A World Beneath the Sands, page 20
And as for Mariette, while he was lauded in Egypt, he found much less favour in his home country. It has been said that he ‘sought no friends except the ruler, and he alienated both those who wanted to exploit the monuments of Egypt by denying them that privilege and those who wanted to support his work of conservation by his solitary gruffness’.49 For all that he had founded and stewarded the Antiquities Service, established Egypt’s first national museum, and discovered a host of major monuments and priceless artefacts, he was never taken entirely seriously by the scholarly community. He was sanguine about his academic reputation, writing: ‘I know the truth, that during my scientific career, I have done only two things, the Serapeum and the Cairo Museum, that most people would regard as services to science. But I have published nothing further, except a few insignificant and incomplete articles.’50
The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres finally appointed Mariette a permanent member in 1878, just three years before his death. A more fitting, and lasting, tribute may be found inscribed on his sarcophagus which lies, not in a Paris cemetery, but in the garden of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It reads, simply, ‘L’Egypte reconnaissante’ – a grateful Egypt.
SIX
A thousand miles up the Nile
Lucie Duff Gordon, lady of letters and friend of the Egyptian poor.
The work of destruction, meanwhile, goes on apace. There is no one to prevent it; there is no one to discourage it.1
AMELIA EDWARDS, 1877
From the death of Cleopatra until the middle of the nineteenth century, the history of Egypt, and of Western engagement with Egypt, was written by men. Women played little or no public role in Roman, Byzantine, Arab or Ottoman rule over the Nile Valley; none of the early European travellers to Egypt was a woman; there were no female members of the Napoleonic expedition, nor of the subsequent expeditions led by Champollion or Lepsius. Only Sophia Lane Poole, with her first-hand account of life in the harems of Cairo, brought a female perspective to Western understanding of Egypt, and shone a light on the lot of Egyptian women. But the mores of the age demanded that her groundbreaking work be published semi-anonymously: her name is absent from the title page, which instead makes reference to her already famous brother: ‘The Englishwoman in Egypt: letters from Cairo written during a residence there in 1842, 3, & 4, with E. W. Lane, Esq Author of the “Modern Egyptians”. By his sister’. Sophia’s own name only appears inside the book, at the foot of the preface.
Nineteen centuries of male-dominated encounters and experiences were finally brought to an end in the 1860s and 70s thanks to two remarkable women: women from very different backgrounds and with very different motivations, but who had the same passion, the same indomitable spirit, and an equal affection for Egypt. One developed a deep fascination for the modern Egyptians and found her calling as a friend of the downtrodden fellahin, bringing their plight to wider attention. The other was captivated by the ancient Egyptians, and, scandalized at the wholesale destruction of pharaonic monuments, launched a campaign to save Egypt’s patrimony for future generations, in the process establishing Egyptian archaeology on a permanent footing. Lucie Duff Gordon and Amelia Edwards: while neither has achieved the worldwide fame of Champollion, Lepsius or Mariette, their names and contributions are writ large in the history of Egyptology, and their stories exemplify all the contradictions of European relations with Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century.
Born in 1821, the year before Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics, Duff Gordon was blessed with remarkable parents. Her father, John Austin, was a professor of jurisprudence and a noted intellectual. Her mother, Sarah, was unusually well educated for a woman of the time (Sarah’s own mother had been a strong supporter of abolitionism, and had been used to discussing politics and literature on a par with men). The young Lucie inherited her parents’ talents and, from an early age, developed an insatiable appetite for reading. A friend described her, with great perspicacity and not a little understatement, as ‘a great reader, a great thinker, very original in her conclusions, very eager in impressing her opinions, her mind was not like those of many women’.2 Lucie’s natural inquisitiveness was fed by early exposure to foreign countries and cultures. The family lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer from 1834 to 1836, where Sarah was known as ‘la belle anglaise’, and where Lucie’s childhood neighbour and exact contemporary was none other than Auguste Mariette. Whether the two ever met is not known, but they are likely to have had friends in common.
When the Austin family returned to England, Lucie was on the verge of her ‘coming out’. At her first society ball, at Lansdowne House – the London residence of the Marquess of Lansdowne, a leading Whig statesman, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary – her eyes fell upon a man more than ten years her senior. Sir Alexander Duff Gordon was of impeccable pedigree, being descended from Scottish nobility, and a baronet to boot. Despite the age difference, Alexander and Lucie fell in love and were married on 16 May 1840 – overcoming initial opposition from Alexander’s mother, who disapproved of her son marrying a woman with no dowry. They made their home in Westminster, where, with Lucie’s intellectual connections and Alexander’s aristocratic cachet, they enjoyed a wide circle of friends. Tennyson used to come and read his poems at their house. Other visitors included the historian, Macaulay, and the novelists, Dickens and Thackeray; the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, and the future Emperor of France, Napoleon III, then in exile in London; the founder of the influential Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith; and the travel writer, William Kinglake (whose first literary work, Eothen; or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, 1844, recounted his adventures in Egypt). To supplement the Duff Gordons’ meagre income, Lucie put her academic and linguistic talents to good use by translating Niebuhr’s Stories of the Gods and Heroes of Greece from German into English. She also demonstrated her concern for more distant lands and peoples when she took in a Nubian boy, who had been enslaved before being rescued by English missionaries, as her servant. Hassan el-Bakeet, always known as Hatty, remained a cherished member of the Duff Gordon household until his death from congestion of the lungs on Christmas Day 1850.
Indeed, a title and connections were certainly no protection against illness in mid-nineteenth-century London, and the Duff Gordons, like so many of the capital’s families, were touched repeatedly by misfortune. Lucie’s second child (her first, Janet, was born in 1842) died at only a few months old. Alexander nearly died of cholera in 1846. And, after the birth of their only surviving son, Maurice, in 1849, Lucie herself began to succumb to tuberculosis. She struggled against the disease, and gave birth to a second daughter, Urania, in 1858; but by the winter of 1861, Lucie was so ill that her doctors advised her to go abroad for a warmer, drier climate. Like many Britons, she headed first for the Cape, but then decided to try Egypt, newly fashionable as a winter resort, especially for consumptive Europeans.
She had read the Bible and Herodotus, the Arabian Nights and Eothen, but nothing could have prepared her for the grim realities of life in Said’s Egypt. On her arrival in Alexandria in October 1862, she wrote ‘what is not pleasant, is the absence of all brightness or gaiety, even from young and childish faces’.3 From that moment on, her support for working-class politics back in Britain found an outlet as a champion of the hard-pressed peasantry of Egypt. Moreover, in her mother (if not in her husband), she knew she had a correspondent who shared her progressive views and who would not be shocked by her frequent scathing remarks about the British abroad. Duff Gordon’s clear-sightedness and openness to other cultures made her an unusually sharp observer of colonial attitudes. ‘Why do the English talk of the beautiful sentiment of the Bible and pretend to feel it so much,’ she wondered, ‘and when they come and see the same life before them, they ridicule it?’4
Lucie’s dismay at the lives of ordinary Egyptians was compounded by her swift realization that the cost of living was far higher than she had expected, at least in Alexandria with its growing European population. (By 1864, there were over 60,000 Europeans in Alexandria, one-third of the city’s population; fourteen years earlier, the entire European population in Egypt had been just 50,000.5) Only days after her arrival, she wrote: ‘I regret more than I can say that I ever came here, for I fear it will be utterly impossible to live as cheaply as I had hoped.’6 But she was nothing if not stoical in the face of adversity, and she decided to make the best of her situation, travelling on to Cairo where she found a more ‘golden existence, all sunshine and poetry, and, I must add, kindness and civility’.7 There she took a servant, Omar, known by his nickname Abu Halawy (‘father of sweets’), and, like all European visitors, set off on a journey upstream. ‘If this voyage does me as much good as it has done to others,’ she wrote, ‘I shall be well enough for anything.’8
The Nile soon worked its magic. After just ten days on the river, Duff Gordon began ‘to eat and sleep again, and cough less’.9 As her health improved, so her fascination and sympathy for the Egyptians themselves began to grow. She was struck by their ‘tolerant spirit’10 and noted, with rare understanding, that ‘the much talked-of dirt is simply utter poverty. The poor souls are as clean as Nile mud and water will make their bodies, and they have not a second shirt, or any bed but dried mud.’11 By the time her boat reached Asyut, nearly three weeks into the voyage, Egypt had her in its thrall. She wrote: ‘I heard a boy singing a Zikr (the ninety-nine attributes of God) to a party of dervishes in a mosque, and I think I never heard anything more beautiful and affecting.’12
But Egypt was changing: internal currents of political awakening were mixing with the external forces of nascent colonialism, and the results were often felt most acutely by the ordinary people. On 17 January 1863, while Lucie was in Aswan, the viceroy Said died and was succeeded by Ismail, a ruler who wanted Egypt to be, and to be seen as, part of Europe – dynamic and modern – not part of Africa (then cast as backward and primitive).13 Yet one of Ismail’s very first acts as viceroy was to receive, in an audience at the royal palace on Roda Island, the explorer John Hanning Speke, lately arrived from Khartoum having discovered the source of the Nile. By opening up Africa, Europe was preparing it for imperial subjugation. Indeed, a few years earlier, during a trip up the Nile, Flaubert had presciently remarked: ‘It seems to me impossible that within a short time England won’t become mistress of Egypt.’14
The sense of a country at a tipping point, poised precariously between a time-worn past and an uncertain future, comes across vividly in Duff Gordon’s letters from Egypt. Unlike virtually every traveller to the Nile Valley before her, she was pointedly uninterested in the ancient monuments, declaring: ‘It is of no use to talk of the ruins; everybody has said, I suppose, all that can be said . . . ’15 A visit to the greatest religious complex of the ancient world merited barely a mention: ‘Yesterday I rode over to Karnac . . . Glorious hot sun and delicious air.’16 Yet she could not be insensible to the layers of history visible at every turn, memorably describing Egypt as ‘a palimpsest, in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that’.17 There were reminders of pharaonic civilization all around, and not just in the ruined temples and tombs. She observed that the Nubian women around Aswan still wore clothing and ornaments ‘the same as those represented in the tombs’,18 while ‘the ceremonies at births and burials are not Muslim, but ancient Egyptian’.19 Away from ‘the highroad and the backsheesh-hunting parasites’20 life in the country was largely unchanged for millennia, and Lucie was greatly taken by ‘the charm of the people’,21 declaring – for she was still, in her own mind, on a short-term visit – ‘I shall say farewell to Egypt with real feeling.’22
Yet, even in the countryside, modernity was encroaching fast. The American Civil War, which had been raging for two years, had boosted the market for Egyptian cotton, and Ismail had responded, ordering vast new irrigation works in order to increase the acreage of cultivable land devoted to cash crops. Egypt’s new-found prosperity did not escape the attention of the Ottoman sultan, Abdel Aziz. In 1863 he paid a visit to his upstart province (as Egypt still was, officially, if not in any practical sense), ‘to see for himself a country which was stated to be more advanced than his own and where foreigners were investing money’.23 One of Ismail’s advisers was in no doubt what was going through the visitors’ minds:
The Sultan, and still more the Sultan’s ministers, cannot bear to think that of the large revenues of Egypt not a tenth comes to his hands. They believe that if it were a completely dependent province, like Syria, they would have the spending and the plundering for themselves of the sums that are spent here for Egyptian purposes. They are continually intriguing against the Viceroy’s quasi-independence. He is surrounded even in his hareem by Turkish agents and spies. This naturally throws him on foreign support.24
While Abbas had looked to England, Said and then Ismail turned to France. Nothing summed up the Franco-Egyptian relationship more powerfully than the Suez Canal project. But, in contrast to the wide-eyed wonder of most Western commentators, Lucie saw the human cost behind the impressive statistics. ‘Everyone is cursing the French here,’ she wrote. ‘Forty thousand men always at work at the Suez Canal at starvation-point, does not endear them to the Arabs. There is great excitement as to what the new Pasha will do. If he ceases to give forced labour, the Canal, I suppose, must be given up.’25
But Ismail was too focussed on Egypt’s modernization, and his own legacy, to listen to the grievances of his subjects; France’s influence, and the canal project, continued without interruption.
Duff Gordon went back home to England in June 1863, but returned again to Egypt that October – not only for her health (which was failing month by month and year by year), but also because she was entranced by her adopted country. Despite missing her children, and pained by the anxiety her illness was causing her family, she freely admitted: ‘The more I see of the back slums of Cairo, the more in love I am with them. The dirtiest lane of Cairo is far sweeter than the best street of Paris . . . I am in love with the Arab ways and I have contrived to see and know more of family life than many Europeans who have lived here for years.’26
Cairo, however, was too cold and damp in the winter months for a consumptive, so Lucie headed back to Upper Egypt and persuaded the French consul-general to let her take up residence in ‘the French house’ on the roof of Luxor Temple. The ramshackle dwelling had been built around 1815 by Henry Salt. Belzoni had lived there while supervising the removal of the ‘Young Memnon’, and Rosellini had stayed during the Franco-Tuscan expedition in 1829. But the moniker ‘French House’ had been acquired in 1831 when the dwelling was used as a base for the French naval officers who had come to Luxor to remove one of the obelisks and take it to Paris. Duff Gordon found the house charming: ‘The view all round my house is magnificent on every side, over the Nile in front facing north-west, and over a splendid range of green and distant orange buff hills to the south-east, where I have a spacious covered terrace.’27
With ‘glass windows and doors to some of the rooms’28 and a few items of second-hand furniture, it became Lucie’s ‘Theban palace’, and her home for the next six years.
With her bird’s-eye view and her lucid prose, she would chart the transformation of Egypt during Ismail’s reign, not so much through his grands projets as through their impact on Egypt’s ordinary inhabitants. Back in 1855, Said had issued an edict compelling every master to free any slave who asked for freedom,29 but a decade later the rural population was still effectively enslaved by the demands of the corvée: ‘the poor fellaheen are marched off in gangs like convicts, and their families starve’. ‘No wonder,’ Lucie observed, ‘the cry is, “Let the English Queen come and take us”.’30 Having inherited a radical streak from her grandmother, Duff Gordon had found her voice as a champion of the Egyptian poor. She became increasingly outspoken against Ismail’s profligacy, lamenting the fact that ‘money is constantly wasted more than if it were thrown into the Nile, for then the fellaheen would not have to spend their time, so much wanted for agriculture, in building hideous barrack-like so-called palaces’.31
This was dangerous talk in a country swarming with spies and informers. Lucie’s letters were intercepted by government agents – she discovered only later that many never reached England32 – and on one occasion Ismail tried to bribe her boatman into drowning her; but her popularity locally saved her. Because of her fair-mindedness and caring attitude – ‘I am, perhaps, not quite impartial, because I am sympathique to the Arabs and they to me, and I am inclined to be “kind” to their virtues if not “blind” to their faults’33 – she gained a reputation among the people of Luxor and the surrounding villages as a trusted friend and advocate. When an epidemic swept the land in the spring of 1864, people preferred to visit her, not the government clinics, travelling up to twenty miles for treatment. She soon gained a reputation for having a ‘lucky eye’, and was asked for all sorts of favours, ‘to go and look at young brides, visit houses that are building, inspect cattle, etc., as a bringer of good luck’.34
But even Duff Gordon’s magic touch could not dispel the growing deprivation and oppression caused by the government’s policy of rash, unbridled development. By January 1865, there was ‘hunger, and pain, and labour without hope and without reward, and the constant bitterness of impotent resentment’.35 Lucie felt that: ‘The system of wholesale extortion and spoliation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go’36 and reported the mood among the townspeople of Luxor: ‘The discontent is growing stronger every day. Last week the people were cursing the Pasha in the streets of Aswan, and every one talks aloud of what they think . . . The whole place is in desolation.’37
