Werne questions the native people about the source of the Nile. Here, at around 4 degrees North, they are told the source is thirty days away, that there are four streams and they become only ankle deep. They also hear that copper is abundant at the source, a claim made by some of the ancient authors about the Mountains of the Moon and substantiated by the copper mines opened around Lake Albert in the early twentieth century.
But it is the news of the Niam Niam that really puts fear into the explorers. The crew had long been talking about the Niam Niam, who supposedly went on all fours like dogs and ate any human who strayed into their land. They also had dogs’ heads, some said, but the Dinka argued that the Niam Niam merely allowed all their teeth to remain (the Dinka and Shilluks, among whom they travelled, removed all four lower teeth for ritual reasons) – the better for gnawing on human flesh. Werne tries to be brave and speculates that the crawling on all fours is just a way of saying that they do not join combat openly but sneak in close to plunder and perhaps eat those who are most easily taken.
It is fear of the Niam Niam together with the rocky bar revealed across the river by the falling waters of the dry season that decides the men to return. Crowds of natives march alongside the boat and appear to threaten it. When Capitan Selim wakes early to pray and sees just how many native fires there are along the shore he loses his nerve and refuses to go on.
But this mixed bag of Turks and Europeans had done enough – they had shown it was possible to penetrate the heart of darkest Africa. The race for the Nile’s source had truly begun.
5 • Sex tourism on the Nile
She cried for marriage, and when married she cried again.
Sudanese proverb
Muhammad Ali may have initiated the race to discover the Nile’s source; he had also, inadvertently, inaugurated the world’s first sextourism destination. Cairo had been the brothel of the East for centuries. It was no accident that the raunchy stories of The Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights) were collected in Cairo. The book may have been set in Baghdad but the happenings described were informed by Cairene excess and voluptuousness. Napoleon’s army vastly expanded the need for prostitutes in Cairo, and this remained much the same after he left in 1801. With Muhammad Ali’s embrace of French learning and his heirs’ embrace of French culture, the popularisation of ancient Egypt by Napoleon’s programme of listing all the country’s monuments and the building with French expertise of the barrage, it comes as no surprise that some of the first tourists travelling the Nile should be adventurous Frenchmen like Gustave Flaubert, lured as much by sex as by the mystique of ancient monuments. And they had to go up the Nile to get their full taste of it because Muhammad Ali, in an attempt to curtail the loose legacy of Napoleon’s army, in 1834 had banished the courtesans of Cairo south – to the Nileside towns of Asyut, Esna and Luxor.
In 1840, the Nile traveller James Augustus St John reported on the almeh or ghawazi, the banished courtesans of the Nile. St John wrote, ‘In reality what is termed the “dance of the almé” is the opera of the Orientals. All ranks, and both sexes, young and old, delight in the exhibition; and the ladies of the harem, instructed in the art by the almé themselves, perform in their own apartments, for the amusement of their families.’ St John made his way to a village suburb of Cairo where the almeh were living. ‘They were all young; none perhaps exceeding twenty; and the majority between ten and sixteen years old. Some few would have been considered handsome, even in London, but the greater number had little beside their youth and the alluring arts of their profession to recommend them.’ St John was led to a coffee house where about a hundred dancing girls were all intent on the enjoyment of the moment. ‘Not being habituated to wine, coffee appeared to produce in them the same excitement and petulant gaiety to which Champagne or Burgundy sometimes gives birth among European women.’ The performance began and St John wrote of the bellydancing, ‘I fear that a company of accomplished almé, engaged by an opera manager, would draw crowded houses in Paris or London.’ He has recourse to Greek: ‘The dance, which is porneia mimetic, represents a tale of love; at least, as love is understood in the East.’
He omits any but the most oblique references to the main way the coffee-house dancers enhance their earnings. Muhammad Ali, before banning such girls, employed a Pezawink bimbashi, a Captain of the Courtesans, to administer the vice of his country. The girls were divided into four classes and each had to pay a special tax to the government which the bimbashi had to collect along with a list of their names. St John remarked, ‘Lately this honourable personage, after a lengthened delinquency, was convicted of the most nefarious practices, among which was that of inserting in the list of courtesans, apparently through revenge, the names of several respectable ladies: the wives and daughters of his superiors . . .!’
6 • Flaubert and his ‘little lady’
When the river straw burned, the sieve at home made of straw cried.
Ethiopian proverb
And the sex tourists came. One of the more famous was Gustave Flaubert. Of course Flaubert, being a romantic as well as a sex addict, had other reasons for his visit to the East. In the mid-nineteenth century there was no more romantic journey than taking a dahibiya, a sailing houseboat, to see the great monuments of the Nile at Luxor, Kom Ombo and Aswan.
Flaubert, in search of the romance he had imagined in his first novel, The Temptation of St Anthony, set off up the Nile with his equally sexually active pal Maxime du Camp. It was du Camp, a pioneer photographer, who took the first photographs of the monuments of Egypt – from the Pyramids to the temple at Luxor; and it was du Camp who, after a mammoth three-day reading session, advised Flaubert to burn the Temptation novel. In between sleeping with prostitutes, Flaubert spent long hours musing on the beauty of the Nile cataracts, or rapids, in Aswan. His letters and diary entries suggest that it was here that Flaubert first came up with the idea for his great novel Madame Bovary.
I went up to Aswan in search of Flaubert. I wanted, in a kind of Alain de Botton moment of secular worship, to find the exact spot where Modern Literature was born. But instead of the black-granite rocky islands and surging currents of through-flowing water there were only the placid waters of Lake Nasser – and the giant curved concrete wall of the Aswan dam. The roaring cataracts that had mesmerised Flaubert and caused him to rethink his whole idea of literature were gone, subsumed under masses of concrete. Maybe it was a fitting tribute after all.
But what had caused this momentous idea for a starkly realistic novel about sex and love rather than the tepid romance of St Anthony? Was it Flaubert’s encounter with the legendary courtesan Kuchuk Hanem a mere ten days earlier?
He and the photographer Maxime du Camp were at the furthest point south of their Nile journey, above the second cataract, now submerged by the waters of Lake Nasser. Flaubert marvelled at the river: ‘The water of the Nile is quite yellow; it carries a good deal of soil. One might think of it as being weary of all the countries it has crossed, weary of endlessly murmuring the same monotonous complaint that it has travelled too far. If the Niger and the Nile are but one and the same river, where does the water come from? What has it seen? Like the ocean, this river sends our thoughts back almost incalculable distances.’
It was here at the second cataract that he decided to give up his desire to rewrite a romance about the East and instead be absolutely rigorous. It was here he decided, surrounded by all that was ancient, to write the world’s first modern novel, Madame Bovary.
Flaubert had come to Egypt for many reasons: to escape failure, to rejuvenate his writing, to accompany his friend du Camp; but undeniably also for the simple pleasures of sun and sex. In a way he’s the prototype of a kind of modern traveller – not travelling solely for sex, but motivated by it, with ruins and river journeys as nice extras.
As we have already seen, the prostitutes, banned from Cairo in 1834, had decamped up the Nile. Still, the two determined young men still managed some screwing in Ca
iro. After satisfying themselves Flaubert paid for his servants to pleasure themselves with local prostitutes and remarked, ‘I shall never forget the brutal movement of my old donkey driver as he came down on the girl . . . all in one movement laughing with his great white teeth . . . the rags wrapped around the lower part of his diseased legs.’ Very quickly Flaubert amalgamated his former romanticisation of the East with an eye for its harsh and often bizarre details: ‘A week ago I saw a monkey jump on a donkey’s back and try to jack him off – the donkey brayed and kicked, the monkey’s owner shouted, the monkey itself squealed, and apart from two or three children who laughed and me who found it very funny, no one paid any attention.’
In Cairo they stayed two months at the Hôtel du Nil. The single photograph of Flaubert in his twenties was taken in the garden of this hotel. This photograph was one of the earliest taken in Egypt, a calotype, made by immersing the finest Turkey Mill drawing paper in silver iodide solution and exposing it for two minutes through the camera. Flaubert must have been standing very still. His head is covered by what looks like a black fez topping a white turban. He is bearded and beefy, bearlike.
The pose, in the hotel garden in 1850, looks very similar to that struck by a devout Muslim in the standing moments before prayer. Flaubert’s eyes are fixed on the ground a few yards ahead of him. There is something black at the base of the picture, perhaps a window ledge. That’s it: du Camp is inside the hotel photographing the shy Flaubert, who wrote, ‘I would never allow anyone to photograph me. Max did it once, but I was in Nubian costume, standing, and seen from a considerable distance, in a garden.’ (The true narcissist refuses to be photographed; he is matched only by the one who insists on being photographed continually.)
The Hôtel du Nil was Flaubert’s and du Camp’s permanent base in Cairo. The owners were two Frenchmen: Bouvaret and Brochier. Bouvaret was a former provincial actor, a man of dubious taste who longed to make his hotel the ‘the last word in Parisianism’. Flaubert mocked him and his pretensions but stole his name, recalling it months later at the second cataract when he decided to write Madame Bovary.
Finally the two friends set sail up the Nile on a barge, a cange. Maxime du Camp made notes about their companions:
Rais Ibrahim. Captain of our boat. A handsome man of twenty-four or five . . . when he was angry with the sailors he would spit at them and punch them. During the five months he was in our service he gave us not a single cause for complaint.
Hadji Ismael. Of all the sailors he was the one I liked the best. He was very sweet natured, with an ugly face, one-eyed, superb muscles.
Khalil. Former bardash [homosexual]. He did in fact have a charming behind, which we often saw when he jumped into the water with the other sailors.
Farghali. Old philosopher. The only one who remained as fit as ever at the end of our journey, when all the others were so exhausted as to be unrecognisable.
Mohamed, whom Gustave called Narcisse because he resembled a servant of that name he had once had. The strand of hair he let grow at his occiput was very long.
All these men, except the captain, had their right forefinger cut off to avoid being taken for military service.
Slowly they sailed up the great grey-green river, against its constant current but aided by the breeze, always blowing, almost always blowing from north to south. It is this breeze, which balances and overpowers the counter-flow of the river, that has made the Nile such a wonderful conduit through the centuries. Flaubert loved the river with its curves and longueurs but soon became tired of the ruins that all tourists feel duty bound to inspect. He dreamed of the pleasures of the ghawazi, the banished dancing prostitutes of Cairo. In E. W. Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, first published in 1836, the author wrote: ‘Egypt has long been celebrated for its public dancing-girls, the most famous of whom are of a distinct tribe, called “Ghawazee”.’ They were different from Egyptians, living apart from the general population, with separate customs, their own social structure, and perhaps even speaking a different language.
When their boat arrived at Esna, a tumble-down town of dust and broken stones, Kuchuk Hanem, the most famous ghawazi of her time, sent her procuress, who had a pet sheep, to the river to meet Flaubert and du Camp. The pet sheep’s wool was painted with spots of yellow henna, and it had a velvet muzzle on its nose. They were led to Kuchuk Hanem’s house where she entertained them most royally.
. . . Kuchuk Hanem is a tall, splendid creature, lighter in colouring than an Arab; she comes from Damascus; her skin, particularly on her body, is slightly coffee-coloured. When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges. Her eyes are dark and enormous, her eyebrows black, her nostrils open and wide, her shoulders heavy, full apple-shaped breasts. She wore a large tarboosh, ornamented on the top with a convex gold disc.
Flaubert was excited. He wrote, ‘One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love . . .’
More than one writer had fallen for Kuchuk Hanem. In the same year that Flaubert met her, George William Curtis observed in his long-forgotten Nile Notes of a Howadji (howadji means ‘foreigner’) that Kuchuk Hanem was ‘a bud no longer, yet a flower not too fully blown’. When things hotted up he became coy, writing ‘whereupon, here the curtain falls’. Flaubert was more detailed. He wrote, ‘her cunt felt like rolls of velvet as she made me come. I felt like a tiger.’ In another letter he wrote, ‘Towards the end there was something sad and loving in the way we embraced.’
It was at this point that Flaubert and du Camp made their way further upstream to the second cataract. Already Flaubert’s writing was changing from the purple prose of St Anthony. Instead of describing a moon-drenched landscape he wrote, ‘it was shining on my right leg and the portion of my white sock that was between my trouser and my shoe’.
Du Camp later observed of this time, ‘Flaubert’s future novel engrossed him. “I am obsessed by it,” he would say to me. Amid African landscapes he dreamed of Norman landscapes . . . on the summit of Gebel Abusir, which overlooks the Second Cataract, as we were watching the Nile dash itself against the sharp black granite rocks, he gave a cry: “I have found it! Eureka! Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary!”’
On the journey back down the Nile, du Camp and Flaubert again stayed at the Hôtel du Nil. Perhaps it was then that the famous photograph was taken. The posture is so reminiscent of leave taking, of the sadness of parting. Flaubert wrote after his second and last meeting with Kuchuk Hanem, ‘I intensely relished the bitterness of it all; that’s the main thing, and I felt it in my very bowels.’
Flaubert is overshadowed in that photo by the two rundown buildings behind him. Perhaps on their roofs there might be storks nesting. The garden looks wintry, a couple of low acacia trees and a taller tree, perhaps some kind of palm, framing the right-hand side of the picture. On an occasion when Flaubert makes Madame Bovary seem the epitome of the deluded romantic fool he has her imagine herself and Rodolphe living happily in a low, flat-roofed house in the shade of a palm tree.
On his way home Flaubert wrote from Constantinople, ‘Why have I a melancholy desire to return to Egypt, to sail back up the Nile and see Kuchuk Hanem? No matter: the night I spent with her is the kind one doesn’t have very often, but I enjoyed it to the full.’ He was still seeing prostitutes. It’s not surprising that du Camp and Flaubert both contracted venereal disease – but not in Egypt, most probably in the Lebanon.
Kuchuk Hanem made such an impact on Flaubert that his account of their night, in a letter home, was turned by the poet Louis Bouillet into a poem where the courtesan is depicted as ‘sad as a widow’ after the departure of the virile young Flaubert (they’ve done it five times in about thirty-six hours). This poem made Flaubert’s muse-figure and mistress Louise Colet jealous. Flaubert wrote to her, realistically one feels, ‘You and I are thinking of Kuchuk Hanem, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interest
ing tourist who was vouchsafed the honours of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others.’ In Flaubert’s writing Kuchuk Hanem appears in the dance of Salome, the dance that leads to John the Baptist losing his head.
Twenty years after Flaubert’s visit, his ex-mistress visited Egypt in 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal. She felt driven to sail up the Nile in search of Kuchuk Hanem. She claimed she met an old and diseased woman of that name. The discarded lover’s last revenge? Later we will follow her on this quest.
For his last novel Flaubert again reverted to Egypt for inspiration. He was still thinking about the owners of the Hôtel du Nil when he thought up Bouvard and Pécuchet, the dim-witted autodidacts in what was intended to be his masterpiece. He never finished it. A few days before his death in 1880 Flaubert wrote to his niece: ‘for the past two weeks I have been gripped by the longing to see a palm tree standing out against a blue sky, and to hear a stork clacking its beak at the top of a minaret’.
I went looking for the Hôtel du Nil in downtown Cairo the other day. In Murray’s 1857 guide the hotel was located across from Ezbekiya Gardens in what is now Goumraya Street. I searched up and down this street, now mainly dedicated to the sale of air compressors and mechanics’ tools, for some sign. But like the second cataract the hotel is long submerged by the workings of modernity. Dodging crazy taxis and surrounded by blaring car horns, I came in the end to the conclusion that the frantic forecourt of the MISR petrol station was the former site of the garden of the Hôtel du Nil.
7 • A journey down the Nile – 2007
The eye of the guest sees cockroaches giving birth. Nubian proverb
I thought of Flaubert strolling along the Nile in Cairo and I imagined that the islands midstream, rather than the banks, would be the closest approximation to how things had looked 150 years ago. But the islands are inaccessible except by local ferry. No tourists visit them (I am talking about the islands that have no bridges to the mainland). I decided to do my own cruise through Cairo to see the islands that are inhabited midstream but are unvisited by tourists and have no cars upon them. You might see a solitary motorcycle crisscrossing the fields, more likely a donkey. These islands would have been submerged during the flood; at best they would have been swamps. But since the first dam at Aswan was built over a hundred years ago they have become permanent parts of Cairo. The largest island has both a church and a mosque; it is straddled by the huge Mounib Bridge, but there is no access to the island from the bridge. Instead you must take a small ferry that costs the equivalent of 5p. There are other, smaller islands, all given over to agriculture and a way of life that has disappeared on the mainland.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 29
