Free Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River by Robert Twigger Page A

croc in conjunction with noise and splashing. Noise doesn’t scare them away, it attracts them, and here Coetzee was undoubtedly right in his constant injunction not to panic when confronted by this sort of danger. With noise comes the promise of a herd of wildebeest or a class of schoolchildren crossing a river. The lamest, the slowest, the one at the back , that is the one the Nile crocodile aims for. Coetzee and his two fellow paddlers were so close they had to be careful their paddle blades didn’t clash. They were doing everything right if the theory of ‘appearing big’ worked. But Coetzee was slightly to the rear and that was where the attack came from. He was picked off by a crocodile which perceived this as a splashing group of potential victims.
    People constantly underestimate the intelligence of wild animals. Often it is only the hunter (and the biologist who hunts with his dart gun) who realises just how canny a creature that has survived sixty million years can be. Not that the attack on Coetzee should mean that kayakers should adopt a different strategy. Nile crocs are the biggest animal killers in Africa, taking over a thousand people a year; no one knows for sure, but these are the estimated figures. They seem to only coexist happily with people who worship them – ancient Egyptians and the Ghanaians living in the small town of Paga, who feed them catfish and are so at ease with their crocs that they dry their clothes on the crocodiles’ backs as they bask in the sun. Could it be that the seeming stupidity of worshipping a killer predator is actually a very smart strategy for coexistence with something that we can neither outrun nor outthink in the game of survival?
    The Nile crocodile, it must never be forgotten, has the highest bitepressure per square inch of any animal recorded. Over 6,000 pounds. That compares to about 300 pounds for a German shepherd dog, 600 pounds for a lion, 1,820 pounds for a hippo, 600 measly pounds for a great white shark and 1,000 pounds for a snapping turtle. A human bite is about 100 pounds per square inch.
    It is interesting to discover that the ancient Egyptian crocodile cult of Sobek built temples and sanctuaries at places – rapids and widening bends – where crocodiles would be most dangerous and most numerous. In fact this is the only Egyptian deity whose dedicated temple location is the result of an observable and pragmatic reason. For the other Egyptian gods we are still more or less ignorant about why one site rather than another was chosen. That the worship of the crocodile was sincere and thorough is attested to by the huge crocodile cemetery found in Tebtunis in the Fayoum oasis. The greatest development of Sobek’s worship was in Ptolemaic times with the establishment of Crocodilopolis in Fayoum. Given that this was the largest lake in Egypt (until Lake Nasser was created by the high dam), one can guess that it might have been a practical response to the quantity of crocs in Lake Qarun.
    Crocodylus niloticus is the animal par excellence of a bloody river. Yet the crocodile does not choose to bite arteries and veins, though one might try and club you with its tail. In fact the croc’s preferred method of killing is to grab the victim swiftly, without fuss, and drown him, and it’s usually a him – male deaths due to crocodile attacks outnumber female four to one. Though it’s tempting to use this as prima facie evidence of male stupidity, the more likely reason is that women, though they may visit the river banks, don’t in traditional societies tend to go swimming and fishing in spots far from human habitation. Saltwater and Nile crocodiles cause more human deaths than any other creature that swims, crawls or runs upon the earth. It has always been so. The nineteenth-century traveller John MacGregor, who was brave enough to canoe the Nile in 1849, reported seeing two men killed by a twenty-six-foot crocodile swinging its tail like a giant cudgel. A