Listen! What is life? It is a feather; it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if the seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it will. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner.

H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines , 1886

No boat whatever could be set in here and hope to live.

Kuno Steuben, assessing the Northern Gorge of the Blue Nile, 1959

D

Deep within a gash in the skin of the continent, in the middle of a fast, brown river twisting through a dark inner gorge, Pasquale Scaturro was hanging on to his life by a rope, kicking to stay afloat in the cold water, his stout arms stretched to their limits. While a skein of currents blasted about his chest, he gripped with one hand the end of a ­seventy-­five-­foot-­long yellow safety rope anchored to a basalt boulder upstream. With the other hand he clenched the black neoprene handle of an ­upside-­down ­sixteen-­foot, three-hundred-pound rubber raft, the lifeboat for this ambitious, perhaps imprudent, expedition.

Pasquale needed to make a fast choice. The nylon rope was wrapped around three fingers of his left hand, but it slipped off one finger, then another, leaving the cord tightening around his ring finger. He could feel the feeling drain from his finger; he imagined it being ripped from his hand. But if he let the rope go, he was committing himself to liquid chaos in the rapid called the Gauntlet. Just a few yards downstream was another huge rapid, Class V or worse, and after that another, then another, on for miles. It was here that Lew Greenwald had drowned on an exploratory expedition of the upper Blue Nile in 1976. It had been an eerily similar accident, in which a raft capsized and Lew was swept into a boiling white cauldron.

Pasquale also well knew that the British Army Expedition of 1968 had scouted this section from the air and elected to send rafts down empty, deeming the ­thirty-­mile defile too deadly for human passage. And just an hour earlier, local villagers had told him of two Germans who had steered a big wooden boat into this section the year before. Their craft crashed against the ancient lava rocks and broke into pieces, and one of the Germans and both the Ethiopian guides drowned. The other German barely survived, hiked out, and left the country on the first flight, never telling authorities of the accident, and is still wanted for murder.

As the seconds passed, as his arms stretched toward the popping point, Pasquale considered the options in the last lozenge of daylight. He recognized that the safest thing to do would be to let go of the raft, swing the other hand to the rope, and pull himself back to shore. But if he did that, he would lose the raft to the Blue Nile, likely ending his attempt to be the first to navigate the whole of the river. Worse, he might be sentencing a man younger than his youngest ­son—­who had disappeared around the ­corner with the raft—­to a watery oblivion.

Alemu Mehariw, ­twenty-­three, was a tall, athletic, ­good-­looking Ethiopian, a Special Forces soldier in the Ethiopian People’s Rev­olutionary Defense Front (EPRDF). The EPRDF was the rebel group that had defeated the former military dictator of Ethiopia, Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the ­so-­called “Red Emperor” or “Black Lenin.” Millions had died during his regime, and he was known for chilling acts such as requiring parents of his victims to pay police for the bullets used to kill their own children. Pasquale had recruited Alemu and Baye Gebre Selassie, twenty, another soldier, as guards and muscle for the Ethiopian slice of the ­three-­country expedition. Neither had ever been on a raft, nor in whitewater, and they were not good swimmers, but they had been eager to join the adventure regardless.

So had Gordon Brown, ­forty-­two, a ­kayaker-­cameraman with the physique of a Dragon Volant. ­He’d locked up his houseboat in Marina del Rey and committed to the endless river, be it a ­six-­month journey or more. Mike Prosser, fifty, owner of Down River Equipment Company in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, had also been seduced by the allure of the Blue Nile. Yibeltal Tsedalu, a trekking guide based in Addis Ababa who ­couldn’t swim and sported a rolling tella belly, had liked the three hundred birr a day (about $35 U.S.) Pasquale was offering enough for him to leave his wife and new baby and ­join—­in a time when not many overseas hikers were seeking out Ethiopia. Even the freelance cook, Yohannes Mekonnen, aka Johnnie Walker, was happy to sign on, though he had a wife and two kids back in the capital and had never been on a boat. He had earned his nickname because Yohannes is Amharic for John, and he was too afraid to run the rapids, so he walked around them. (It was his whiskey of choice as well, but that was incidental to the nickname.)

But while many were attracted to the risk Pasquale proffered, most somehow resisted. His protean buddy Mike Speaks, who had led a variety of extreme river expeditions and who had perhaps spent more time on the Blue Nile than anyone else on earth, had attempted the Northern Gorge in 1996, but a raft flipped, and one of the Ethiopian guides died. Despite Pasquale’s constant imploring, Mike declined to join. “My life is too valuable. You ­couldn’t pay me enough to run that gorge again,” said the ­twenty-­year career river guide who had run big water on five continents. And he strongly recommended that Pasquale reconsider. “It’s a death trap,” Speaks warned. And Kurt Hoppe, a longtime partner in Pasquale’s business ventures and companion on Everest and Kilimanjaro signed on, flew from Colorado, and left after five days. At the black entrance to the Northern Gorge, Kurt decided to hike out and head home, after receiving word that his eighty-­year-­old dad had been diagnosed with a medical condition. In all, Pasquale had personally invited some ­thirty-­five friends to join him, but schedules, costs, obligations, mortgages, divorces, doctor and haircut appointments, restaurant reservations made it impossible.

Nonetheless, Pasquale and his small flotilla of two rafts and a kayak had entered the Northern Gorge, just 182 miles down from the source, in the shank of a hot January afternoon. The rapids to this point had all been easy to run or, if not, to portage, and Pasquale was beginning to think that perhaps the difficulty of the Blue Nile was overrated. But then they came to the Gauntlet, a labyrinthine stretch of liquid lightning. Here, the river, which was more than a ­half-­mile wide just a hundred yards upstream, was pinched to the width of a pickup truck. It blazed like a phosphorus fire as it decanted down a chute; turned sharply for a frothing, foaming run; and then wedged into a crack where it spat droplets into the air. It was so narrow that locals had dropped a ­three-­limbed tree across its canyon as a bridge. Finally it spun through a brief unruffled section before dumping into another dreadful rapid. There was no way that the Gauntlet could be navigated, but they could film an empty raft being tossed down its length.

For the previous six weeks, Pasquale and Gordon had been featured players in an IMAX ® Theatre production titled Mystery of the Nile. The film was a showcase of the great river, from its Blue Nile source in Ethiopia, to Sudan, where it swings past the black pyramids of Meroe, to Egypt, where it flushes through Cairo and then debouches into the Mediterranean near Alexandria in a plexus of shallow channels.

Pasquale was then to stay on after the crews left to make a try at running the whole of the river, some 3,200 miles from source to sea, an exploration dreamed of for centuries.

To locate the river’s source—­quaerere caput ­Nili—had been the hope of many great captains and geographers of the classical age: Herodotus, Cyrus and Cambyses of Persia, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, even Nero. It was the great ­nineteenth-­century geographical quest that consumed David Livingstone, Richard Burton, John Speke, and many others. Though the White Nile is the longer of the two streams that join in Khartoum to create the Nile proper, it is the Blue Nile that contributes about ­eighty-­five percent of the water that powers Egypt, and most of the precious silt that nourishes its banks. If the Blue Nile dried up, or were dammed or diverted in a significant way, Egypt would wither.

But while successful treks had been made to the headwaters of both the White and Blue Niles, neither had ever been navigated in a linear fashion from the first fountains to the last sighs, as the “Everest of rivers” pours into the brine. Attempts on both had resulted in fatalities and failure. Most happened on the Blue Nile, as it is the bigger, dropping at a steeper gradient, through deeper canyons, and over deadlier ­rapids—­most in the infamous Northern Gorge. Then there was the concatenation of giant Nile crocodiles, hippos, roaming bands of bandits, tropical diseases, the extreme heat, and the incendiary politics along the way. But those would come later.

Pasquale felt he might be qualified to be the first to lead a successful expedition down the entire length of the Blue Nile. He had run major rivers around the world, including the Zambezi, Colorado, ­Bio-­Bio, and Omo, and had made the first descent of the Tekeze in northern Ethiopia. He had been on three Everest expeditions, including leading the 2001 summit bid that put blind climber Erik Weihenmayer on top. And he had spent years in outback Africa searching for crude as an oil and gas geophysicist. Though past fifty, he was strong, fit, and a citizen of “the fourth world,” that ­free-­spirited territory where time has no weight, the true religion is exploration, and the inhabitants are rogues, nomads, and pioneers.

When Pasquale and Gordon scouted the Gauntlet, they assumed it would be one of the few completely unnavigable sections of river on the whole journey. But it was so spectacular that they decided to film a “ghost boat,” one without human cargo, caroming through. When the thirty or so members of the film crew had returned to their homes in Europe and America for the holidays, ­they’d left behind a spartan camera package consisting of a ­forty-­two-­pound seventy-millimeter large-format camera for Pasquale and Gordon’s ­use—­with a ­forty-­pound waterproof housing, a ­twenty-­pound magazine, and six rolls of ­seventy-­millimeter film weighing twelve pounds each. The Gauntlet was obviously worth spending some film on, so they devised a plan.

They emptied the two rafts of all the gear and hired some barefooted farmers to help them carry the gear downriver to the end of the rapids. They then secured the frames and oars of the first raft. Gordon would release it at the top of the three-­hundred-­yard-­long Gauntlet, coordinating with Pasquale via their ­Icom IC-­2 handheld radios, since the bottom and top were not within sight of each other. A waiting Pasquale could jump in at the bottom and row it safely to shore before it pitched into the next cataracts.

They divided up the tasks. Gordon, with help from Baye, set up the camera at a strategic point to capture the wildest action of the empty rafts hurtling through one after the other, and Mike set up a few feet away with a Sony digital video cam. Yibeltal was just upstream and would kick the first raft out into the middle current when he received a hand motion from Gordon. Pasquale, in the meantime, began to make his way to the rapid’s terminus. ­They’d arranged that he would signal Gordon by radio once in position to capture the raft. Yohannes, who wanted nothing to do with this tosh, skittered away like a water bug.

But when Pasquale hiked downstream with Alemu to find a spot where he might catch the raft, he realized that the exercise might be a bad idea. He was on a rock about thirty feet above the river, just below the dark tranche through which the river tore. He could feel the ground vibrating from the river’s bass notes as it blew out of the cut and fanned out to a fast but flat section some twenty feet wide and sixty feet long. The opposite bank was a ­four-­story vertical wall, smooth as monument stone, topped with a fine tangled fantasy of branching acacias, a palisade of thorns. If the loose raft barreled down the other side, Pasquale would not be able to catch it in time, and it would bang around the corner, and be gone forever.

He knew he needed another man on the opposite bank in case it came down closer to that side. He spied a small shingle beach on the opposite bank, so he attached two throw lines to a boulder and asked Alemu to take one and swim across the river to be ready to capture the raft from the other side. But with a piercing look of terror, Alemu refused to try to catch the boat from either side—he was not a good swimmer, and he knew even bigger rapids were just downstream.

A row of ­Talmudic-­faced herders, wrapped in dirty coarse cotton cloths and holding long ­cattle ­sticks, squatted on their haunches watching the curious activity. Pasquale turned to them and asked if they would help retrieve the forthcoming raft, and offered ten birr each for the effort. They shook their heads no. Pasquale upped the offer to fifty, but again they refused. He peeled out one hundred birr, then one ­thousand—­the equivalent of about $114 U.S., more than a year’s ­earnings—­but they were resolute. “The Abay [Blue Nile] destroys,” their ­watery-­eyed leader said as flies buzzed about his mouth. “It is not safe.”

Realizing that chucking a boat down this fearsome piece of water was not a good idea, Pasquale picked up the radio and squeezed the talk button. He would tell Gordon to abort the attempt . . . it was a pointless bag of horrors. They would just portage the rafts around. But as he shouted into the ­walkie-­talkie, there was no response. Then the radio emitted Gordon’s voice: “Hurry up . . . ­we’re losing light. Give me the signal.”

Pasquale knew what was happening. When the batteries were low he ­couldn’t broadcast, but he could receive, so Gordon was hearing nothing from him. And the spare batteries were in a kit up at the start of the Gauntlet.

“If I ­don’t hear from you in ten seconds I’m going to release the first raft,” Gordon’s faint voice came through the speaker.

“NO! NO!” Pasquale yelled into the handheld. ­“Don’t release the boat!”

“Five seconds.” Gordon’s words beaded up and rolled down Pasquale’s spine.

Pasquale dropped the radio and scrambled up the rocky hill to a vantage where he could wave at Gordon to stop. But as he reached the top, he saw the raft already launched, skidding on a crackling surge of foam. The raft careened around the corner, and in a ­slow-­motion narcotizing moment, it rolled over.

Shit. ­We’re in trouble now, Pasquale thought, and sprinted down to where Alemu was standing, still holding the one rope. The raft started toward their position, its ­oil-­black bottom shimmering with water, the aluminum frame bent and battered. It had no flip lines, nothing rigged for a capsize. Still, they had to try. Knowing he was the ­stronger—­and more able to pull the boat ­in once a rope had been attached to it—­Pasquale shouted, “Alemu . . . take this rope and jump in. Tie it to the raft.” Alemu shook his head no, but Pasquale screamed again, so forcefully that it seemed to agitate the air, and Alemu took the plunge, hoping to land just in front of the raft.

But, as a novice in swift water, Alemu miscalculated, landed a few feet downstream of the boat, and vainly dogpaddled against the current. Within seconds the rope he held was stretched taut, and the powerful current started to push him under. Pasquale watched Alemu’s shoulders straining with effort, knowing this was exactly how Ian Macleod, a member of the British Army Expedition, had drowned, in this same area, in 1968. Ian had tried to swim across the river to attach a line to the other side. But he erred in his mark, and was pendulumed to the middle of the river, where the ­shore-­anchored rope went rigid and pushed him underwater like bait behind a speedboat. Unlike Ian, though, Alemu was just holding the rope. “Let go!” Pasquale screamed. Alemu stared back, eyes wide with terror.

Finally, he let go of the rope, and was shot like a champagne cork around the corner, out of sight. Pasquale knew from an earlier aerial scout in a Russian ­MI-­17 helicopter that the next rapid, about fifty yards below, began with a recirculating hole that could swallow a raft like a pill. Pasquale had been on previous expeditions where teammates had died in what might have been preventable circumstances, and he desperately did not want that to happen again.

He ­didn’t hesitate. Pasquale took the end of the other ­throw-­rope and dove into the cold current. It took precious seconds to reach the raft, where he curled his right hand around the black handle and brought it to a halt. Suddenly it seemed as though the Nile had inhaled and was holding its breath. A silence deep as the river swept in and hovered around Pasquale. It lasted seconds, then the sounds poured in again as into a bowl, and he took a gulp of air.

Now the rope in his left hand was ­banjo-­string tight, slicing through nerve endings. It thrummed against the roar of the rapids. The raft handle was beginning to tear. The canyon was filling with shadows. The current’s spray was stinging his face like BBs; his ring finger had gone numb. Like on some medieval torture rack, his muscles screamed for relief. He was out of time. He had to choose. Let go of the raft and insure his own safety. Let go of the rope, and hang onto a ­turtle-­turned runaway ­raft—­hopefully finding Alemu alive, and somehow getting him in the raft and to shore before the next falls.

Pasquale let go of the rope. The raft rocketed around the corner, Pasquale flailing in its wake. There on the other side of a jutting rock, up against a blunt cliff, was Alemu, his raw fingers pried into a chink in the stone, angry water clawing at his chest, face drained of color. As the raft spun toward Alemu, Pasquale, with a surge of adrenaline, reached up to the underside of the raft and bored his index fingers into two of the ­self-­bailing holes, kicked, and pulled himself up onto the ­eel-­slick bottom of the raft. Then he reached over and hauled Alemu on board.

Looking downstream he saw the monster hole just a few yards ­away—­the start of the next rapid. He had no way to steer the ­upside-­down raft as they rode it toward the brink. As Pasquale groped to untie the bowline, he had one thought: ­Fuck—­now ­I’ve done it.