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

decade earlier Irish traveller Eliot Warburton wrote that he found a lad crying beside a dead crocodile, which had eaten his grandmother. He sold the crocodile for 7s 6d, with the old lady inside.
    It is little wonder that the croc was worshipped, and is still worshipped. Sobek was the ancient crocodile god who achieved his greatest popularity during the Ptolemaic era, around the third century BC . Theoasis of Fayoum, which was fed by the Nile, was called Crocodilopolis, the Greek word from which the modern name for the beast derives. Oddly enough, giant crocodilian fossils have also been found in the same oasis, extinct remnants of a proto-Nile. In apothecary shops in the spice bazaar of Cairo you will still see a stuffed croc hanging from the roof beams – for protection. Indeed you can buy one, for luck, in Khan al-Khalili souk. Mostly they come from Lake Nasser, the dammed Nile. It is damned in another sense: with a glut of over 70,000 crocs, it’s not a place you want to explore in the dark. Still, the dam does keep them from floating down to Cairo. Most of them. Indeed, when there is a croc scare in town, it is usually the result of an unwanted pet being liberated into its natural environment.
    A stuffed croc gracing a magician’s den is a familiar sight in many supernatural films or TV programmes. This derives from the magical and alchemical traditions of Egypt, themselves inheritors of the cult of Sobek. Most ‘magical’ practices are debased forms of some practical endeavour. There are convincing arguments that prayer forms were originally sophisticated bodily movements designed to achieve optimal mental and physical health, rather in the manner of tai chi. The cult of Sobek, as we have seen, most probably derives from a desire to placate the biggest predator on the block, and from a sensible strategy of observation and appeasement that is maintained by elevating its status to the supernatural and ritualistic.
    That the Nile is supremely important can be judged by the fact that it has no god; Khnum is the local deity of the Nile at the first cataract, near Aswan in modern Egypt, a place favoured by François Mitterrand and the Aga Khan, not to mention Agatha Christie and Winston Churchill, as a place of perfect climate in winter. It was also traditionally the source of all ivory – hence Elephantine Island, where the great mounds of tusks coming out of Africa were stored before being despatched in barges down the Nile. In a sense the first cataract is the gateway to Egypt, the first place where the flood will be noticed – and on the flood rested the prosperity and health of the nation. Sobek was seen at certain times as a primeval creator god, the one pulling the strings. This almost certainly pre-dates the cult of Ra and the sun gods and the association of light with the monotheisms, because earth religions are almost always displaced by light religions as civilisation develops. I have seen a clear example of this in northern Borneo where I was shown, by a now converted (to Christianity) Lundaiya tribesman, acrocodile-shaped mound where they used to worship (and hang the heads of their enemies). There were no crocodiles left in that region, if there had ever been; nevertheless the primal representative of the earth religion had held firm until the light religion of Christianity had replaced him.
    A Nile crocodile can weigh up to a ton – the weight of a small car like a Honda Civic or a Ford Fiesta, but a Ford Fiesta can’t rise up nine feet on its back legs and tail, using the swinging tail to maintain buoyancy as it lunges upwards from the water, jaws snapping, jaws that have the crushing power of a machine press. People who jumped from boats into the lower branches of trees have been pulled from those trees even though they were more than their own height above the water. On land, say strolling along a riverine beach, one needs to be a fair distance from the shallows. A stick with eyes can lunge thirty