Red Nile [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Red river Picture a river that flows through a quarter of all Africa, a river fed by smaller streams and other rivers, yet retaining in our mind a unity, a single identity, despite the diversity of the nations and tribes it passes through. One molecule of the water that rises in the forests of Burundi or in Lake Tana in Ethiopia can make its journey all the way to the Nile delta in Egypt and flow into the Mediterranean, and so justify our referring to the mighty system of the Nile as one river. The Nile is mighty. If the Thames were on the same scale it would not end at Gravesend - it would swim the Channel, continue through Europe, cross all of Turkey and enter Iraq to issue like the Euphrates into the Arabian GulL Imagine travelling such a river, wanting to own it and control it. This has been the dream of men and nations since nations began with the world's first - the country known as Misr, Egypt. These attempts at control have faded, the influence and consequences all forgotten. Only the stories remain. And the ruins of great buildings, old dams, temples and statues? Don't these exist too as the stories we tell of such buildings and their makers? Only the stories remain. And what is the colour of such stories? A trick question. The stories that remain are always the most highly coloured, the most passion filled or the most blood curdling. Naturally, their colour is red. Red. The real Nile isn't White or Blue or even Green. It's Red. For a moment when the Blue Nile in full flood enters the White Nile it backs up the river, reversing its flow for five miles, mixing its load of sediment with the clearer waters of the White Nile to make, for a few days, a blood-red river. This moment, in time and place, where Blue and White meet in the Sudan in early summer near Khartoum, is a magical metaphor for the world's greatest river: a river of blood, of life, of