A propitious wind, and sails of patience

A propitious wind,and sails of patience
No river has so marked the land it flows through as the Nile. From the earliest of times, writes Fayza Hassan, it has exercised a special enchantment over explorers who tried to map its course and describe what they observed on its shores. Later, tourists spent the winter season gently plying its waters on their way to Upper Egypt. The scores of studies, diaries and travel-logs they left behind recorded inimitable sunsets -- and incredible adventures As soon as the wind had filled our large sail, the Reyyis (or captain of the boat) exclaimed, 'El-Fat-Hah'. This is the title of the opening chapter of the Qur'an -- which the Reyyis and all the crew repeated together in a low tone of voice.
Sophia Poole, 1842
DISCOVERY AND DIVERSION: Herodotus and Strabo were among the first historians who attempted to put the Nile and its people 'on the map', followed much later by mediaeval Arab travellers like Ibn Battuta and Ibn Jubayr as well as by some Christians who, on their way to and from the pilgrimages to the Holy Land, stopped long enough to describe the cities of Egypt and the river which was their life-line.
In 1721, the chaplain of the British settlement in Algiers wrote in his Travels or Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant, that "[n]o diversion can be attended with greater pleasure than travelling upon the Nile." Before him, in 1704, Paul Lucas, a physician, antiquarian, botanist and merchant from Rouen, published Voyage du sieur Paul Lucas au Levant (The Voyage of Mr Paul Lucas to the Levant). In his dedication "to Louis XIV and HRH Madame", he explained that "one will find [in his book] among other things, a description of Upper Egypt following the course of the Nile from Cairo up to the cataracts, with a precise map of this river which has never been presented before."
A little more than 10 years later, an acute curiosity in what lay south of Cairo began to develop, pitting French and English explorers against each other in a race to be first to depict -- and often to appropriate -- the extraordinary vestiges of an ancient and mysterious civilisation. Consequently, enlightened visitors began to ply the Nile: Rev. Richard Pococke and Dr Charles Perry sailed as far as Aswan, while Frederick Nordern, a Danish sea captain sent to Egypt by King Christian VI of Denmark, went even further, reaching Derr in Nubia, where he was attacked and had to escape down the river to save his life.
Perhaps the best known of these intrepid travellers is Scott James Bruce who, in 1768, sallied out in search of the sources of the Nile. He mistook that of its tributary, the Blue Nile, for the real thing; but his voyage, all the way to Khartoum, made for the telling of most extraordinary tales of the river and its people.
His voyage included, among other notable events, a gun battle when trying to land at Antinous to see the ruins of Hadrian's town; a fine reception at Mallawi, where Sheikh Mohamed Agha sent his respects along with a gallon of brandy, honey-preserved oranges and lemons, and a whole lamb; the sighting of a live crocodile just before reaching Dendera; and the discovery of the tomb of Ramses III.
By the 1780s, the account of a voyage on the Nile up to Aswan was expected of any serious visitor, a state of affairs which compelled Etienne Savary, who had so positively inspired the members of the French Expedition with his Lettres sur l'Egypte, to entirely invent an exciting description -- informed by his illustrious predecessors' writings -- of Luxor and its temples, which he had been unable to reach on account of his youth, inexperience, and poverty, as well as the general hostility displayed towards the French at the time.
EXCAVATING THE PAST: Long before any systematic attempt was made to study Egypt and Nubia's ancient history, many men and women had carried "souvenirs" of their travels back to their country. Collections were built up, and in 1741 the Egyptian Society was founded in London. In 1753, the British Museum was established. Among the collection of antiquities it contained were 150 Egyptian pieces, which could have been enhanced in 1816 by the colossal granite bust of Ramses II, known as the Young Memnon: Henry Salt, the British consul-general in Egypt, had commissioned self-styled archeologist and jack-of-all-trades Giovanni Belzoni to remove it from Thebes and ship it back home. The British Museum turned it down, however, and it was bought by Sir John Soane for 2,000 pounds sterling. It is still one of the main attractions of the Soane Museum.
Having completed this arduous task, and still enjoying Salt's patronage, Belzoni set off up the river to discover more monuments, visiting Philae and then Abu Simbel, where he excavated the great temple of Ramses II and opened the grotto-sepulchre of Seti I. There, he discovered this pharaoh's sarcophagus, which was soon to follow the same route as Young Memnon's bust.
Vivant Denon accompanied Bonaparte on his Egyptian expedition and, oblivious to the military battles raging around him, immersed himself in the detailed sketching of the monuments that lay along the Nile. The Description de L'Egypte was the impressive outcome of his and his scholarly companions' intensive efforts.
These eminent savants and erudite amateurs began to electrify Europeans, who longed as never before to embark on an "Egyptian adventure". When Champollion eventually deciphered the Rosetta Stone in 1821, the path up the Nile to the ancient burial grounds was transformed into a busy thoroughfare. It was not long before an extraordinary collection of scholars, adventurers, treasure seekers and collectors arrived in Egypt. The bazaars thrived, and the antiquities dealers were kept busy providing collectors with genuine -- and sometimes fake -- mummies, which sold like hot cakes. Most travellers of the period reported that, apart from the sights themselves, the single most enduring impression they took away from their visits to Thebes, Karnak or Luxor was that everyone they met was intent on selling them something.
Endowed with far more serious business acumen than the ordinary boatmen, dragomans and souvenir-sellers who plagued the foreigners with their offers of "a little piece of the past" were the members of the Abdel-Rassoul family, from the village of Gurna, who had often provided labour for the Antiquities Service. They were engaged in digging up and selling off antiquities with almost professional skill, marketing these treasures preferably to wealthy foreign collectors. They struck gold one day, or so they thought, when a young man from the family stumbled upon a tomb near the colonnaded temple of Hatshepsut, known as Deir Al-Bahari (the northern monastery). Inside the tomb, mummies and sarcophagi were piled one on top of the other. Having been led into the cache by their relative, the Abdel-Rassouls realised at once that they were the first to penetrate this strange, deep pit; unaware of the identity of the mummies, they were nevertheless extremely careful to keep their find a secret. Cautious as they may have been in selling the gold and papyri they brought from their treasure trove in the dark of the night, however, they were eventually apprehended.
When Emil Brugsch, Mariette's successor and head of the Egyptian Museum, heard of the Abdel-Rassouls' activity and their subsequent arrest, he decided to visit the tomb himself. There, he found the remains of some of the greatest rulers of ancient Egypt: Seti I, Amosis, Amenophis I, Tuthmosis III and Ramses II, 40 kings in all, whose mummified bodies had been moved to this unadorned morgue-like hole thousands of years before by priests attempting to protect them against tomb-robbers. The royal mummies were eventually loaded onto a steamer on 14 July 1881 and, accompanied by Brugsch, sailed down the river to Cairo. Forming a spontaneous funerary procession, the villagers accompanied the steamer, walking along the banks of the river, the men firing their guns and the women wailing and covering their faces and breasts with dust and sand. The constant lamentation was passed on from village to village, whose inhabitants mourned their ancient rulers as if they had been cherished members of their own families.
TOURISTS AND TRAVELLERS: All the boats that plied the river did not carry such a gruesome cargo, however. More often than not, they served as floating pleasure palaces to a jolly lot.
This sailing on the moon-lit Nile has an inexpressible charm; every sight is softened, every sound is musical, every air breathes balm. The pyramids, silvered by the moon tower over the dark palms, and the broken ridges of the Arabian hills, stand clearly out from the star-spangled sky.
Eliot Warburton, 1845
Ampère once said that a visit to Egypt was "a donkey ride and a boating trip interspersed with ruins," an epigram which may indeed have summed up some travellers' experience in his time. The standard course accessible to the ordinary voyager was to follow the Nile from Alexandria to Wadi Halfa, just below the second Cataract (an itinerary which would encompass today the man-made Lake Nasser). Amelia Edwards -- who in the 1870s went "all the way", pushing "a thousand miles up the Nile" -- advised "a good English saddle and a comfortable dahabiya" to those who sought to "add very considerably to the pleasure of the journey," as she noted in her famous travel account.
Though the donkeys and the saddle must indeed have been of the essence, it was ultimately the dahabiya that made the voyage or ruined it. "Of the comparative merits of wooden boats, iron boats and steamers, I am not qualified to speak," wrote Edwards in 1873. "We however saw one iron dahabiya aground upon a sandbank, where, as we afterwards learned, it remained for three weeks. We also saw the wrecks of three steamers between Cairo and the first Cataract." She believed that "the old fashioned dahabiya -- flat-bottomed, drawing little water, light in hand, and easily poled off when stuck -- was the one vessel best constructed for navigation on the Nile."
Although far more costly, she found the dahabiya preferable to the steamer: "The one is expensive, leisurely, delightful; the other is cheap, swift and comparatively comfortless." One of the staunch defenders of this Nile aristocracy -- of which she considered herself a full-fledged member -- who looked down on ordinary tourists, Edwards had little patience for those who wished to visit "the sites" in season, on a budget and in a hurry.
Before she had discovered the joys of travelling on the Nile in style, however, the merits of the various types of dahabiyas had already been perceived by one of her predecessors. In 1862, in her Letters from Egypt, Lucie Duff Gordon, who, like many illustrious travellers attracted by the climate, had come to Egypt for health reasons, wrote to her mother about the "jewel of a boat" (dahabiya) her servant Omar had found for her. "I went to Boulak... and saw various boats and admired the way in which the English travellers pay for their insolence and caprices. Similar boats cost people with dragomans L50 to L65. But, then, 'I shall lick the fellows,' etc., is what I hear all round... the owner of the boat, Sid Achmet el-Berberi, asked L30, whereupon I touched my breast, mouth and eyes, and stated through Omar that I was not, like other Ingleez, made of money but that I would give L20."
After Sid Achmet's initial refusal to lower his price, Lucie went in search of other boats, but found none to her satisfaction. The ones she saw were not as clean nor "had a [similar] little boat for landing". Meanwhile, Sid Ahmed relented: "[he] came after me and explained that if I was not like other Ingleez in money, I likewise differed in politeness, and had refrained from abuse... and I should have the boat for L25."
Another point which provoked Edwards was the schedule of the voyage, to which novice tourists submitted without protest. In a letter to his mother, dated 3 February 1850, Gustave Flaubert described the classical itinerary which the ra'is of his cangia proposed to follow: "We'll go up the river as quickly as possible, stopping only when the wind stops -- a thing I gather happens quite often -- and it is on our way back, downstream, that we shall stop and visit places at our leisure."
Nile cruise veterans, among them Edwards, disagreed: by starting much earlier in the season, it was possible to include unhurried visits to sites off the beaten track, on the way to and from Aswan and Abu Simbel. This inside knowledge was one more reason, for those who were familiar with the ways of the wind and the river, to feel superior.
TRANSCENDING TRANSLATION: Foreigners could enjoy their luxurious individual forays into more or less uncharted areas only insofar as they were lucky enough to secure the services of a capable dragoman. Without his invaluable services, visitors left to their own devices usually lived to regret it. He usually took care of the logistics of the trip, hiring the boat, and making all the necessary arrangements for provisions, accommodation and visits to monuments along the way. He was the only articulate link between his client and the native population.
The choice of the dragoman, therefore, was of the utmost importance. "Our choice of these gentlemen fell between three, equally recommeded... a Maltese, a Greek, and an Egyptian," wrote Howard Hopley in 1868. After choosing Haroun the Egyptian, Hopley commented: "Haroun was a man who knew full well that we infidel islanders were delivered into his hands as a prey, to be squeezed as a sponge -- only not too dry. He did not in the least shrink from this arrangement, but chose to do it in a gentlemanly way." Hopley was most impressed by Haroun's attire, and admitted that his handsome appearance had won him prefence over the two other candidates. "He wore a gorgeous turban, perfect in its twists with multitudinous silk tassels dangling about the neck. Trousers of purple, falling half-way down the legs, exceedingly ample, and girt in at the waist by a sumptuous Damascus scarf of many colours, a gold embroidered vest, and a braided jacket of green."
Dragomans intrigued tourists to no end, and were often instrumental in the return of many visitors who were happy to arrange a second trip through them. They were a fixture around the Shepheard's and the Mena House, and some became quite famous. Rumour had it that several well-off American tourists took their dragomen back home with them at the end of their tour, while others married them and settled happily in villages around the historic sites. Their exotic attraction never waned entirely and, even after the advent of organised tours, one could often see small groups clustered around the legendary character, intent on being initiated in the mysteries of Ancient Egyptian customs in the dragoman's strange idiom -- a sometimes puzzling amalgam of all the different languages he proudly claimed to speak fluently.
COOK AND COLONIALISM: Thomas Cook took his first group of tourists to Egypt to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal, which he dubbed the "greatest engineering feat of the present century" in his Excursionist and Tourist Traveller magazine. Due to a miscalculation, they arrived too early to attend the opening, but were in time for another occurrence: the appearance in Cairo of the Prince and Princess of Wales who, unable to be present at the Canal festivities -- since England was officially boycotting the event -- had resolved to pay Khedive Ismail an advance visit. After a brief stay in Cairo, they were sent off up the Nile for a six week-trip on the khedival dahabiya.
The Cook crowd, divided into two groups of 16, took Egyptian-built steamers, the Benha and the Benisuef; those who witnessed their progress claimed that, oblivious to their surroundings, they seemed to spend most of their time in hot pursuit of the royal party, never lagging far behind the khedival vessel. Cook himself did little to discourage the excessive interest of his charges: unable to deliver the inauguration, he was only too happy to keep his clients entertained by giving them a chance to observe royalty at close range, an opportunity they could not seize at home.
When it all started, Cook and his troupe of first-time travellers had not been welcome guests on the Nile, however. "Such is the esprit du Nil," wrote Edwards, adding: "The people in the dahabiyas despise Cook's tourists; those who are bound for the Second Cataract look down with lofty compassion upon those whose ambition extends only to the First; and travellers who engage their boats by the month hold their heads a trifle higher than those who contract for the trip."
Cook was quick to catch onto the caste system that prevailed on the Nile, and did his best to promote his own kind of tourism, countering Edwards' pride in "going as far as [she] liked and for as long as [she] liked" with the claim that "[his clients] had the advantage [of speed] over the voyagers by the old Nile boats, whose patient endurance must have been very severely tested." Furthermore, although his tours to the Holy Land and Egypt were by no means cheap, they were certainly much less expensive than individual trips. In addition, Cook's attention to his clients' comfort was painstaking: apart from providing luxurious accommodation once he had his own Nile steamers, his ministrations extended to the quantity, quality and variety of the food served: the daily menu included handsome portions of English ham and Yorkshire bacon, sardine and salmon from Liverpool, preserved fruit and marmalade from London, in addition to Gloucester and Cheddar cheeses, augmented with fresh meat, eggs, vegetables and poultry bought on the way. Those who, unlike Cook himself, did not wholeheartedly support the work of the Temperance Society were given ample opportunity to wash down their hearty meals with bottles of Bass beer.
In unfamiliar and often mysterious surroundings, good food from home was a reassuring feature, one for which his customers would undoubtedly be grateful, Cook reasoned. Unlike Eliot Warburton, who, twenty years before the commercialisation of Nile excursions, had been completely happy with "a plunge into the Nile [constituting] the principal part of a toilette in which razor or looking glass [were] unknown," they needed rather more than "a carpet... a chibouque of fragrant latakeea... [and] a little cup of coffee's very essence".
Nor were they cut out to enjoy Gustave Flaubert's travelling style. In 1850, he wrote his mother from Egypt that he was entirely satisfied with the blue cangia he and Maxime du Camp had rented, which featured "a room with two little divans facing each other, a large room with two beds on one side of which there [was] a kind of alcove for our baggage and on the other an English-type head [lavatories], and finally a third room... which will serve as store-room as well."
Tourists as well as travellers, however, generally demanded the pampering they were used to at home, pleasantly enhanced with some, but not too much, local colour. Even Amelia Edwards had not been too keen on total uprooting: "...there are cabins to put in order, flowers to arrange...It is wonderful however what a few books and roses, an open piano and a sketch or two will do. In a few minutes the comfortless hired look had vanished...and the 'Philae' wears an aspect as cozy and home-like as if she had been occupied for a month."
BOTHERED, NOT BEWITCHED:
Happy are the Nile travellers who start thus with a fair breeze on a brilliant afternoon. The good boat cleaves her way swiftly and steadily. Water-side palaces and gardens glide by, and are left behind. The domes and minarets of Cairo drop quickly out of sight. The mosque of the citadel, and the ruined fort that looks down upon it from the mountain ridge above, diminish in the distance. The Pyramids stand up sharp and clear.
Amelia Edwards, 1877
There was nothing about the scene to distinguish it from any river scene in any city. The pyramids, of course, were hidden by buildings. The grey, poppling water and the occasional barges were too matter-of-fact for description.
William Golding, 1984
Nobel Laureate and author of the Lord of the Flies William Golding arrived in Egypt in the 1980s, long after the High Dam had changed the conditions of Nile travelling. There had been a revolution, the population had increased almost threefold, budget tourism was thriving and Egypt was no longer offering bored Western aristocrats individually tailored tours. His head filled with a medley assortment of prejudices and preconceptions, Golding arrived, compared the situation on the ground -- or rather on the water -- to his dream, and found reality most wanting.
"He was not a terribly gracious man," says literature professor Fatma Moussa, who, while in London, had been asked by Faber and Faber, the editors of Golding's future travel book, to help arrange a pleasant trip up the Nile for the author and his wife. Moussa asked her son, Alaa Soueif, then in Cairo, to assist Golding. Soueif was to be Golding's "minder" (a modern and sophisticated version of the cherished dragoman of times gone by, as Golding saw it) throughout the river voyage. "I did my best," Soueif says, recalling the unpleasant experience, "but he was a cantankerous old man, chronically dissatisfied."
Golding's writings seem to give credence to this opinion: "The boats were awful. There weren't many of them...I had some delusion that Cairo would have river boats...the boats were either plastic skimming dishes or rotting old houseboats where the decaying curtains were pulled apart by their own weight and carpets under foot squelched with water from the bilge."
Secretly dreaming of warmth and luxurious comfort, Golding would have undoubtedly been more at home on one of Cook's pleasure steamers, on the terrace of the Cataract Hotel with Hercule Poirot watching the younger members of the expedition boarding "quaint little sail boats" for a visit to Philae, or, less anachronistically, on one of the extraordinarily sumptuous-five star Nile cruises that take tourists on courtly, tidily packaged tours of Upper Egypt. He longed for a fancy experience and felt short-changed. He admitted, however, that, had the trip been up to his expectations, he would not have had a chance to write an original Egyptian journal, in which the things he had not been able to do or see featured preeminently; nor would he have been taken, towards the end of his stay, to "the region of Darbel Habbena (sic)". There he met famous architect Hassan Fathi, who "live[d] on the top floor of an ancient Mameluke Palace".
Today, with the advent of fast train and air travel, mass tourism and packaged guided tours, solo river trips from Cairo to Aswan are no longer common: "Today, unless you are adventurous enough to sail down the Nile by felucca," writes Deborah Manley, "your journey will be in one of the 200 or so river boats that act like floating hotels between Luxor and Aswan. Hemmed in by barges and the 'British' dam at Aswan, they move up and down between the two all year long, although a few boats are now designed to go all the way from Cairo to Aswan... At Aswan, each company has its own anchorage...the boats may be lined up two or more deep."
"He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience," Golding's engineer on the Hani told the impatient author. Those who are sailing on the Nile in grand style do not have to wait for a propitious wind. They only have to contend with the interminable delays in river traffic caused by five-star cruiser gridlock.
Sources:
Jean-Marie Carré, Voyageurs et Ecrivains Français en Egypte, IFAO, first edition 1956
Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile, Bantam Books, 1973
Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, Parkway Publishing, 1993
William Golding, An Egyptian Journal, Faber and Faber, 1985
Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, Virago, 1983
Gianni Guadalupi, The Discovery of the Nile, The American University in Cairo Press, 1997
Deborah Manley, The Nile, A Traveller's Anthology, Cassell, 1996
Anthony Sattin, Lifting the Veil, Dent (n.d.)
Francis Steegmuller, ed. and transl., Flaubert in Egypt, Penguin Books, 1996
Nicholas Warner, ed., An Egyptian Panorama, Zeitouna, 1994