Chasing Beauty, page 9
By December 18, their dahabiyya, the Ibis, was ready. Isabella announced in her diary that they were “charmed.” The long, two-masted boat measured just nine feet across and sat high in the water, better to maneuver and float above an ever-changing riverbed. “With a few touches,” she went on, “the little parlour became very pretty and as we could spread ourselves well over the boat, we were quite comfortable, with our separate dressing rooms, bath rooms, etc.” The spacious upper deck, which Belle called their “sky lounge,” was decorated with “Eastern rugs, couches, plants and awnings . . .” The scenery from onboard seemed quivering and alive. She personified Cairo in a runaway sentence that ends with these words: “. . . the lights of Cairo looked at themselves in the water, the palms waved and whispered to us from the bank, the moon looked down on it all, and when the crew, with their turbans and many coloured robes squatted in a circle about their little lurid, flickering fire, cooked their coffee and chanted their low weird songs to the tapping of the tarabuka—it was too much.” Too much for a single sentence and too much for her senses to take in at all once—she found the scene reminiscent of one of Scheherazade’s tales in Arabian Nights, as she’d noted on first arriving the week before.
Those familiar tales, translated from Arabic into English in the early eighteenth century, along with biblical stories, made up common reference points for first-time travelers on the Nile. As Belle would observe later, “The harvest scenes are full of incident. There is so much life: people, camels, donkeys, goats, sheep, dogs, cows, and buffaloes, and all such Bible pictures.” Egypt had long stirred the popular imagination in the West, but in the decades after Napoleon’s expedition at the end of the eighteenth century and the deciphering of hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, the ancient land and its river had become de rigueur on the grand tour. By 1872, when the squeaky-voiced teenager Teddy Roosevelt and his family traveled on the Nile, the river was crowded with seasonal tourists. That same year Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose memory was badly fraying, visited the sights with his daughter Ellen. He most wanted to see the tomb of Osiris on the island of Philae, the so-called jewel of the Nile.
The Gardners encountered tourists from England, Germany, France, and Brazil, but they also met familiar faces. When they came across the boat of fellow Bostonian Thomas Gold Appleton, all they could do was wave like mad and shout across the water. They dined with General George B. McClellan and his wife, Ellen, on each other’s boats.
The Nile’s current ran from south to north, so the arduous part of the trip was the first leg upriver. It could be done by sail when northerly winds blew but otherwise required quite a bit of tracking, or pushing by poles. Sometimes the crew had to scramble onshore to pull the boat along by a series of pulleys and ropes. A calm day meant little progress; a direct headwind also posed difficulties, or as Belle remarked: “great blow little go.” Jack kept detailed notes of when they were sailing and when they were tracking, down to the quarter hour.
Whether moving fast or slow, Belle didn’t seem to mind. She enjoyed her floating home, named after the long-legged shorebird common along the riverbank and revered by ancient Egyptians for “its hostility to locusts,” as Appleton quipped in his journal. She affectionately described what happened on the boat in bird terms, as when noting how the Ibis folded her wings for the night. Jack tried to learn photography, with not very good results. At one point he received advice from Antonio Beato, a professional photographer from whom he bought numerous prints. Belle spent time on the sky lounge reading, writing letters, absorbing the sights and sounds. Twelve days after they’d started out from Cairo, she made reference to Homer’s Odysseus and his visit to the land of the lotus-eaters: “No wind, we went not quite so surely as slowly I think—but the air was perfect and I felt that I could sit forever, lotus eating, watching the birds, the camels, and the people.” Likewise, in the evening two days later: “As I lay upon the couch with the fragrance of the frankincense stealing over me, the wake of the moon was a fit path by which my thoughts went straight to Cleopatra, and I forgot it was Xmas eve.”
Belle collected experiences and impressions almost as if they were objects that she could put in her hand. She wrote expansively almost every day in her modest-size album, which she also used as a diary. Sometimes she included a purchased photograph that illustrated her prose observations, as at the Temple of Esnah, which they visited on January 21: “The temple now consists chiefly of 24 columns, with capitals different and some beautiful.” Here and there, she illustrated her prose with her own carefully composed watercolors, depicting what she’d found interesting or what had moved her. She was fascinated by the visual and the verbal, and the combination of the two—how one might amplify the other. The night before their visit to the Esnah, onboard the Ibis, Belle was overcome with emotion at the beauty of the scenery: “What nights we have! The river runs liquid gold and everything seems burned into the precious metal, burning with inward fire; and then the sun sets and the world has hardly time to become amethyst and then silver, before it is dark night. And the moonlight nights! How different from ours. Nothing sharp, clear and defined, but a beautiful day turned pale. It was so beautiful, inexpressibly lovely tonight on deck and everything was so still when the Muezzin’s call to prayer was wailed through the air, that the tears would come.”
She drank up the sights and sounds. At the Pyramids near Cairo, which they’d visited first, before boarding the Ibis, Belle exclaimed: “. . . when I got away from the carriages and many of the people and could lie on the sand near the Sphinx, with the silent desert beyond and on every side and the Pyramids a little away from me—then solemnity and mystery took possession and my heart went out to the Sphinx.” Her experiences engaged all her senses.
Album page with painting of women praying, Travel Album: Egypt and Sudan, 1874–75, Isabella Stewart Gardner, ink, paper.
She could be typically Western in her views of the people, calling the women “rarely handsome” and saying that “all Arabs beg.” When they early on went to see the Mosque of the Howling Dervishes, she said she’d “never seen anything so terrible.” But she marveled at antiquities in the Cairo museum, calling the statues unequaled in their artistry. And she was deeply curious watching “graceful women coming and going with the water jars on their heads” near the riverbanks. She declared that the crew on the Ibis were a great delight, noticing how they were “so vain of their dress—I mean, their turbans. They are always washing them, fingering them and helping each other to wind their heads up in them.” She relished how they sang and how they enjoyed “their oft repeated cups of coffee and their occasional whiffs from the hasheesh pipe.” She quietly observed “the steersman at his prayers, his forehead touching the deck.” Her elegant watercolor of two women sitting on the ground of a “ruined mosque” captures her hushed appreciation for their world. The purchased photographs she included in the diary were not mocking but rather show people expert at what they do, proud and at one with their surroundings.
The Gardners came ashore again three days after Christmas Day to see the colossus at Ed Dayr. Unafraid of travel by any means, Belle got on a donkey while one of the red-turbaned crewmen “trotted by my side and held me on and the donkey up.” They saw the caves of Tell el-Amarna and the caves in the Libyan hills, which were gracefully decorated. Later, at Temple Koorneh, she traveled by “men’s arm’s, donkeys, ferry boat, and donkeys again.” By mid-January, they arrived at their—in Belle’s excited words—“first Egyptian Temple!” Dendera was a later Roman temple built to honor an Egyptian goddess and thus “very modern for Egypt.” She felt “rather suffocated at first by its massiveness and its 18 giant columns in the portico” but found the temple’s inner room “so mysterious and dark with its huge walls.” She shivered when thinking of the ritual sacrifices that had taken place within its halls but marveled at how they were “covered with sculptures” and noticed with pleasure the frieze of “Cleopatra and her son Cesarean on the walls, with their cartouches.”
The next day they anchored the Ibis near the Temple of Luxor at Thebes, where they picked up newspapers and letters. Neither Belle nor Jack reported any news from home in their diaries. On January 16, they started out on donkeys, under moonlight, for the great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, the forecourt of the Luxor complex, with its hundreds of enormous columns and pylons, some twelve feet in diameter, all reaching to the sky and inscribed with hieroglyphics and friezes. Interestingly, Belle didn’t describe what she saw; she described her feelings and reactions to what she saw. “I have never had such an experience and I felt as if I never wanted to see anything again in this world; that I might shut my eyes to keep that vision clear. It was not beautiful, but most grand, mysterious, solemn. I felt it, even more than saw it. It was a terrible [sic] that fascinated. I never can forget that night and Karnak will always be to me at the head of everything.”
A week later, as they approached Nubia to the south, the riverbanks began to change from limestone to sandstone. Belle painted a tranquil sunset, a favorite time of day. They were headed for Aswan, the first cataract, where many travelers turned around for the trip back down the Nile to Cairo. They were not alone there. “It was a race for the cataract,” Belle wrote on January 25, listing the other boat names, including the Nautilus and the Philae, which she found “very pretty and fast.” The next day Jack counted seventeen boats, either turning around to go back to Cairo or waiting to go through the cataract. Local villagers, called the Shellalee, had to pull each boat, one at a time, through a passage of rapids and whirlpools to avoid the jagged outcroppings. The Gardners were at the end of the line, and so passed the time by socializing. They had tea with Englishmen, dinner with a Mr. Foster to talk about hieroglyphics, and then exchanged visits with the McClellans. When Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince Arthur, arrived at the cataract, his boat went ahead of theirs, as did the boats of two German princes.
They got through the cataract on February 10, a hot day, with the Shellalee on board to guide the boat. “It was a most exciting time,” Belle noted, so when the end came, “the stillness was so great and so sudden that I felt like fainting and never was there a lovelier or quieter evening as we gently sailed past Philae.” By the time they got to Wadi Halfa, on February 22, they’d traveled over sixty days and almost eight hundred miles. Now it was time to turn around to row back down the river to Cairo. Belle lamented: “It was really sad to wake up to the realizing sense that it was the last day’s sail.” They had one more stop to make five miles past Wadi Halfa, at the Rock of Abusir. They went by boat, instead of overland by donkey, on the advice of the McClellans; Belle thought it a “fresh pleasant way of getting to the mountain and it was very interesting threading our way through the 1000 islands of the 2nd cataract.” At its top, Belle had the mountain to herself—“there was nobody to laugh at me for being absolutely unhappy because our journey was over and our faces were to be turned to the north.” She hunted for “carved names for those of friends and found several, as well as the historical ones,” while Jack was busily scratching their surname into the ink-black rock.
On their return, they stopped again to see the massive sculptures at Abu Simbel, which they did by moonlight on February 24. Belle returned early the next morning to say “goodbye to one of the old world’s wonders at sunrise.” She got there before anyone else and lay on the golden sand, as she watched the “light streak in the sky getting deeper and deeper, and by and by a yellow light began to creep down the rocks and over the benign calm of the great Ramses.” Under her watercolor sketch capturing the rising yellow light at the horizon and the blue and pink streaks of the dawn sky, she wrote: “Zodiacal Light.”
***
JACK LISTED OTHER PLACES THEY VISITED ON THEIR RETURN TRIP: EL-DERR, Amada, two days at the island of Philae, then Aswan and Edfu. At Thebes in mid-March, they visited the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens on the western side of the river, and that evening, back at the boat, they hosted the American consul, Ali Muraad Effendi. Bonnici, the dragoman, lit many candles to illuminate the Ibis, which “greatly delighted” the dignitary. The next morning, Belle couldn’t resist another visit to “glorious Karnak for farewell,” adding a photograph of the temple complex mirrored in its sacred lake to her diary. They left Thebes “bathed in a golden glow.” By April 12, with the Pyramids near Cairo “looming” in the distance, their river journey was at its end. “Good-bye to the dear Nile Voyage,” Belle wrote mournfully at the end of her Egypt diary.
THE TRIP WAS NOT NEARLY OVER, THOUGH. THE HOLY LAND, SYRIA, AND Greece came next on the itinerary. Jack’s family would later observe that Belle was “a tremendously energetic person as regards sight-seeing, amusements, excursions when travelling,” an apt description of her on this trip, except that after Egypt, she struggled on and off with various illnesses, some not identified. When they arrived back in Cairo on April 3, they arranged for passage later that month on the Vladimir, from Port Said to the ancient port city of Jaffa, then called Joppa. Belle had felt “wretched” with fever in the days before, and the eighteen-hour crossing made it worse with seasickness. Even so, she thought Joppa a beautiful sight, with pilgrims in bright-colored clothes filling the streets. In the tent where she and Jack were staying, she rested on a sickbed, where she could hear the tinkling bells of donkeys and camels passing nearby.
At the next stop, they pitched a tent on a cliff hanging over the seas, near Andromeda’s Reef. She wrote that she was “struck with the difference from Egypt. There the people are still and grand as their old temples; here everything is life; so much more like South of Europe, the people, with a good dash of the East. No nationality prevailing, but a confused mass of Persians, Russians, Syrians, Arabs, Greeks.” With Belle still not feeling well, they left early the next morning for Jerusalem, a “very jolty” ride, though she couldn’t help but be interested. On Sunday, May 2, she went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in the center of old Jerusalem. Its beauty overcame her weariness: “Impossible to describe the Church with its many chapels of the different sects, the gorgeous silver and gold lamps.” As at Karnak, “the impression one receives is only to be felt, not spoken.”
A week later they left for Jordan, with Belle riding a little chestnut horse, Mustapha. Together she and Jack would ride and camp in the desert. Jack had kept on the capable Bonnici from their Nile travels, paying him six pounds a day, and hired Ahemed as head muleteer and Assaid, Habeis, and several more crew to manage their six riding horses, five mules, and three donkeys. They took along a parlor and bedroom tent, along with separate tents for cooking and a water closet. They traveled through the wilderness of Judaea to Jericho, and then started for the Dead Sea, where they bathed in its clear waters. “The most delicious bath I ever remember—so buoyant,” Belle noted in her diary. They went on to Solomon’s Pools, the Mount of Olives, then Bethel, Galilee, Nazareth, and Cana, and finally arrived in late May at the Mount Carmel Convent, where they stayed six days.
Belle again felt terrible. Even a week later, after a day’s journey on the coast toward Tyre, she wrote: “not feeling very well, and so terribly tired.” On the seventeenth, they heard a report of cholera in Damascus and decided not to go. A week after that they climbed to the top of Lebanon, then down to the Cedars, where they pitched their tents in the grove. “Glorious to be there under the ‘shadow shroud’ of those kingly trees and then the delicious fragrance,” Belle wrote, quoting the book of Ezekiel. By the time they got to Beirut, on June 28, they’d spent forty nights in camp, and, according to Jack’s calculations, more than 212 hours in saddle.
Belle did not put watercolors or photographs in her second diary, from this part of their travels, as she had done in the first, on the Nile. Instead, she placed purchased photographs into their own album, which she bought in Cairo. She did, however, press between the diary pages the flowers she’d plucked from various sites—a pink poppy flower at Joppa; a sprig of thyme at Calvary; a laurel leaf at the Dead Sea. She was also weary and often sick. She was no longer on the river, with long evenings on the moonlit sky lounge to mull over what she’d seen that day—by this point, they’d traveled a long way by boat, donkey, camel, and horse, and on foot, in increasing heat. Given that Jack never mentioned that he felt poorly or sick, and that Belle’s illnesses seemed to fade and then return, the possibility of another pregnancy comes to mind, though there is no direct mention of this at the time, or later. In any case, Belle was wearing out.
And yet they went on—to Cypress, Rhodes, Smyrna, and then Constantinople (now Istanbul). By July 9, they arrived in Athens: “Wretchedly—so to bed—can’t quite believe I am in Athens.” The next day they drove by the theater of Dionysius and up to the Acropolis; they sat on the steps of the Parthenon as the sun sank in the western sky. They stayed until after 9 P.M., “feasting our eyes. Perfect, pure and beautiful.”
Waiting for letters while traveling was always nerve-racking—it was impossible to know how things were going back home. “Letters and no bad news, thank God,” Belle had remarked earlier in March. Now they weren’t as fortunate. Belle reported on July 16 that they’d received “two terrible telegrams about poor, dear Joe.” Joe Gardner, Jack’s eldest brother, had died by suicide on June 11, 1875, news that didn’t reach Jack and Belle until they were back in Constantinople. Joe had sat down in the middle of a road near his summer home on the North Shore and shot himself in the head, as Henry Adams told a friend in a letter. A line in the parish register at Emmanuel Church, which held the funeral, states that the coroner had determined the cause of death to be an “accidental shooting.” But, given the public setting of his death, everyone knew the sad truth.
