The Nile at Mile One (cont.)

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The Nile at Mile One (cont.)
Taking in the "gleaming cataract".
Churchill was lucky enough to observe Murchison Falls, where my travels in his footsteps finally concluded, in the first light of dawn. "The river was a broad sheet of steel grey veined with paler streaks of foam," he wrote. "The rock portals of the Falls were jetty black, and between them, illumined by a single shaft of sunlight, gleamed the tremendous cataract—a thing of wonder and glory, well worth traveling all the way to see."

I was about to find out if my efforts to reach this remote point along the Nile, not to mention my taxing bike ride from Wanseko, had been worth it. The jeep riders had arranged for a park ranger to ferry them upriver later in the afternoon so they could see the "tremendous cataract" up close, and they invited me to join them.

Often the boat came close enough to the hippos and crocodiles that I could have reached over the railing and touched them.

We didn't see another human being the entire trip. Indeed, we saw no signs that humans had ever been here—just the pristine fecundity of a healthy ecology humming with activity. The River Nile, as the locals called it, was often hundreds of yards wide and surrounded on both sides by steep hillsides covered with thick greenery. The river looked amazingly blue and clean, its rippling surface sparkling in the afternoon sun. The park's wildlife population was said to have been all but eliminated by rampaging soldiers during the Obote and Amin dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, but if so, the subsequent recovery had been remarkable. I saw more wild animals along this 13-mile stretch of the Nile than I had seen in many weeks of wide-ranging travel in neighboring Kenya. There were literally hundreds of hippopotamuses—some plodding up the riverbanks, others squatting in the shallows with only their bulging eyes visible, still others disappearing underwater only to reappear half a minute later on the other side of the boat. Sharing sandbars with the hippos were dozens of plump brown crocodiles. Nearly all of them were stretched out on their bellies with their jaws open wide, revealing long rows of nasty-looking yellowish teeth. This open-mouthed posture was actually a cooling reflex, like a dog's panting, but it lent the reptiles a peculiar aspect, at once menacing and lazy.

The animals rarely shied away from us. Often the boat came close enough to the hippos and crocodiles that I could have reached over the railing and touched them. Along the shore were numerous graceful giraffes and self-possessed elephants, as well as a few shaggy, skittish waterbucks. And all around was an extraordinary array of waterfowl: goliath herons; fish eagles; saddle-billed storks with yellow, orange, and black beaks that resembled miniature Ugandan flags; and most entertaining of all, pied kingfishers, which hovered 40 feet above the water like hummingbirds for minutes at a time before diving straight down to snag their unsuspecting prey.

After two hours of steady chugging, our boat passed a long calm stretch of water and rounded a bend, and suddenly the waterfall swung into view. Even from half a mile downriver, it was fearsome to behold—a glistening cascade of white fury that carried such force our boat could not advance against the current. This extraordinary power stemmed from the fact that, as Churchill explained, above the Falls the banks of the Nile "contract suddenly till they are not six yards apart, and through this strangling portal, as from the nozzle of a hose, the whole tremendous river is shot in one single jet down an abyss of a hundred and sixty feet." Transfixed, we admired this sight for I don't know how long before the captain finally turned the boat around and, with the surging current at our back, returned us to camp in half the time it had taken to get there.

The next morning, the jeep riders invited me to accompany them overland to the top of the Falls. Churchill may have been lubricating his tale somewhat when he claimed that the Falls could be heard from ten miles away, but they were certainly audible from five. When we finally clambered down to the shoreline the roar was fantastic, like the fiercest windstorm imaginable. In the last few hundred yards of its approach to the Falls, the Nile seems to sprint so impatiently forward that the foamy green water gets ahead of itself and leaps exuberantly upward, as if ascending an invisible escalator. Just before the fall line, the river separates into separate flows. The one feeding the cataract is over the edge in an instant, crashing down into the bubbling pool below. The others loop around a massive stone outcropping and supply a second waterfall, shorter but far wider than its famous brother. The spray, the din, the water's irresistible force and volume are as overwhelming to the senses as the knowledge of its distant destination in Egypt is to the mind.

Murchison Falls remains a glorious natural spectacle, but only because Churchill did not get his way. Churchill, that incorrigible champion of industry, wanted to build a dam at Murchison Falls. Its "terrible waters" itched at his restless nature. They had to be put to some productive purpose: "I cannot believe that modern science will be content to leave these mighty forces untamed, unused, or that regions of inexhaustible and unequalled fertility, capable of supplying all sorts of things that civilized industry needs in greater quantity every year, will not be brought—in spite of their insects and their climate—into cultivated subjection." Of course, the dam whose construction Churchill was advocating here would have covered up forever the very falls he had praised as one of the great wonders in all Africa. Prudently, he ignored this contradiction. He did seem to sense there was something unholy about his proposal, however. His reflections on damming the Nile were interrupted, he later wrote, by "an ugly and perhaps indignant swish of water" that nearly drenched him.

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