A Nile Journey in 1873

 

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This article is rather long and has 14 photographs - which are an integral part of the piece ! Please be patient while it downloads - Netscape in particular is rather sluggish ! Thank you.

MANY OF US OLDIES have taken a trip up the Nile in one of those large floating hotels; hot and cold water, TV, comfortable air conditioned cabins and a mandatory sun deck shaded from the heavy sunshine. The banks coated with green palms glide past endlessly; the pillars of Kom Ombo red on the bank, the shops of Aswan with optional camel rides, irritating children begging and selling imitation antiques await the free spending and curious visitor.

WE WERE BY NO means the first tourists. The Victorians came in their droves. I had heard of Amelia Edwards and was delighted to locate her book "A Thousand Miles Up The Nile" - in a Luxor bookshop ! Reading it I was amazed by her lucidity, humour, and scholarship - but most of all stunned by the similarities between her trip in 1873 - and ours in 1999 !

IN THOSE DAYS the independent traveller hired a wooden flat bottomed sailing two masted boat called a dahabeeyah. It had a deck with a suite of smartly furnished cabins at the stern and a small stairwell led up to the roof of the cabins for the passengers to take their ease ! The dahabeeyah crewed by 15 sailors and a captain - as well as the essential dragoman for interpreting - and 3 or 4 cooks and waiters ! Pianos were frequently taken aboard for evening entertainment . Familiar ?

AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS and her companion Lucy Renshawe came to Cairo in the winter of 1873. Previously they had made a journey together on foot and with horses across the craggy Dolomite Mountains in northern Italy. A book had been composed; "Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys" - which happily became a best seller ! The taste for adventure now gripped Amelia, alongside the very sensible notion of getting paid for it. "A Thousand Miles Up The Nile" was eventually published in 1877, it too became a best seller; the trip changed Amelia Edwards life.

Amelia in old agwe; grandmotherly, white hair. Long nose, wide forehead. Wears a fur stole or coat Middle aged Victorian woman, hair in bun parted in the centre. High ruffled dress, black, with pendant at the neck
Amelia Edwards in later life
Lucy Renshawe

 

The Boat

"....our first business was to look at dahabeeyahs; and the looking at dahabeeyahs compelled us constantly to turn our steps and our thoughts in the direction of Boulak - a desolate place by the river where some two or three hundred Nile boats lay moored for hire. [Dahabeeyah hunting] is beset by its own peculiar difficulties. The boats in the first place are all built on the same plan.....and are given to changing their places....so that the boat which lay yesterday alongside the eastern bank may be over at the western bank today, or hidden in the midst of a dozen others half a mile lower down the river........"

".......Even on days where there is little to see and nothing to do, it is never dull. Trifling incidents which have for us the excitement of novelty are continually occurring. Other dahabeeyahs, their flags and occupants, are a constant source of interest..... Passing each other by day, we dip ensigns, fire salutes, and punctiliously observe the laws of maritime etiquette. Sometimes a Cook Excursion Steamer hurries by, crowded with tourists......."

 

A long wooden boat with a long triangular sail is on the river. Many windows in the hull. Flat topped cliffs in the background. Sunny boat deck, blue water beyond and a green river bank. The 3 travellers sit beneath an awning in the shade smiling at the camera.
A Dahabeeyah late 19th century The Miriam in 1999. Hilary, Anne and Sylvia

At Luxor (Thebes)

 

".....Luxor is a large village inhabited by a mixed population of Copts and Arabs and doing a smart trade in antiquities. The temple has formed the nucleus of the village. The grand entrance faces north...the twin towers of the great propylon, dilapidated as they are, stripped of their cornices, encumbered with debris, are magnificent still. In front of them, one on each side oft he central gateway,, sit two helmeted colossi, battered and featureless, and buried to the chin.....a few yards in front of these again stands a solitary obelisk, also half buried....."

 

 

Two ruined heads are buried to the shoulders in front of a wall. The obelisk has two men standing beside it to give an impression of the height. One of the statues has been excavated, body now clear. The obelisk is also higher. Bright sunshine.
In 1873. The colossi are buried In 1999 they have been excavated.

 

 

 

Karnak - the Hypostyle Hall

".....It is a place that has been much written about and often painted; but of which no writing and no art can convey more than a dwarfed and pallid impression.....The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one's own dumbness, and littlness, and incapacity, too complete and crushing......I stand at the foot of [of the columns] - or of what seems to be the foot; for the original pavement lies buried seven feet below.....It is carved in the semblance of a full blown lotus and glows with undying colours...it would take not six men but a dozen to to measure round the curved lip of that stupendous lily....."

 

Engraving of massive carved pillars in disarray. Leaning on each other.
 The massive carved pillars of the same design are upright. Tourists walk about, val in foreground, Anne in hte distance.
In 1873 In 1999

 

ASWAN - The Ride on the camel

 

".....Now the camel riding that is done at Assûan is of the most commonplace description.....Irreproachable as a beast of burden, he is open to many objections as a steed. It is unpleasant.....to ride an animal which not only objects to being ridden, but cherishes a strong personal antipathy to its rider.....You know that he hates you from the moment you first walk around him wondering where and how to first begin the ascent of his hump.....He swears freely while you are taking your seat; snarls if you but move in the saddle; and stares you angrily in the face if you attempt to turn his head in any direction save that which he himself prefers. Should you persevere he tries to bite your feet. If biting your feet does not answer he lies down.....inflicting grievous bodily hard upon his rider....."

Engraving of a camel lying down. Two men stand beside in turbans and tunics Photo of Hilary smiling; she sits on a camel which is looking large and fierce.
Camel at Assûan 1873
 Hilary in Aswan 1999

 

 

At Abu Simnel - the Large Temple

 

".....The artists who wrought the original statues.....summoned these giants from out the solid rock....they took a mountain, and fell upon it ...hollowed and carved it as though it were a cherry stone, and left it for the feebler men of after ages to marvel at for ever. One great hall and fifteen spacious chambers.....then smoothed the rugged precipice towards the river and cut four huge statues with their faces to the sunrise, two to the right and two to the left of the doorway, there to keep watch until the end of time....."

 

Engraving of the four statues abuttting the cliff face. Photo similar to the engraving, little change.
Rameses II at Abu Simnel 1873 Rameses II at Abu Simnel 1999

 

At Abu Simnel - the Small Temple

 

"....here the whole front is but a frame for six recesses, from each of which a colossal statue, erect and life like, seems to be walking straight out from the heart of the mountain.....[and] the male figures are full of spirit and the female figures full of grace. The Queen wears on her head the plums and disc of Hathor. The King is crowned with a pschent.....they have their children with them; the Queen her daughters, the King his sons....."

The engraving shows four relief statues inside sort of doorways carved into the cliff. The photo shows the same four statues from a different angle. Both show the size and magnitude of the temple.
The facade of the small temple 1873 The same facade after relocation and conservation 1999

 

After many adventures (including carrying out some exciting excavating) the dahabeeyah returns downstream to Luxor. They pass:-

Kom Ombo

 

".....Kom Ombo is a magnificent torso....it was a double temple and dedicated to two Gods, Horus and Sebek; the hawk and the Crocodile. Now there remain only a few columns buried to within eight or ten feet of their gorgeous capitals...some fallen rocks graven with the names of Ptolemies and Cleopatra....."

The engraving shows pillars and pediments in a ruinous state; chunks of sytone everywhere. The pillars are buried nearly to the capital. The photo shows the pillars fully excavated down to the original ground level. They dwarf the tourists wandering past. This is the best of the comparisons.
Kom Ombo in 1873 Kom Ombo in 1999

Kom Ombo as been much restored since Amelia Edwards came here in 1873. It was not then realised that this ancient temple had been subject to massive Roman Restoration (note the Corinthian Capitals of the pillars); in particular the wall hieroglyphs are of the raised, rather than the engraved, variety. This is typical of the Ptolemaic (Greek) Dynasties of Roman Rule of Egypt.

Amelia did not see this depiction of the famous Cleopatra. Had she done so no doubt she would have made an appropriate drawing !

 

Relief carving of an Egyptian woman, she is crowned and holds a sceptre.
Cleopatra the Great

 

 

BORN IN 1831 in London Amelia Edwards was an only child of elderly parents; artistically gifted she had desired to be a painter, unsuccessful she tried music and indeed achieved some admiration as a composer, but it was as a writer and novelist that she eventually made her career. Once engaged to be married she broke the engagement and made her permanent home in Westbury-under-Trym with an older woman Ellen Braysher. Her friendship with Lucy Renshawe appears to have been confined to the trips abroad; but an strong attachment to the artist Marianne North lasted for many years.

AMELIA HAD DONE her homework before she went to Egypt, she was knowledgeable about Egyptian history and could read some of the common cartouches - Professor Mariette the French archaeologist had cracked the Hieroglyph Code back in the 1830s. Her book however describes how unready she was for the splendours which awaited her, and her complete conversion to Egyptology. Appalled by the constant removal and destruction of Egyptian artifacts, the deterioration of the buildings because of the numbers of tourists, the rapacity of the visitors - and indeed of other nations who lifted antiques wholesale to put in their national museums - she devoted the rest of her life to campaigning for conservation and control of Egypt's heritage.

HER EFFORTS RAISED the profile of Egyptian Studies to the status enjoyed by Classical (Greek and Roman) Research. She was instrumental in the setting up of the Egypt Exploration Society which promoted controlled digs working closely with the Egyptian Government. Dr Flinders Petrie the renowned archaeologist was her protégé, in her will she left money for the endowment of a Chair of Egyptology at University College London which continues today. Her own collection of antiquities was also bequeathed to University College but are now part of the Petrie Museum in London.

 

AFTERA PERIOD OF ill health Amelia Edwards contracted influenza and died in 1892. She is buried in Westbury-under-Trym in the churchyard; her grave - which she shares with Mrs Braysher - is marked by an Obelisk and the Egyptian Ankh

Green English churchyard. The grave is by the side of a stony church wall. Everyhting is green, the obelisk and the ankh.

Amelia B. Edwards

1831 - 1892

 

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The Boat Luxor Karnak Aswan Abu Simnel Kom Ombo Amelia Edwards

 

With Thanks to:

"One Thousand Miles Up the Nile" by Amelia B. Edwards

"Amelia Edwards, Traveller, Novelist & Egyptologist" by Joan Rees, Emeritus Professor of Eng. Lit. at Birmingham University, Pub. The Rubicon Press. And for the photos of the dahabeeyah and Lucy Renshawe.

Gaslight

Kate Furphy for the Westbury-under-Trym churchyard photograph

The Petrie Museum in London

 

From Old Dyke 10, March 2001

 

 

 

Animated giraffe. Smiles and dances.

 

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