The River

By Sidney Owitz

The river flows through good times and bad, through forests and deserts, through days of cheer and days of sadness, through war and peace, and finally, it ends in the sea. It may assist in fertilizing the land, and it may help to spread disease and pollution. We cannot live without it, yet it could also drown us and kill us. Life is like a river.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546263418

Sidney Owitz

Sidney Owitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was educated. He graduated as a physician at the University of Cape Town. After practicing Medicine in South Africa for twelve years he came to the United States and became an anesthesiologist. He lives in Florida with his family.

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© 2018 . All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/27/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-6342-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-6341-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018912022

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Chapter I The River

Chapter II Liaisons In Nature

Chapter III The Ten Lost Tribes

Chapter IV The Other Two Tribes

Chapter V Jews in Islam

Chapter VI The Birth of a Nation

Chapter VII Empires Gone By

Chapter VIII Religion in the 2¹st Century

Chapter IX Language

Chapter X Death with Honor

Chapter XI Unsung Heroes

Chapter XII Where will the River Flow?

DEDICATION

T his book is dedicated to my dear wife, Joan, who has always been a wonderful help and support to me.

SUMMARY

T he river flows through good times and bad, through forests and deserts, through days of cheer and times of sadness, through war and peace, and finally ends in the sea. It assists in feeding us and fertilizing the land, but it may help to spread disease and pollution. We cannot live without it, yet it could also drown us and kill us. Life is like a river.

I

THE RIVER

                           From too much love of living,

                           From hope and fear set free,

                           We thank with brief thanksgiving

                           Whatever gods may be

                           That no life lives forever;

                           That dead men rise up never;

                           That even the weariest river

                           Winds somewhere safe to sea.

                               A.C. Swinburne (1837 – 1909)

F rom dust to dust, so says the Bible. It could also be said, from sea to sea. Our humble beginnings came from the sea, and figuratively speaking, the River of Life ends in the sea. Life is like a river.

Just as an artery supplies the lifeblood to the human body so does a river give life to the land through which it flows. Without water there is no life, no growth, only death. The river helps to feed the people, animals and birds, plants and trees that dwell on the land. The river brings fresh water from the springs and from the mountains where rain and ice and snow have fallen, and carries the water in streams or rivulets which join other such arteries, ultimately forming into rivers and delivering its contents into lakes or the seas and oceans. Rivers flow through mountains and valleys, plains and gorges, forests and deserts. When the flow is too heavy the river will overflow its banks and cause widespread flooding, often necessitating the erection of dikes and levees in order to protect the surrounding farmland and human and animal dwellings. Some rivers are invisible as they are out of view – they cannot be seen because they are flowing subterranean, the waters having seeped through the porous earth. Still, beyond human sight, they flow endlessly. Cavefish and troglobites, blind and living in darkness, swim in them destined never to see the sun, but they always need the water. Aquifers are rivers that are contained within permeable layers of rock. Both rivers and their subterranean counterparts provide the nearby cities and villages with their drinking water and farms for their agricultural requirements – or else, they just keep on flowing.

Rivers may cause erosion of the land and they often sculpt the surrounding rocks into weird and bizarre shapes. They may develop eddies and cataracts encouraged by the rough and uneven surfaces over which they flow or they may erode the soft rock under them. Sometimes they flow over cliffs in the form of waterfalls. The riparian zone is the area surrounding the river banks on both sides. This is usually fertile land as the minerals that have spilled out of the waters are a boon to farmers. Riparian soil is nutrient-rich, and birds will come to the river bank to drink and partake of its life-giving fluid. Animals, too, will come to drink of its health-giving content and wash in its cool waters – a veritable spa.

Mankind has always made great use of its rivers. We drink its water and bathe in it. We come here to relax. We have sport in our rivers, including sailing and fishing. We navigate in our waters with our kayaks, boats and ships. We use rivers for transporting our goods and felled trees. Often our economy depends on the use we make of our rivers. Animals and birds are attracted to the delights which they glean from the waters. They partake of the playful and unsuspecting fish that know no other home. We build canals to connect rivers to our lakes in order to aid in our transportation systems. Before air travel was ever known the rivers were our most important form of transportation for our goods and merchandise within the country as well as internationally. We use the water for agriculture. We often dam our rivers for the purpose of preserving water and adding to our water supply and irrigation. We need our dams for navigation and recreation as well as for hydro-electric power. Our dams act as a storage system. Rivers are frequently chosen as boundaries between states and countries, and add to our defensive systems. Docks and boat-building facilities can be found on our larger rivers. Rivers help us to sustain life. Without our rivers life far from the coast-line would be almost impossible to maintain. Just as the human body must remain well hydrated, so should the land.

Early civilization commenced around rivers. Mesopotamia, perhaps the earliest of them all, had its origins along and between the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Ancient Egypt was wrapped along the banks of the Nile, while the Indus River and its environs were home to the people of the Indian sub-continent. Faraway China, too, had its origins along the Yellow River. Agriculture, as we know it, was developed in the region known as the Fertile Crescent, a part of the Middle East which extends from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf which includes today’s Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Israel and a part of Turkey. Wheat and barley and chick peas were grown in those days while goats and sheep were domesticated.

The flowing waters can be so calm and soothing that we can bathe a baby in their midst. Yet there are times during storms when the river becomes so angry that it will seethe, froth and boil to such an extent that the churning current can sink a vessel and drown its entire crew. Rivers can support life and bring on death. They harbor fish to feed a nation and at the same time they provide a home to poisonous snakes, piranhas and other lurking dangers that can harm us.

In winter rivers may turn to ice. They may cease to flow as though frozen in Time, making them a haven for skaters. When the weather warms up they will flow again, collecting the melted snow and ice from the mountainside, adding to their load. They may perhaps cause flooding of the countryside. During times of drought rivers may dry out leaving behind nothing but an empty river bed in memory of days gone by; witness the wadis of North Africa. With further rainfall their prior flow and course may be resumed.

Rivers, too, often become havens for the deposit of waste materials, industrial run-off, poisonous compounds and plastic non-bio-degradable material. Many rivers are rife with pollution and poisonous compounds, including fertilizers and insecticides that have been washed into them by rainfall and by the effluent from industry. Passively they accept our waste disposal. These toxins may interfere with the breeding and feeding of fish, the growth and development of coral reefs, and ultimately birds and other animals that drink and feed off their contents. Non-biodegradable plastic material may end up in our rivers and stick in a bird’s throat, thus preventing it from feeding itself and lead to its death. Rivers may harbor bacteria that have spilled into them from sewage and other waste products, and aid in the spread of endemics and epidemics that kill our innocent unsuspecting people.

We need water to live and to keep our bodies hydrated, but rivers could be a scourge to mankind. There are chronic diseases which are spread by their waters. Onchocerciasis is a disease caused by the bite of the black-fly which breeds around rivers. It deposits filariae into the skin of bathers and fishermen who frequent its waters causing intense itching and rashes. This may spread to the eyes leading to river blindness. Hundreds of thousands of people in Central Africa suffer from river blindness. Schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia) affects millions of people in Africa and Asia. Two hundred thousand people per year die in Africa from this disease. It is actually caused by a fluke, the eggs of which are carried by a snail to the unwary bather. It enters the bladder or the rectum via the blood -stream, causing bleeding from these organs and chronic sclerosing inflammation, and sometimes leading to cancer. It is a scourge in areas where this disease is endemic. Rivers are potential sites for causing bowel infections such as diarrheas, dysentery and cholera. Epidemics can be spread by bathing in or drinking polluted water from infected rivers. Rivers that give us life may also be a bane to our well-being. A drug that heals some people may maim or kill others. So may it be with the waters of a river – they may heal some, but their toxic contents may kill others! Therefore our rivers must be kept clean, unpolluted and free of toxic elements and disease.

When the river approaches the sea its speed of flow diminishes. It spreads out into deltas, creating fertile farmland, the envy of the farmers who do not possess such land. These river deltas are sometimes referred to as the origin of the ‘cradle of civilization’. Fish and birds, too, have their breeding and nesting grounds in these deltas.

Without rivers mankind’s development would have been impeded. Without rivers we would never have reached this point in our civilization. Like the flow of a river the history of mankind moves along. It travels through good times and bad, through tragedies and pleasures, through forests and deserts, and where there is war and where there is peace. As the river continues its never-ending course it sees everything, it sees the unraveling of history. It witnesses nations coming and going, civilizations being born and put to rest. The inhabitants have been through hell and high water, hurricanes and cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis - until the river flows ‘somewhere safe to sea’.

That ol’ man river, he must know something, but he don’t say nothing, that ol’ man river he just keeps rolling along. (Words by Jim Croce, sung by Paul Robeson).

Rivers flow through Space and Time, and we do, too. So come with me through the following pages on our journey as we travel into the past and visit some of the areas and events through which our rivers have already flowed and lived through. You might be the student, but the rivers have seen it all.

II

LIAISONS IN NATURE

B eside the river stands a large tree. It is full and shady, and has over-sized serrated leaves and a wonderful tasting fruit. It is a fig tree. It was standing there a long time before man had ever set his eyes upon such a tree.

Eons before homo sapiens walked on this earth, when the land was free of mankind, plants and insects were enjoying the sunshine under the watchful eyes of the rolling rivers. Already plants and insects had created a liaison with each other, long before man set foot upon this earth, over 400 million years ago. Days of light and darkness, and the seasonal changes were the order of the day, much the same as it was at the time of the Creation. Man is a late-comer to this scene. By the time he arrived and began to look around him he did not notice that plants and insects had forged a permanent relationship that had already lasted millions of years, each depending on the other for their very existence, as though the one was here solely to serve the needs of the other. Man, a newcomer, had no such relationship with nature – man, of course, relies on nature, but without man nature would continue to thrive. Perhaps the world would be better off; there would be far less pollution and far less consumption of its resources, no war and no man-made destruction of the planet, no global warming and no nuclear bombs. The last child entering the room is the one who frequently disrupts the classroom.

The first mention of a tree occurs in Genesis, the first Book of the Bible. Figs were here long before the dinosaurs. The fig tree was present in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve made use of the leaves of the fig tree after they had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge in order to hide their private parts from each other so as to prevent shame and embarrassment. If not for a tiny wasp (not mentioned in the Bible) there would have been no fig tree and no leaves to conceal the private parts of Adam and Eve. Conversely, if not for the fig tree there would be no tiny wasp.

Apart from the fact that plants give to insects shade and shelter, as well as food and nourishment in exchange for the act of pollination and the spread of seeds throughout the neighborhood, there are also times when insects may destroy plants either by inflicting diseases upon them or eating up all the greenery growing on them. This goes both ways as plants can destroy insects, too, as in the case of carnivorous and poisonous plants; witness the Venus Fly Trap. Sometimes the plant has to establish ruses in order to attract the insects to come and pollinate by producing aromas, often attractive but occasionally foul-smelling similar to the odor of rotting flesh. At other times the plant wears a mask in order to attract the insect as when the orchid resembles some kind of insect in a scheme to entice a pollinator to ‘come into my parlor’. Yet the fig tree does not have to entice its pollinator with masks and scents. The pollinator will come anyway; it is inscribed in its DNA.

When the plant has anchored its roots into the soil, and the sun, rain and air have given it the necessary forces to make it grow and produce food it will require insects for pollination and the spread of its seeds. The butterfly will arrive and nourish itself on the nectar and pollinate the plant. The plant, in its turn, will nourish from its leaves the newborn caterpillar which needs food and water, oxygen and shelter. There is a liaison between plant and insect, a symbiosis, which keeps them both alive and satisfied.

There are times when plant and insect compete with each other for the same food supply, such as when carnivorous plants and spiders hunt for smaller insects. If the spider is more successful than the plant in winning the majority of victims it will be found that the carnivorous plant will suffer as a result, displaying stunted leaves and lack of growth, as though it were undergoing malnutrition and ultimately starvation.

The fig tree belongs to the family known as ficus, which includes the banyan tree. The Asian fig is ficus carica. The fig tree, although present all over the world, was initially found in the Middle East and Asia. Botanically speaking, a fig is a mulberry. There is an amazing relationship between the fig-tree and the wasp, even closer that what exists between other plants and their insect pollinators. This is an incongruous relationship – the