For transport I needed something inconspicuous, invisible even. Foreigners are not encouraged to take their own boats along the Nile without official protection, or that’s the theory. In any case too much of a presence would result in lots of unwelcome attention. I’d been with a professional photographer in Ezbekiya book market and been warned off by bullying members of state security – I didn’t want that sort of interest on my little cruise.
My Maxime du Camp was my friend D’Arcy Adrian-Vallance, who is usually up for most aquatic larks – we once paddled the fields of Oxfordshire during the worst of the floods – and who reminded me that I had once boasted that a rubber beach raft was the best way to travel on the Nile. The challenge was on. My beach raft, which cost around £20, was about nine feet long with rubber rowlocks and enough room for two – one at each end. I had two tiny oars to row with. D’Arcy was happy to keep watch and cradle our only rations – a water bottle and some biscuits. I was grateful for the water as I had something of a cracking hangover and had arrived with nothing except the boat tied to my car roof. This we inflated at a local garage in Maadi and then with a £2 tip to the nearest felluca captain we launched from the jetty next to TGI Friday’s. Feluccas ply the River Nile at all the main towns. In Cairo they are limited by the bridges – their masts being too tall to fit under some of them. We would have no such difficulties.
Quickly we were midstream and travelling fast with the current. Throughout its length the Nile is never sluggish – it is a young river still, or feels it, no, that isn’t right, it is a virile river, it knows its own mind. There is nothing sleepy about it.
I was always surprised and was surprised now at how little floating garbage there is in the Nile in Cairo. You’d think by now after all these miles it would be a veritable cloaca. The canals that lead off it are horrible. Those that haven’t been covered over are like fly tips or open sewers. You see lads bathing horses in these canals, riding the horses in up to their withers. No, the Nile is a clean river, cleaner now that there is a sewerage system that takes city waste far out into the desert to be treated. I looked down and saw no fish, though I have seen them in shoals in the sun-heated shallows near the bank. I rowed on, feeling the sun on my dehydrated face but blissfully happy. D’Arcy dangled his fingers in the water as it streamed past, or rather as we streamed along with it, as it was the roughly 3mph current that was taking us towards the centre of Cairo.
We were at the tip of the big island known as Geziret Bahrein when children began shouting and waving to us. You never get that in the city – kids are too blasé there and there are too many foreigners walking around for it to be a novelty. We passed a little beach where women were washing giant aluminium cooking pots, and in a sort of concrete river-lapped pool they were smashing clothes against the water. Boys dived in to swim to us, but in some kind of natural etiquette they kept their distance from our ludicrous little craft, though their faces were beaming – all wet heads and white teeth. We declined all invitations to land and rowed on past an enormous two-masted dhow, a sandal, whose sides were overflowing with freshly cut reeds. It looked like an enormous floating haystack. Special boards, grey and worn-out looking, were fixed to the gunnels to raise the ship’s sides. This meant the reeds reached right up to the bottom of the sails. There was no engine on the craft, perhaps the last working sailboat in Cairo – I would never have thought I’d see such a thing in the twenty-first century. The rudder was especially massive, hewn, it seemed, from timbers a foot thick with a great arching tiller arm like the bough of a tree. Men, half hidden by the high reeds, called out to us laughing. It seemed we had found the ideal way to travel into Cairo.
Not 300 yards away was the infamous Corniche, the racetrack along the Nile’s bank where it is not uncommon to see a car in a tree – that is, off the ground like some Formula 1 mishap. That’s how dangerous it can get. Ever been undertaken by a car going 100mph while simultaneously being overtaken by one going about 90? I’m not surprised that foreigners decide to hug the slow lane come what may, though it does put you nearer to the trees. And the river. Which is obviously the best place to be. Strangely, we were making good time. The six or so miles from TGI Friday’s in Maadi to the island of Zamalek would take us just under two hours. When the traffic is really bad I’ve done the same journey in an hour and a half. D’Arcy and I talk excitedly about getting a power boat to move in and out of Cairo with ease. But we’ll never do it; drifting with a bit of rowing is way better than blasting and bumping over the waves creating a power ripple that annoys the net-casting fishermen, even though they are so inured to insult they never show it.
We drift on past the enormous fountain base midstream beneath the rotating restaurant in the sky attached to the Grand Hyatt. The water piles past the concrete base and we noticed a small maintenance ladder which we grab hold of. In such a small craft the scale of the world seems changed, as if we are Borrowers scurrying around the giants’ world.
Finally we arrive at the cultivated market gardens that stretch along one edge of Zamalek. There are similar gardens all along the Nile. Any patch of earth near a water supply gets turned into a bed growing something. When they burned the police huts down during the 2011 revolution only the gardens next to them were left unscathed. Egyptians are gardeners before anything else – I’ve never seen a garden that isn’t tidy, artistic and good to look at. In Europe, good gardeners tend, on the whole, to be about as imaginative as petrol-station designers. The flower growers are sometimes a tad more creative than the vegetable experts, but not by much. But an Egyptian garden is at its best when it is mainly vegetables. These will be grown in an ordered but pleasing way, with a flower or two thrown in – which we now know contributes to better growth all round. When you see Egyptian gardens, market gardens and vegetable gardens, you understand how they could have built the Pyramids – a stone at a time, each one individually crafted but broadly similar, but not mechanically similar. I think that’s what makes these gardens so pleasing.
We pulled the boat out. Deflated it, put it on the roof of a hailed taxi and drove back to Maadi in half an hour. It was early and the Corniche was empty.
8 • Kuchuk Hanem’s fame
Trust in God, but tie your camel first. Arab proverb
Flaubert was in Egypt in 1849–50. So was Florence Nightingale and so, as we have seen, was George William Curtis, American author of Nile Notes of a Howadji. Curtis later became editor of Harper’s Weekly and, like Flaubert, was more interested in the mysterious orient than in ancient antiquities. He wrote a long description of the dancing girls of Esna, and he, too, succumbed to the delights of Kuchuk Hanem, whom he took to be in her late twenties and calls, wrongly, Kushuk Arnem. For all the brilliance of Flaubert’s description we are left with a woman like the statue of Memnon, her lip curled and carved in stone. Curtis, a worse writer, makes her live: ‘Smiling and pantomime were our talking and one choice Italian word, she knew – buono. Ah! How much was buono that choice evening. Eyes, lips, hair, form, dress, everything that the strangers had or wore, was endlessly buono. Dancing, singing, smoking, coffee, buono, buono, buonissimo! How much work that one word will do!’
With her young associate Xenobi and an aged couple beating drums and playing a one-stringed fiddle, Kuchuk Hanem began to dance. We see immediately the expert bellydancer at work:
Her hands were raised, clapping the castanets, and she slowly turned upon herself, her right leg the pivot, marvellously convulsing all the muscles of her body. When she had completed the circuit of the spot on which she stood, she advanced slowly, all the muscles jerking in time to the music, and in solid substantial spasms.
It was a curious and wonderful gymnastic. There was no graceful dancing – once only was there the movement of dancing when she advanced – throwing one leg before the other as gypsies dance. But the rest was most voluptuous motion – not the little wooing of languid passion, but the soul of passion starting through every sense, and quivering in every limb. It was the v
ery intensity of motion, concentrated and constant . . . Suddenly stooping, still muscularly moving, Kushuk fell upon her knees, and writhed with body, arms and head upon the floor . . . it was profoundly dramatic . . . it was a lyric of love which words cannot tell – profound, oriental, intense and terrible.
Poor Louise Colet hadn’t a chance.
9 • Colet searches for Kuchuk Hanem
The hyena will enter at the place where a pet dog breaks through the hedge.
Ethiopian proverb
Louise Colet was ten years older than Flaubert. She died in 1876, four years before he did. It was during the interregnum of their intense eight-year affair, from 1846 to 1854, that Flaubert spent his night with Kuchuk Hanem. After he had reported it all to Louise Colet, the idea, the image, the competition, this woman, this dirty foreigner, she just wouldn’t go away. It ate away at Colet and she should, of course, have let it go. Instead, in 1869, she wangled an invitation – as with her Académie Française prizes, it was said she was expert at getting influential people to intervene on her behalf – from Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail Pasha. To celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, Ismail was sparing no expense: a boat would sail up the Nile, quite the match for one of Cleopatra’s galleys, and on board would be the greatest minds of literary Europe, the celebrities of the day, the aristocrats and the men of wealth and influence. All on one boat which would traverse the Suez Canal and then proceed up the Nile as far as Aswan, stopping, of course, at Esna, the adopted hometown of Kuchuk Hanem. By some quirk of fate, Colet and Hanem were not quite the same age – sixty years old and fifty years old, women who had shared the same man, the inventor of the modern novel, some twenty years earlier. One, a French intellectual, a poet, a salon hostess. The other, a courtesan, a prostitute perhaps, but also a marvellously skilled dancer, a musician and a singer.
Like all intellectuals Colet was jealous of physical charms that trumped intellectual ones. Not that she hadn’t been beautiful in her day, but a life spent sitting around reading books doesn’t develop the body along the same lines that dancing and fornicating do. Flaubert’s description of Kuchuk Hanem emphasises her broad shoulders, her powerful head and, yes, her beautiful throat that smelled of sweet turpentine.
The journey up the Nile was exactly what Colet had expected. She wrote in her diary that ‘The Nile surpasses all photographs but only if you are holding your hat – it is very breezy.’ She landed at Esna with one thing in mind, to find and speak with her lover’s ex-love.
There was no assistant courtesan with a decorated sheep to meet Louise as there had been for Flaubert and du Camp. The ship would stay a day and two nights. Most visitors were taken in carrotta, donkey carts, to see the ruins at Kom Ombo. Louise walked up the hill with a dragoman from the ship leading the way. All along he tried to convince her that there was no one of that name – kuchuk hanem only means ‘little lady’ he tried to explain. In the shadows, spies were watching.
On the second night she went back again. Again Kuchuk Hanem’s spies told her of this strange woman. In the end, for amusement, Kuchuk Hanem summoned the ageing French beauty to her spacious town house, built with the wealth of a thousand conquests. The women were waited upon by two giant Nubians, one with a single eye.
Hanem was older than Colet had imagined and was thick around the middle; she was watching Colet with her still powerful eyes. Her ankles were still beautiful though, her legs slim.
Yes, she was known as Kuchuk Hanem. What was that to the howadji? She made a joking aside to her maid, older than she, a woman with infinitely understanding eyes and grey tresses, a black gown and arms knotty and veined with work. Every element of opposition had been rolled out of her form, perhaps by centuries of despotic rule by men and Pharaohs alike, perhaps by her life as maid to Kuchuk Hanem and others.
Hanem’s eyes were huge, almond perfect, outlined in kohl enough to make each one still a precious object. She listened to the babbling story and understood it. Since Flaubert’s time she had mastered not only Italian but also fluent French. Colet was insistent about one thing: ‘Did she remember this man?’ She proffered the photograph. Kuchuk Hanem nodded. She recalled the two men – the first photographers ever to ascend the Nile. How could she not?
Now the delicate bit: what was he like, how had their night of love been? Kuchuk Hanem roared with laughter: ‘There are no nights of love! Only days when we imagine such things. Your husband was a writer, you say. It was another good story for him to tell the world, no doubt.’
Yet when Colet left, Kuchuk Hanem checked again the photograph she had been given by Flaubert, who had implored Maxime du Camp to part with this keepsake, this memento of a few hours so many years ago.
10 • The calling
The eye of the horse is the bit. Egyptian proverb
Maxime du Camp photographed grand things, or people. He resisted the urge, though the site was venerated, to take a picture of a single young lady’s footprint preserved already some weeks in the sand by the infatuated tour guide in Luxor (this gives some idea of the increase in tourist volume since then: a tourist’s footprint would last about three minutes in most sites in Egypt now). It was the footprint of Florence Nightingale, who, as we have already noted, was travelling up the Nile at the same time as the louche novelist.
Florence was travelling without her parents, with friends of the family. The object was to see the great ruins of the Nile, and come to some decision about marriage. She had just turned down a proposal from one of England’s most eligible young bachelors, Richard Monckton Milnes – a wealthy poet, politician and friend of many in high office. He would become one of the closest friends of Richard Burton, Nile explorer and translator of The Thousand and One Nights (one of Florence’s favourite books and, in another translation, her preferred reading on her Nile voyage). Milnes had already made his own Nile cruise with a disreputable pal who brought along a hammer and chisel to remove any ‘hieroglyphic friezes’ that took his fancy. They also brought panes of glass to seal the windows of the dahabiya, or houseboat, against the cold and the mosquitoes (you can get both in winter along the Nile). Milnes returned to England with the soubriquet ‘the first Englishman to enter the harem’. It was not this that put Florence off. She loved the man. Nor was she concerned by his interest in the perverse (though she may not have been fully aware of it). The reason she had declined his hand was because she felt she had a higher purpose, a purpose she would discover in Egypt on the Nile.
That Florence Nightingale narrowly missed marrying England’s most famous pornographer – as Milnes later became – is something only an inhabitant of an alternative universe can really relish. I mean, what if she had? Monckton Milnes was a gentleman and poet, a bon vivant, a great and generous entertainer, friend of the good and the great – what did it matter that he had a penchant for the Marquis de Sade, whose work occupied pride of place in his ‘Aphrodisiopolis’?
That Florence did not marry a porn collector naturally only happened because she took a Nile cruise. Of course it would have been bad for nursing, thousands would have suffered and possibly died, and she did have a calling to be a nurse. But still, something perverse draws me to the idea of Florence Nightingale spending her life with a man with the greatest collection of dirty pictures in Europe. A year after her return from Egypt she would still write, ‘I know that if I were to see him again . . . the very thought of doing so quite overcomes me. I know that since I refused him not one day has passed without my thinking of him.’
Though Florence had said no to Milnes before she left for Egypt, he had evidently given her time to think it over. Her Nile cruise with some family friends was to help her decide, or to get over him altogether. Instead it coalesced her long-held dreams and gave them the courage to speak for themselves. Almost any life of external achievement and prominence looks inevitable in hindsight, but with Florence Nightingale the effect is absurdly noticeable. She seems destined to stand up for women’s rights.
Her father William
had been given the choice aged twenty-one of inheriting £100,000 – the equivalent of £7,000,000 today (the money went a lot further then because of the greater differentials in income) – as long as he changed his name from Shore to that of his childless benefactor great-uncle Peter Nightingale. The catch was: if William Nightingale had no male heir, then he had to ignore his daughters and send the money to the nearest male relative in turn.
Naturally he said yes, ditched Shore, became Nightingale and looked forward to fathering several sons. He had two daughters. One born in Naples who was called by the Greek name for that city, Parthenope, and one born in Florence who fortunately was called not Firenze but Florence. Parthenope was Florence’s elder sister, and it’s just as well she had no ambitions of her own to be a nurse. Parthenope Nightingale doesn’t quite sound right (how about Napoli Nightingale?). Parthenope was often ill; in fact in their youth they both were, and Florence often nursed her. Parthenope would later write with the insight of sisterhood but not its sentiment, ‘I believe she has little or none of what is called charity or philanthropy, she is ambitious – very, and would like well enough to regenerate the world with a grand coup de main or some fine institution.’
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 30
