The Nile Basin

The crocodile takes its family name from one river. Long before science had a word for the animal, the people of the lower Nile had a god for it, and the Greeks who came to trade and to stare carried its fame back across the Mediterranean. Crocodylus niloticus, the Nile crocodile, is the animal of the Nile in name and in fact, and the river it is named for is far longer, and shares its water with far more people, than most of the world pictures. Far longer. Follow it from the equatorial lakes to the Egyptian delta and you cross the whole shape of the problem this book exists to teach: great permanent water, an ancient predator, and millions of people who have no choice but to use the same shoreline.