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
Hers, however, was a lone voice. Most European commentators – from the safety of their comfortable drawing rooms – were wholly supportive of Ismail’s ‘reforms’. British diplomats rarely ventured beyond the cities, and all were wilfully blind to the seething resentment building up beneath the surface. Duff Gordon alone could see what was coming, and wrote to her husband: ‘I wish you to publish these facts; they are no secret to any but those Europeans whose interests keep their eyes tightly shut, and they will soon have them opened.’38 She would, of course, be proved right, but only when it was too late.
While modern Egypt was lurching towards repression and revolution, the study of ancient Egypt was experiencing its own transformation under Mariette and the recently established Antiquities Service. Duff Gordon was no stranger to the world of oriental archaeology – Sir Henry Layard, discoverer of Nimrud and Nineveh, was a family friend – and every Egyptologist passing through Luxor could not fail to make her acquaintance. In February 1864, de Rougé and Mariette arrived by steamer; Lucie’s main concern was that ‘they will turn out good company’.39 A more permanent companion was the American adventurer and antiquities dealer Edwin Smith, who was also living at Luxor, and for whom Duff Gordon procured the latest archaeological books from England.40 As late as the 1860s, a few surviving links with Napoleonic Egyptology could still be found in a place like Luxor; one of Lucie’s Egyptian acquaintances, whom she fondly referred to as ‘my old “great-grandfather”’, had been Belzoni’s guide, and ‘his eldest child was born seven days before the French under Bonaparte marched into Luxor’.41
Alongside these echoes from the past, new rivalries were beginning to shape the discipline. Lepsius’s pupil, Johannes Dümichen, was in Egypt to copy inscriptions, and got to hear about a king list that Mariette’s workers had uncovered at Abydos. He dutifully sent a copy to Lepsius, back in Berlin, who published it without even acknowledging Mariette. In the resulting furore, with national pride at stake, Dümichen and Mariette almost came to blows.42 In truth, since Lepsius’s expedition and the foundation of the Antiquities Service, German scholars had largely been shut out of fieldwork in Egypt.43 Not even popular novels, with titles like An Egyptian Princess (1864), published by the Leipzig professor, Georg Ebers, could mask the sidelining of German Egyptology.
Mariette, meanwhile, was unstoppable, opening up excavations throughout Egypt and, to Duff Gordon’s disgust, ‘forcing the people to work’.44 With all his power and authority, he was not immune to thinking himself above the law. On one occasion, no doubt after a heated argument about access to antiquities and fired by competing national interests, he struck the British consular agent at Luxor, Mustafa Agha Ayat, before flatly denying any wrongdoing. With her sense of fair play, Lucie was incensed, and wrote to the British authorities who sent a Foreign Office official to conduct an enquiry.45 The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 led to a weakening of the French position in Europe, and the strengthening of Prussia under Bismarck; but none of this seemed to affect Mariette, secure in his position and master of all he surveyed. Duff Gordon, though, continued to cock a snook at her childhood neighbour: ‘A man has stolen a very nice silver antique ring for me out of the last excavations – don’t tell Mariette . . . My fellah friend said “better thou have it than Mariette sell it to the French and pocket the money; if I didn’t steal it, he would” – so I received the stolen property calmly.’46
Well may Lucie have pocketed the odd illictly acquired antique, for she was constantly worried about money, and struggled to make ends meet, even with her frugal lifestyle. An outbreak of murrain had swept Egypt in the autumn of 1863, killing large numbers of livestock and raising prices still further. Duff Gordon was forced to eke out an increasingly precarious existence: ‘I live in the open air altogether. The bats and the swallows are quite sociable; I hope the serpents and scorpions will be more reserved.’47 In the summer months, the heat could be unbearable; the only solution was to drop her European reserve and opt for something more practical: ‘It has been so “awfully” hot that I have not had pluck to go on with my letter, or indeed to do anything but lie on a mat in the passage with a minimum of clothes quite indescribable in English.’48
Despite being settled in Luxor, Duff Gordon experienced bouts of terrible homesickness, still missing her children, and feeling she was gradually losing them. But by July 1864 she had begun to accept that she would never return to England. She wrote to her husband: ‘I do not feel at all like breathing cold damp air again. This depresses me very much as you may suppose. You will have to divorce me.’49 Far from damaging her reputation, however, her heroic existence in a distant land captured imaginations at home, and the publication of her Letters from Egypt in 1865 cemented her fame.
The Egyptian climate may have been beneficial for those suffering from tuberculosis, but other diseases were rampant. On a journey down the Nile in May 1865, Lucie nearly died of pleurisy, and had to be nursed back to health by her faithful servant Omar. (After recovering, she wrote to her husband: ‘I beg you won’t ever forget Omar’s truly filial care and affection for me.’50) A few months later, in Bulaq, Mariette’s wife was not so fortunate, and succumbed to cholera. Meanwhile, the plight of ordinary Egyptians continued to worsen. When desperate peasants had vented their anger by attacking a Prussian boat on the Nile, Ismail himself had paid a visit and ‘taken a broom and swept them clean, i.e. – exterminated the inhabitants’.51 One Egyptian had confided in Duff Gordon: ‘I only pray for Europeans to rule us – now the fellaheen are worse off than any slaves.’52 In Lucie’s own view, a combination of factors had conspired to make life intolerable: ‘The country is a waste for want of water, the animals are skeletons, the people are hungry, the heat has set in like June, and there is some sickness, and, above all the massacres . . . have embittered all hearts.’53
Ismail, however, carried on as if the day of reckoning would never arrive. In April 1866, he visited Constantinople and obtained from the Sultan, for a large sum, the right to pass the title of viceroy to his son, rather than to the eldest surviving relative, thus breaking with Turkish custom and effectively establishing his own dynasty. (The following year, the Sultan recognized the new reality and granted Ismail the title of khedive – also in return for a hefty payment.) By July, the Egyptian government was nearly bankrupt; Duff Gordon’s own son-in-law, Henry Ross, was hit hard when his employer, the Egyptian Commercial and Trading Company, suffered losses. But Ismail, instead of reining in his spending, merely clamped down on dissent ‘The espionage is becoming more and more close and jealous,’ Lucie wrote, ‘and I have been warned to be very careful.’54 Farmers were beaten to pay taxes for the following year, which they were unable to pay. Fellahin were conscripted to fight alongside Turkish troops to put down a rebellion on Crete. And, all the while, able-bodied men were plucked from the fields to work on government construction projects. The combined results were calamitous:
The hand of the Government is awfully heavy upon us. All this week the people have been working night and day cutting their unripe corn, because three hundred and ten men are to go tomorrow to work on the railroad below Assiut. This green corn is, of course, valueless to sell and unwholesome to eat; so the magnificent harvest of this year is turned to bitterness at the last moment. From a neighbouring village all the men are gone, and seven more are wanted to make up the corvée.55
In the summer of 1867, Ismail accompanied his new best friend, the Ottoman sultan, to Europe, where they were feted by their hosts. The first stop was Paris, to view the Exposition Universelle. Duff Gordon remarked tartly: ‘The universal prayer now is, “may he not return in safety, may he die in France and be buried in the graves of unbelievers”.’56 The khedive’s next port of call was London, where Ismail was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath and the Sultan received the Order of the Garter. Egyptian officials who accompanied the royal visit were not just there to bask in the reflected glory: Ismail wanted them to learn about the modern developments taking place in Europe – for example, the remodelling of Paris under Hausmann – and copy them back in Egypt. Ali Mubarak, an engineer, was made Minister of Public Works and Minister of Schools on his return from France, and duly set about transforming the city of Cairo and establishing government schools throughout the country. Cairo witnessed its greatest construction boom since the Middle Ages as waste land was levelled and filled, new avenues and public squares laid out, dirt roads surfaced, and sewers dug. The unifying philosophy was tanzim: organization, regulation and modernization, an extension of military order into every aspect of civilian life.57 It was also a deliberate attempt to turn Egypt into a Western nation. Plots in the new quarter of Cairo were made available to anyone who promised to build a building with a European facade. Ismail’s eyes were fixed firmly on modernity, even if, in a nod to the growth of tourism, he adopted a pyramid-and-sphinx design for his country’s new postage stamps.
Just as tourists expecting a scene from the Arabian Nights were disappointed by the remodelling of Cairo, so tourism itself was reshaping Egypt. In 1867, the year that Mark Twain first visited the country (to climb the Great Pyramid), Duff Gordon wrote ‘Americans swarm in the steamboats, and a good many in dahabiehs’58 and added: ‘This year I’ll bolt the doors when I see a steamer coming.’59 No longer a quiet backwater, Thebes had been transformed into ‘an English watering-place. There are now nine boats lying here, and the great object is to do the Nile as fast as possible.’60 In January she entertained the writer Edward Lear, and in the autumn her mood was greatly lightened by a visit from her son, Maurice, who seems to have spent most of his time shooting water fowl. But time was catching up with Duff Gordon and her way of life. In December that year, she wrote laconically: ‘Half of the old house at Luxor fell down into the temple beneath six days before I arrived; so there is an end of the Maison de France, I suppose.’61 Lucie’s mother, Sarah Austin, had passed away in August 1867, and Duff Gordon’s own health continued to worsen. By January 1869, she wrote to her daughter: ‘I am more ill, I believe, than you quite suppose. I do not like your father to be worried, but I may tell you that I think it hardly possible I can last much longer . . . I think Maurice had better go home soon . . . I wish I could hope to see any of you once more, but I do not see any possibility of reaching Europe.’62
Later that month, she sent Maurice home, with the tart observation that: ‘He ought to be doing something.’63 In February, she was just about well enough to receive a visit from the Prince and Princess of Wales, during their trip up the Nile. (Since the publication of Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt she had become something of a celebrity.) But, by the late spring, she knew the end was coming. Cairo would provide better terminal care, so she left Luxor amidst much weeping. She almost immediately regretted it, writing to her husband: ‘If I live till September I will go up to Esneh, where the air is softer and I cough less. I would rather die among my own people in the Said [Upper Egypt] than here.’ (She added, with just a hint of maternal exasperation: ‘Don’t think please of sending Maurice out again, he must begin to work now or he will never be good for anything.’)64
Duff Gordon’s final letter, written to her husband on 9 July 1869 from the spa resort of Helwan, just south of Cairo, ends: ‘God bless you, my dearest of all loves . . . Kiss my darlings all . . . Forgive me all my faults toward you. I wish I had seen your dear face once more – but not now. I would not have you here now on any account.’65
She died in the early morning five days later, aged just forty-eight. The faithful Omar was by her side until the very end. In an obituary in The Times, Lucie’s friend, Caroline Norton, summed up her life and legacy succinctly: ‘Lady Duff Gordon lived in Egypt, and in Egypt she has died, leaving a memory of her greatness and goodness such as no other European woman ever acquired in that country.’66
Khedive Ismail has been described as ‘an ugly man of the greatest charm’.67 His subjects may have begged to differ, at least on the latter point. Charming or not, he certainly had a taste for opulence (Sauternes was his drink of choice), and his extravagance was notorious, especially when it came to entertaining foreign guests. When Empress Eugénie visited Egypt in 1869, for the official opening of the Suez Canal, Ismail ordered an eight-mile long road to be laid from central Cairo to enable her ‘to drive out to the Pyramids without fatigue (she perversely rode out there every morning on horseback) and had built under their shadow a stone mansion in which she might repose for a single night’.68 As for his own palace at Giza, its gardens were intersected by mosaic pavements laid by craftsmen brought from Italy, all at a reputed cost of 30,000 Egyptian pounds. It was his love of European fashion and progress that caused him to remodel and modernize not just central Cairo, but virtually the whole of Egypt. In addition to his greatest project, the Suez Canal, opened in the year of Duff Gordon’s death, he presided over the reclamation of 1.25 million acres of desert land, and the construction of 8,400 miles of irrigation canals, 1,185 miles of railways, 500 miles of telegraph, 4,500 primary schools, 430 bridges, sixty-four sugar mills, fifteen lighthouses, the Suez docks and a new harbour at Alexandria.
In Cairo, many of the buildings were jerry-built – outwardly ostentatious, but lacking in structural solidity. None demonstrated his love of indulgence and his obsession with European culture more than the Opera House. Built on one side of the Ezbekiya Gardens, facing Shepheard’s Hotel, it was a monument to Western taste par excellence. Modelled on the Paris Opera, it was decorated inside with crimson hangings and an abundance of gold brocade; an opulent royal box included screened pews for the ladies of the king’s harem. The first performance, a production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, took place on 1 November 1869. Had Duff Gordon still been alive, she would no doubt have excoriated this latest demonstration of the khedive’s vanity. Empress Eugénie sat in the royal box between Ismail and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. Few Egyptians were invited that evening, and few would attend in the years to come. Instead, the Cairo Opera House became a favourite haunt for Western expatriates, where they could cocoon themselves from the harsh realities of life beyond the marble foyer.
Another of Verdi’s works had been intended for the Opera’s opening night, but was not ready in time. Aïda received its premiere two years late, on Christmas Day 1871, to great critical acclaim. In typical Ismailian fashion, the first performance featured 3,000 performers, including Nubians and slaves ‘bearing in procession statues and figures of the ancient gods borrowed out of the museum for the occasion’.69 As befitted an opera set in the time of the pharaohs, the scenario of Aïda had been commissioned from the greatest Egyptologist of the day, Mariette. Having presided over the Antiquities Service and Egyptian Museum for over a decade, he was at the height of his reputation and influence. But events far from the banks of the Nile soon threatened not just Mariette’s position, but his very life.
Throughout the mid- and late 1860s, the rivalry between France and Prussia had been building, in Egypt and across the continent of Europe. The spat between Mariette and Dümichen was a symptom of a wider malaise. While Germans may not have been actively involved in excavations, they were impressively productive in other areas of scholarship, building on Lepsius’s achievements a generation earlier. One of the leading lights of this second generation of German Egyptologists was Mariette’s friend, Heinrich Brugsch. He had studied under Lepsius and assisted Mariette at the Serapeum. In 1863, he founded a learned periodical, the Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde; it remains to this day one of the discipline’s most respected organs, and arguably the premier journal for ancient Egyptian philology. In 1864, Brugsch served briefly as Prussian consul in Cairo, before returning home to take up a professorship at the University of Göttingen. In 1869, at the apogee of Ismail’s flirtation with Europe, Brugsch was invited back to Cairo to be head of a new Khedivial School of Egyptology. Mariette had considered Brugsch a friend; now the two looked like rivals. The Frenchman opposed the School of Egyptology from the start: not only was it run by a German, it also threatened to create an alternative centre of scholarship in competition with the Egyptian Museum. Under Brugsch’s leadership, the school gave back to German Egyptology a prestige it had not enjoyed since Lepsius’s expedition. For Mariette, this was anathema.
Worse was to come. On 16 July 1870, the French parliament, fearing the spectre of German unification and the growing assertiveness of its neighbour, declared war on Prussia. It was a disastrous mistake. The Prussian-led coalition of German forces mobilized quickly and invaded north-eastern France. A series of rapid German victories culminated in the siege of Metz and the battle of Sedan. The French army was defeated and Napoleon III captured. In Paris, on 4 September, the empire was abolished and the Third Republic declared; but it was not enough to assuage German wrath. Two weeks later, German troops surrounded the capital and began to draw the noose tight. After a four-month siege, the French capital fell on 28 January 1871. France’s defeat paved the way for what it had most feared: German unification under an all-powerful Prussia. Worse still, the Treaty of Frankfurt which brought the war to an end gave most of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany, upsetting the balance of power in Europe that had prevailed since the defeat of the first Napoleon in 1815.
By a stroke of singularly bad luck, Mariette had returned to Paris for his summer vacation when the siege broke out, and found himself trapped in the city for months. This was not just a personal misfortune: in his absence, rivals in Egypt started plotting to replace him. Brugsch was mentioned as a candidate for a possible German takeover of the Antiquities Service, but was loath to move against a former colleague, and Mariette’s enemies failed to press their advantage. As soon as the siege of Paris was lifted, Mariette hurried back to Bulaq to reassert his own position, and, with it, France’s leadership of the Museum and Service. He bore no ill will towards Brugsch, telling him: ‘For me you are not a German, you are Brugsch . . . I love you as a true friend.’70 Two years later, Mariette appointed Heinrich’s younger brother Emile Brugsch, who had joined the School of Egyptology as his brother’s assistant, to a post in the Museum, where he served loyally for the next forty years.
Mariette reaped the rewards of determination and magnanimity with a series of spectacular discoveries during the course of 1871. The painted fresco of geese, and the statues of Rahotep and Nofret (still some of the greatest treasures of the Egyptian Museum), were uncovered at Meidum, while the sands of Saqqara yielded the spectacular decorated tomb of Ti. But France’s grasp on the levers of archaeological and cultural influence had been weakened, and no amount of digging for antiquities could change that fact. Following the Franco-Prussian War, the study of German was introduced into Egyptian government schools alongside French, as Ismail and his ministers sought to hedge their bets on which European power would ultimately triumph.71 Mariette had other concerns too. Not only was the Khedivial School of Egyptology under German control (in the person of Heinrich Brugsch), so too was the new Khedivial Library. Ludwig Stern became director in 1873, and was followed in post by four more German orientalists, the Library remaining a bastion of German influence until the outbreak of the First World War. When the Egyptian Society, founded in 1836, disbanded in 1873–4, its remaining books were donated to the Khedivial Library, bolstering the latter’s position as one of the leading academic institutions of Cairo.
In Europe, too, Germany was challenging French pre-eminence in Egyptology, with a series of chairs established in all the leading universities: Göttingen in 1868 (created for Brugsch), Strasbourg – under German control since the Franco-Prussian War – and Heidelberg in 1872, and Leipzig in 1875 joined Lepsius’s chair at Berlin as major seats of learning. What made matters worse, as far as French sensibilities were concerned, were the close ties between German and British Egyptology, dating back to the participation of Bonomi and Wild in the Lepsius expedition.
The long-standing competition between France and Britain for control of Egypt was thus replaced during the 1870s by a keenly felt Franco-German rivalry. So, when senior vacancies arose at France’s two most prestigious institutions, the Collège de France and the Louvre, Mariette declined the chance to return home. Although Egypt had carried off his beloved daughter Josephine in March that year, following the death of his wife in 1865, he knew that his destiny – and his national duty – lay in Cairo, not Paris. As his biographer would later write, Mariette, ‘had the choice once more between Egypt and France, and he chose Egypt: he remained faithful until his death’.72
It was into this heady mix of major-power rivalry, old-fashioned digging and newfangled scholarship that one woman sailed in the autumn of 1873, rather by accident than design. She had no academic training and no governmental support. Yet her brief sojourn in Egypt would change her life and alter the course of Egyptology forever.
Amelia Blandford Edwards (1831–92), known to her family and friends as Amy, was born into a comfortable middle-class home in London, almost ten years to the day after Lucie Duff Gordon. Edwards’s father was a bank clerk, who had previously served as an army officer under the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War against Napoleon. But it was Edwards’s mother who encouraged the little girl to indulge her love of reading. Educated at home, like most young women of her generation, Amy developed an independent mind and a lively imagination, fired by travel books and the Arabian Nights. When she was six, Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians was published, and she devoured it from cover to cover. She later recalled: ‘I had read every line of the old six-volume edition over and over again. I knew every one of the six hundred illustrations by heart.’73 Inspired by such accounts of life in far-off days, she wrote a poem at the age of seven called ‘The Knights of Old’, which was reproduced in a penny weekly. It was her first published work. Beside reading and writing, another passion was drama, encouraged, once again, by her mother who took her on trips to the theatre at Sadler’s Wells. Amy had a carefree childhood, combining cultural experiences in London with summers in the country, staying with her uncle and aunt in their Suffolk farmhouse. There, she showed an early aptitude for painting, decorating the whitewashed walls of her room with a mural she titled ‘The Landing of the Romans in Britain’. The combination of artistic skill, a vigorous and confident hand, and a love of historical drama would serve her well.
Alongside this wide range of accomplishments, Edwards’s principal passion was music. She had natural talent, a good voice, and clear enunciation, and she hoped to make a career as a singer. When illness thwarted her attempts, she tried her hand as an organist, but found it insufficiently creative. With a career in music thus ruled out, she would have liked to become an artist, but that was considered entirely unsuitable for a respectable young woman in early Victorian England. So she fell back on writing, and into a career as a journalist, contributing to the Saturday Review and the Morning Post. The job was steady but not lucrative, so Edwards supplemented her income by publishing history and fiction. Perhaps to her surprise, she turned out to be rather good at it. Her writing was filled with an extraordinary range of information, reflecting her catholic interests, a sharp eye for contemporary customs, and a satirical wit.
In the early 1850s, Edwards travelled to France, Germany and Switzerland, developing a love of foreign travel and a receptiveness to other cultures – not to mention a connoisseur’s knowledge of wine. More intriguingly, her visits to Paris seem to have brought her into contact with a Bohemian circle of artists and political radicals from whom she learned a determined, if largely concealed, sense of social justice. Armed with a host of experiences and a wealth of insight, she published her first novel, My Brother’s Wife, in 1855, to favourable reviews. A second novel, The Ladder of Life, followed in 1857, and a further six novels together with a series of short stories in subsequent years. Meanwhile, Edwards’s personal circumstances were not without incident. In 1860, in what she would later describe as ‘the great misfortune of my life’,74 both her parents died, within four days of each other. She had been especially close to her mother, and, seeking company, decided to move in with friends, Mr and Mrs Braysher. They introduced her to upper-middle-class society, providing abundant material for a satirical novelist. When Mr Braysher died in 1863, Edwards and Mrs Braysher decided to set up home together, moving to a house in Westbury-on-Trym, which they shared for the rest of their lives.
By the late 1860s, Amy was settled and successful, but restless for new adventures. Remembering fondly her youthful excursions to the continent, she decided once again to travel. In the summer of 1871, she set out for Switzerland and Italy. She wintered in Rome, spent the spring in southern Italy, and moved on to the Italian lakes for the summer. So far, so conventional. Then, on a whim, she decided to explore the Dolomites, a region still largely unknown to tourists, accompanied by her friend Lucy Renshawe. The two women travelled alone, exploring the dramatic scenery and isolated mountain villages. The result was Edwards’s first extensive travel book, touchingly entitled A Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites (later reissued with the more romantic title Untravelled Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys). The trip to Italy was such a success that Edwards and Miss Renshawe set out again the following summer, for a walking tour of France. But, thwarted by bad weather, they decided to follow the footsteps of countless travellers before them and embark on a journey up the Nile instead. They braved a storm-tossed crossing from Brindisi to Alexandria and forty-eight hours in Egyptian quarantine before finally arriving in Cairo on 29 November 1873. As Edwards put it: ‘In simple truth we had drifted hither by accident; with no excuse of health or business, or any serious object whatever; and had just taken refuge in Egypt as one might turn aside into Burlington Arcade or the Passage des Panoramas – to get out of the rain.’75
As soon as her publisher, Longman’s, heard that she was in Egypt, they commissioned a book, giving the trip a purpose. With her novelist’s eye for detail and her openness to new experiences, Edwards set out on her journey through Egypt and Nubia, a thousand miles up the Nile.
Egypt had changed a great deal during the first decade of Ismail’s reign. The rebuilding of Cairo had swept away much of the traditional Islamic architecture, replacing it with modern constructions in the European style. New factories had sprung up in the towns, while extensive irrigation works and land reclamation had transformed the countryside. Tourism, too, had changed. Thomas Cook had conducted his first escorted tour up the Nile in 1869, using two hired steamers for ‘the first publicly advertised party to the First Cataract and back’.76 The following year, Thomas Cook’s son John negotiated the use of the khedivial steamer Beherah to take forty-four guests up the Nile, ‘the largest party of English and American tourists that had to date ascended the river as one party’.77 It was said that, ‘at every village landing-stage he scattered largesse, from great sacks of copper coins’ to ingratiate himself with local people and trinket-sellers.78 By the autumn of 1870, Cook’s had been granted the sole agency for a passenger service by Nile steamer. The resulting explosion in tourism meant that, by the time Edwards and her companion arrived in Egypt, all the items that Wilkinson had listed in his 1847 Handbook as difficult to obtain were readily available in both Cairo and Alexandria.79
Eschewing the rapid steamer, Amy opted instead for the more traditional dahabiya, a more leisurely way to see the sights. She and Miss Renshawe were joined by twenty-three fellow-travellers. During the course of the next few months, as they sailed upstream, through the First Cataract and into Nubia as far as the rock of Abusir, they encountered all the hazards faced by shipping on the Nile: headwinds and periods when they were becalmed, sandbanks and rapids, sandstorms and a hurricane. For Edwards, these merely added to the adventure. So did the trials and tribulations involved in visiting some of the archaeological sites: ‘It might be necessary to crawl into a tomb or slide down into the darkness on one’s stomach.’80 A further touch of spice was provided by a sense of competiton, for sailing alongside Edwards and her party in another dahabiya were the diarist Marianne Brocklehurst and her companion Miss Booth. Brocklehurst and Edwards were firm friends and fierce publishing rivals. As it turned out, Amy had nothing to worry about. For while Miss Brocklehurst was dismissive of the ancient monuments and contemptuous of the modern Egyptians, Edwards was entranced. All those well-thumbed illustrations in Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs had come to life in front of her eyes. She knew she was gathering the material for a bestseller.
Like many a traveller before her, Edwards was captivated by the climate and scenery – ‘the skies are always cloudless, the days warm, the evenings exquisite’81 – but she was no mere tourist. From her earlier travels in Europe, she understood that ‘the mere sight-seeing of the Nile demands some little reading and organizing, if only to be enjoyed’,82 and indeed believed that ‘To “see” Egypt is to be required to learn’.83 To this end, she took in every detail and sought out information on every tomb and temple she visited. At Saqqara, she took lunch on the terrace of Mariette’s former dig house, and made a point of visiting Memphis, but was disappointed to find it reduced to ‘a few huge rubbish-heaps, a dozen or so of broken statues, and a name!’ 84 In general, though, with her romantic bent and love of the dramatic, Edwards could not fail to be moved by the antiquity and mystery of Egypt’s pharaonic past. At Philae, she felt: ‘If a sound of antique chanting were to be borne along the quiet air – if a procession of white-robed priests bearing aloft the veiled ark of the God, were to come sweeping round between the palms and the pylons – we should not think it strange.’85 She was also unusually sensitive to ancient Egyptian religion, writing: ‘One cannot but come away with a profound impression of the splendour and power of a religion which could command for its myths such faith, such homage, and such public works.’86
This open-mindedness did not, however, extend to sympathy for the modern Egyptians. Despite Edwards’s political radicalism in a European setting, she was wilfully blind to the sufferings of the fellahin, arguing that ‘there is another side to this question of forced labour . . . How, then, are these necessary public works to be carried out, unless by means of the corvée?’87 When confronted by grinding poverty, her usual insight seems to have deserted her, and she fell back on European stereotypes: ‘It seemed to us that the wives of the Fellahin were in truth the happiest women in Egypt. They work hard and are bitterly poor; but they have the free use of their limbs, and they at least know the fresh air, the sunshine, and the open fields.’88
From the vantage point of a comfortable dahabiya – ‘our Noah’s Ark life, pleasant, peaceful, and patriarchal’89 – it was all too easy for the pampered to slip into prejudice. Edwards’s description of ordinary Egyptians is as cruel as it is colourful: ‘A more unprepossessing population I would never wish to see – the men half stealthy, half insolent; the women bold and fierce; the children filthy, sickly, stunted, and stolid.’90
It was ironic, therefore, that in Luxor, she made a point of visiting the house lately occupied by Lucie Duff Gordon, remarking that ‘her couch, her rug, her folding chair were there still’, and noting that ‘every Arab in Luxor cherishes the memory of Lady Duff Gordon in his heart of hearts, and speaks of her with blessings’.91
