of Luxor. Ripped from their vines along the edge of the river, they floated quickly along on beds of their own broad leaves, carrying high their swollen rust-colored buds. The buds looked like the inflated fingers of a brown rubber glove, and if there were four or five buds on one plant, the whole thing looked spookily like a bloated hand rising up out of the river. The first time I saw one like that, I gasped in fright, thinking it was a drowned body drifting beside me. On the riverbanks I saw ancient mud houses painted mustard yellow and sky blue, power lines, thin spires of smoke rising straight into the windless sky, acacia trees and tamarisks, oxen pulling wooden carts through the mud. In the middle of a small grassy island, a lone donkey stood scratching his side on the trunk of the tiny tree he was tethered to. Everything passed by as in a slow-rolling film, perpetually moving, each scene gradually replaced by another. Floating pump stations appeared now and then, and sometimes the banks of the river were built up with stone ghats.
That afternoon I stopped at the edge of an empty island and let the boat hang in the shade of the reeds. I lay down in the bottom of the boat to rest and watched the cloudless sky. There were rarely any clouds here at this time of year, yet it was amazing to me how the shifting sun could make this seemingly blank plain look so many different ways in the span of just one day. The Egyptian sky was not simply blue — it had color and great depth, shading, and moods. Sometimes it was pink, other times yellow, late in the day it turned lavender, then purple.
Water pumps muttered on the far shore, and tiny sparrowlike birds flitted in the reeds all around me. The boat rocked gently, and I realized that the Nile never had the swampy smell that some urban New En-gland rivers have: a musty, rotting odor with a chemical tincture, like dry-cleaning fluid. Even in Cairo, with all its urban waste and probable toxicity, the Nile had no unpleasant smell.
Like the sky, the river, too, responded to the sun; it never looked one way for long. Here the water was quiet, opaque, and had the creamy coffee color of the Seine. “The water of the Nile is quite yellow,” Flaubert wrote, “it carries a good deal of soil. One might think of it as being weary of all the countries it has crossed, weary of endlessly murmuring the same monotonous complaint that it has traveled too far. If the Niger and the Nile are but one and the same river, where does this water come from? What has it seen? Like the ocean, this river sends our thoughts back almost incalculable distances.”
I had wondered often about the source of all this ever-flowing water. The countries it had crossed were ten in all: Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt. Flaubert, like many people of his day, believed that the Niger and the Nile were the same river — they aren’t and never were, but no one understood that until the late nineteenth century. Technically, the real source of the Nile is the rain that develops from the South Atlantic Ocean through the process of evaporation and condensation. The rainfall drains into the Nile basin and feeds the lakes of east Africa. The Egyptian Nile is a combination of water from the White Nile and the Blue Nile. The White Nile effectively has its source in the Luvironza River in Burundi, which flows into the Ruvubu River, which flows into the Kagera River, which in turn flows into Lake Victoria, where it is then known as the Victoria Nile for the next two hundred miles until, in Uganda, it flows into Lake Albert. From Lake Albert, the White Nile continues northward into Sudan, where it’s called the Bahr el Jebel, and in Sudan the river enters the Sudd, the vast and infamous swampland of southern Sudan — a mess of floating islands composed of mud, papyrus, aquatic plants, and reeds. The islands, some a mile square, drift and shift and interlock. The Nile as an identifiable river ceases here for a time as its waters filter slowly through the reeds in a million different streams. The historian Emil Ludwig wrote of the Sudd, “Here it is as though the Nile were a rope frayed in the middle, the solid bulk teased and parted into a hundred strands.” Judging from the accounts of numerous adventurers and explorers, the Sudd must be one of the most inhospitable places on earth. In 1908 a horrified Winston Churchill wrote in his travelogue My African Journey that the Sudd was:
at once so dismal and so terrifying that to travel through it is a weird experience . . . For three days and three nights we were continuously in this horrible swamp into which the whole of the United Kingdom could be easily packed . . . To travel through the Sudd, is to hate it forevermore. Rising fifteen feet above the level of the water, stretching its roots twenty or even thirty feet below, and so matted and tangled together that elephants can walk safely upon its springy surface, papyrus is the beginning and end of this melancholy world. For hundreds of miles nothing else is to be perceived — not a mountain-ridge blue on the horizon, scarcely a tree, no habitation of man, no sign of beast. The silence is broken only by the croaking of innumerable frog armies, and the cry of dreary birds.
I was fascinated by the grim power of the Sudd — a place so dense and choked with vegetation that the Nile waters almost fail to pass through it. In his book The Nile, a detailed anatomy of the river, Robert O. Collins writes of the Sudd, “The river can hardly move at all in this Stygian swamp, so it sits, and in the steamy heat near the equator, more than half of the water of the Bahr al-Jabal evaporates away into the atmosphere.” It was the impassability of the Sudd that for millennia had prevented the discovery of the source of the Nile. Neither pharaohs nor emperors had been able to cut through that swamp. Because of the shifting movement of clumps of growth, it was impossible to cut a permanent channel there. A ship would move upstream a bit, only to have drifting islands close in behind it, blocking any possible retreat back to civilization, while more drifting islands from upstream would float down and press against the ships until they were trapped, unable to move in either direction. Collins writes, “To abandon ship meant certain death in the Sudd, with its swamps stretching endlessly beyond the horizon. Relief expeditions did not always arrive in time to save the occupants of a stranded vessel from starvation. There are reports of fragile steamers being crushed by the implacable pressure of the river, building its block of sudd, and legends of cannibalism when rations came to an end.” Fish, crocodiles, and even the enormous hippopotamuses in the Sudd are often literally crushed to death by the swamp’s enormous floating islands. In 1839 Muhammad Ali sent the Turkish naval captain Salim to break through the Sudd. Salim failed on his first try but returned a year later and successfully cut the first passage. But once a cut was made through the swamp, it was impossible to keep it clear. In 1869 Muhammad Ali sent the British explorer Samuel Baker to the Sudd with twelve hundred soldiers, but Baker, too, failed to break through permanently.
The much-diminished White Nile trickles out of the Sudd and, fortunately for northern Sudan and Egypt, gets replenished at Khartoum by the Blue Nile flowing into it from the Ethiopian highlands. For all the old associations of Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile, the truth is that more than four-fifths of the water of the Egyptian Nile comes from Lake Tana and the monsoons in Ethiopia. North of Khartoum, the Nile meets the Atbara River, its last tributary, and travels on through the deep desert of Sudan and on into Egypt in a slow, steady, unaltered state, yet with enough volume and force to have been able to kick dust into Amr’s parents’ cup of water at Elephantine before the construction of the High Dam.
The water, or some small part of it at least, that was passing beneath my boat had traveled slightly downhill for approximately one hundred and fifty days from its source near the equator. It had traveled more than four thousand miles and had been running its modern-day course for over twenty-five thousand years. How many eyes had looked at the same water I was looking at? How many people had drunk from this water, rowed on it, swum in it, or drowned in it?
As I lay daydreaming in the bottom of my boat, I heard with striking clarity the familiar sound of a public address system being switched on, the flickering static, the clumsy finger testing the microphone with a click, a pause, and then a low voice launching into the call to prayer. A breeze from the east blew the singer’s voice directly over me. Allah hu akbar! The voice had a plaintive catch in it, a thrilling break that seemed to express great emotion. Soon, a second voice drifted from the other side of the river, singing the same words, but the new voice was high and tiny as it struggled against the breeze.
I was exhausted. There was still some light left to the day, and I could feasibly row another hour or two, but I decided to stop here for the night. I had slept poorly the night before in Nervous anticipation, and now I could hardly lift my arms. This seemed as good a place as any to spend the night. It was quiet, secluded, and therefore relatively safe. It wasn’t that I feared being harmed as much as I feared the clamoring attention of local people — too much attention could bring my trip to an end. If I spent the night closer to a village, I would benefit from a greater civic protection but raise my chances of being discovered. I decided to stay where I was.
By five o’clock the moon was a pale disk over the eastern shore of the river, and distant voices babbled beneath it in the banana groves. By ten o’clock Venus would be gone and the nearly full moon would be high overhead. I climbed out of the boat and wandered around the little island, stretching my legs. The island was another barren hump of sand and grass and stunted shrubs in the middle of the river. I sat on a warm patch of sand near my boat and made a small fire just for the plea-sure of it. My sunburned face, ankles, and hands responded to the heat of the fire with a stinging that felt almost cold. I was still wearing my makeshift turban on my head and had come to find it more comfortable than a hat.
I amused myself by burning twigs and eating peanuts and watching the beauty of the place change with the changing light, the blue and green, the gold and ochre and violet slowly transforming to other softer colors. The sun was hidden behind the red stone cliffs in the west, but the sky and the east bank were still blindingly bright. This, I thought, was how hobos lived, and it was easy to see the appeal of that freedom and irresponsibility. I heard the sound of a tractor coming from some indeterminate spot across the river, then realized it wasn’t a tractor at all but the purring of frogs tuning up for the evening in the grasses all around me. Egypt was full of audio and visual tricks like this. In Egyptian towns and cities, what you think is a beautifully colored bird in a tree is really a plastic trash bag caught on a twig. What you think is the sound of crickets is really somebody’s chirpingly off-centered fan belt. At an ancient temple, what you think is the whistling of some rare bird is really a soldier trying to get your attention. And then when you arrive in the country, what you think is a lumpy heap of trash floating down the river is really four knobby-headed water buffalo crossing from one side to the other. What you think is litter snagged on a tree branch is really a beautiful bird. What you think is a man hissing and clacking at you is really the rattle of the ubiquitous maculate kingfisher. It seemed to me there were a limited number of sounds on the planet, and nature and humans borrowed them from each other.
Kingfishers plopped into the river. A raft of pelicans floated by. A red-legged stint gingerly picked his way through the water hyacinths. When a long metal barge came motoring upriver toward Luxor, I felt a hobo’s urge to hoot and throw a stone at it.
Darkness came quickly. I huddled around my fire and ate some bread and tuna fish and two apples. This was a strange place for a foreigner to be sitting alone. You couldn’t call it a wilderness, for there were people less than a mile from here in every direction. But it was an empty spot at the edge of the river and I was alone. That thought made my pulse quicken, made my head snap around to see who might be approaching. Anticipating the night ahead, I was undeniably Nervous.
I kicked sand over the fire, repositioned my anchor in the mud, and lay down in the boat with my sweater as a pillow. As I lay down, a handful of cockroaches crawled out from under the fake grass on the bottom of the boat and scurried along the gunwales and over my hands and shoes. They had been there all day, hiding. Under any other circumstances, I would have been disgusted by the sight of them, but here I didn’t care. I was tired and had no choice but to sleep in the boat with what-ever unsavory creatures were in it with me.
The river’s current gently bent the reeds around me, and the sand three feet from my boat gave off vents of warm air. Venus and several bright stars cast long trails of light on the water. I watched the movement of the stars, sliding east to west. Eventually the moon, just short of being full, was so bright it dimmed the stars, and I found that by the light of it I could write in my notebook without a flashlight. Cast onto the land, the light of the moon was greenish — it glowed and made the grass look black and the sand look like heaps of snow, just as all the travelers before me swore it did. Eventually I closed my notebook, positioned my flashlight and knife beside my head, removed my turban, and lay there staring at the sky.
Why I read three books about crocodiles before taking my trip to Egypt I don’t really know. I had been told many times that there were no crocodiles in the Egyptian Nile, but like a child who dreads being frightened and yet begs to hear the awful ghost story again and again, I had to know what a crocodile could do, how it thought, what it ate, size of teeth, greatest enemy, and so forth, and therefore one horrible book led compulsively to another. That night as I lay on my back, separated from the Nile by an eighth of an inch of hammered steel, crocodiles were on my mind in a way they had not been in the light of day. Let me just say that only two types of crocodilians are considered to be maneaters: the saltwater crocodile and the Nile crocodile. Beneath me was the Nile. I knew that there were no crocodiles here, but it had not escaped my notice that when people spoke of the Nile crocodile and its disappearance from Egypt they always used qualifiers. They said, “By 1870 the Nile crocodile had practically vanished from all of the Nile below Aswan,” or they said, “The Nile crocodile virtually disappeared,” or “the crocodile is almost completely gone,” or “for all intents and purposes the crocodile has been eradicated.” Now, lying here on top of the river, I of course had to think about those one or two crocodiles that for all intents and purposes had surely survived here, couldn’t help imagining a large lurking thing bumping roughly against the bottom of the boat. After a few minutes of recalling every terrible thing I knew about the Nile crocodile, I stopped simply imagining the rough bump and began fully expecting it.
I sat up in the boat, looked around at the bright water shimmering and swirling beneath the moon. Seeing nothing unusual, I lay down again.
You probably know that crocodiles don’t sleep much — a few intermittent catnaps during the day after they’ve eaten a few cats — and then at night they go hunting, floating quietly, with only their eyes and ears above the water level, which makes them not only hard to see but hard to hear. What exactly would I do if that elongated crocodile snout with its jutting mandibular teeth just now presented itself on the coaming of my boat and gave me a leering lipless smile? “Life is never more intense and worth living than when death lurks around the corner.” That was the epigraph to one of the books I read about crocodiles. From this terrifying little book, No Tears for the Crocodile written by one Paul L. Potous and published in 1956, I learned that around that time — not so long ago — crocodiles were responsible for a greater number of human deaths than any other wild animal in Africa. In addition, the crocodile was able to do all that damage even though graced with a brain not much bigger than a shot glass. A crocodile can remain submerged for a full twelve minutes, as compared with a hippo’s trifling eight, and he can see awfully well underwater. He has at least sixty teeth, and if he knocks one of them out, another one grows back in its place, and if he knocks that tooth out, another replaces that one, and on and on that way endlessly, which is a big part of the reason crocodiles can live so long — two hundred years they’ve been known to last, chewing their way through the de-cades with ease. It’s not unheard of for one crocodile to zip through two thousand teeth in a lifetime. In addition, the crocodile never stops growing. At birth an infant crocodile is about the size of his mother’s nostril, yet he can manage almost immediately to trot off and take care of himself. When they’re feeling threatened, crocodiles clap their jaws together. If they’re hungry enough, they’ll run across dry land to snatch up their next meal. They can run almost thirty miles per hour on land on those short little twisted legs and are said to be capable of running at a kind of gallop, speeding through the sugar cane like a low-flying missile. Mr. Potous informed me frankly that the crocodile does not have to be provoked in order to attack, “for it hunts man by instinct, lying in wait for its victims at the places where it knows they must come to draw water or where they go down to bathe and wash themselves [or where they are lying in their preposterously small boat not too far from Luxor]. Men, women, or children — they are all a meal to the saurian.”
I sat up a second time and looked across the water. My hands were so bright in the moonlight that they were distracting. I looked north and south. I didn’t see anything bad — just water, the black sky, the moon, and the banks of the river. I lay down again, the boat rocked, and though I tried to think of other things, I had to remind myself that the Nile crocodile has a varied array of hunting habits, from the sudden lunging rush to the coy, sneaking trap. Most of all he seems to like to come up behind you, following you with his periscopic eyes, and then at an opportune moment he knocks you clean off the riverbank and into the water with his enormous tail, an experience that I expect is probably not unlike getting struck by a moving cargo van. Or, if he’s in a hurry, he simply lunges all at once out of the river, grabs you with his jaws, pulls you into the water, and drowns you. In general, the crocodile seems to go for the head or the leg, perhaps finding easier purchase there.
Despite all those large and replaceable teeth, crocodiles have some difficulty chewing, so they whirl their catch around and around in the water until they break off a choice piece that they can swallow whole. In his Handbook of Alligators and Crocodiles, Steve Grenard explains this: “Crocodiles have no way to anchor their prey once it is dead, so to get a mouthful of meat, they bite the animal and roll over and over on their long axis until they twist off a hunk of meat. Then they bring their heads above water, flip their food into the air and grab it again, each time getting it further and further down the gullet. They usually need to rest for a few minutes before taking another bite.” Sometimes they even fall asleep in the middle of a meal and can be found snoring away on a beach with a ragged hunk of animal flesh perched on a back tooth, “which they have been unable to swallow but which they retain as a snack until such time as they awake.” And if the crocodile finds its meal too tough to rip apart, it simply stores the whole maimed mess in the mud at the bottom of the river and waits for it to rot a little. Grenard also let me know that while crocodiles can apply “many tons of pressure with their bite,” they have very little strength when opening their mouths, and so it is therefore easy to disarm a crocodile by simply clamping his snout shut with one’s hands. (Mr. Grenard did not tell me how one would safely get away from the crocodile and resume normal life once one grew tired of that particular posture.)
By the way, never expect to meet just one crocodile, because where there is one there are usually others. They live in communities, though actually the only thing they like to do as a community is stage a feeding frenzy, attacking another living thing, a hippo, say, or a human, and pulling it to shreds in great harmony.
Mr. Potous, who during his life spent a truly creepy amount of time with crocodiles, was in the habit of cutting them open just to see what and who they had eaten. “The stomach contents of crocodiles,” he says, “are at times interesting although often gruesome, and I have found the remains of metal bangles, human and animal bones, native beads, baby hippo tusks, teeth and many other objects . . . The original owners of these beads were women and girl children who wore them as ornaments and who had been taken and devoured by the crocodiles.”
I lay on the Nile in my boat under the glare of the huge Egyptian moon. The boat swayed. The black water swirled beneath me. I turned onto my side, closed my eyes, and changed the subject: scorpions, which according to Charles Sonnini, “here grow to a very large size,” had a sting that “occasioned acute pain, swoonings, convulsions, and sometimes death.” And then I put my shirt over my head, trying to block out the moon and that terrible picture I had once seen of a Nile Malapterus, an electrical fish that looked not unlike a very large snake and whose touch, according to reports, made men convulse and go stiff with the electric shock.
Eventually, out of pure mental and physical exhaustion, I fell asleep and, mercifully, did not wake until dawn.