Parting the Desert

by Zachary Karabell

  His teenage stint in the navy was only one element of a regimented education designed by Muhammad Ali. Part of Said’s schooling was traditional. He was a young Turkish prince, the son of a beautiful, tall Circassian mother who was one of Muhammad Ali’s concubines. His first years were spent in the harem among the female members of his father’s court. Then he was placed in the care of male guardians and trained in martial skills such as riding, shooting, and fencing. He was tutored about the Koran, the life of the Prophet, and the golden age of the Arab caliphate in Damascus and Baghdad, and he learned about the great victories of the Ottomans and their glory days under Suleiman the Magnificent, who conquered Egypt early in the sixteenth century and nearly became the lord of Central Europe. Said loved the desert, and military exercises. He enjoyed wearing uniforms and watching his troops parade in front of him. One of his favorite pastimes was taking special guests into the desert, erecting a temporary court of elaborate tents, serving sumptuous meals, and spending several days watching military maneuvers.

  But Said also received an education unlike that of the average Turkish prince. He had a French tutor named Koenig Bey and learned fluent French. He read the French classics and acquired a zest for French culture that was only intensified by his teenage friendship with Lesseps. He was sent to Paris in the late 1830s, where he passed many days roaming the Latin Quarter. His affinity for Paris never faded, and this was one of the reasons why he responded so favorably to the French when he assumed power.

  Francophile that he was, he renovated the palaces made musty by the austerity of Abbas and filled them with furniture built in the ateliers of Paris. He purchased silks and damasks from Lyon and Marseille, and he collected ceramics from Limoges. In fact, during his reign, the Egyptian royalty acted and dressed much like European royalty. The Ras al-Tin (“Cape of Figs”) Palace in Alexandria, where Said passed his summers, was redesigned to mimic a comparable royal abode in Vienna or Milan. And in his opposition to political reform, he was no different from the Austro-Hungarian emperor.

  Said may have been a genial, generous soul with a penchant for luxury, but he was also an autocrat. In fact, it never seems to have occurred to him that there was any other form of government. He was the ruler, and his word was law. Technically, his authority to order executions was constrained by his legal status as a vassal of the Ottoman sultan. In practice, however, he had the power of life and death over millions of Egyptians. He could command twenty thousand peasants to travel hundreds of miles to work on whatever projects he wished. He could spend the money that flowed into his treasury however he saw fit, without having to consult anyone. The religious authorities of al-Azhar preached obedience to his will. There were no elections. Villages were governed by shaikhs whom he could replace on a whim, and provinces were overseen by elites that depended on him and him alone for patronage. The army was his to command, and its generals served at his pleasure.

  And at no point did Said contemplate political reforms that would have diminished his authority. On the contrary, his policies were designed to centralize authority and enhance his power, in order to make it simpler for him to govern and to raise revenue. The country had been divided into administrative districts by his father, in imitation of the Napoleonic reforms that reorganized France. Said went a step further and extended these reforms to the bureaucracy. He was the first Egyptian ruler to organize a government with civil servants who received published salaries. As radical as that was, salaries were still open to negotiation based on favor and bribes, and the civil service did not have any authority separate from the will of the viceroy. Above all, Said was skeptical of the populist spirit of the 1848 revolutions. He believed in educating the ruling class so that they could rule better, but he saw no reason for the peasants to learn to read. “Why open the people’s eyes?” he explained. “That only makes them harder to rule.”1

  Said’s ideology manifested itself in his physical surroundings. His court was an eclectic mix of Eastern ostentation and Western conveniences. The Ras al-Tin Palace combined cedar beams from Lebanon with gold-gilt work that echoed Versailles. Persian rugs designed to cushion divans surrounded sofas and chairs made in Europe. The evening entertainment consisted of singing girls and musicians who played reed fifes and the darabuka fish-skinned drum, while the guests washed their hands in European finger-bowls. The army was dressed in uniforms adopted from the Prussians and Austrians; the members of the court wore loose, richly embroidered robes and shawls, sometimes topped by a red Turkish tarboosh, or by a white lace skullcap. Said himself often sported a fiery ruby ring on his finger, along with a tarboosh encrusted with jewels. He loved to entertain, and much of the business of his court was conducted not in formal sessions but during long evenings of song, dance, and food.

  And Europe responded, both socially and economically. The accession of Said was a klaxon for European entrepreneurs who had been stymied during the years of Abbas. Projects that had been shelved were revisited. Under Abbas, foreign consuls were rarely invited to the court, and their social lives dimmed. Thousands of Europeans who had flocked to Alexandria during Muhammad Ali’s reign in search of new horizons went elsewhere to seek their fortunes. But in the fall of 1854, that stream reversed course, and the expatriates returned in the hope of making deals.

  The consuls were the key middlemen. As diplomats, they guarded their country’s interests and made sure that their countrymen were treated fairly. But they were also free agents who enriched themselves by selling access. The French consul might set up a meeting between a French railroad consortium and a member of the royal household who owned land along the Nile. The consul would take a fee from each party, most likely in the form of stock in the joint venture. He would then have a vested interest in seeing the project completed, but no costs if it wasn’t. Each country had consuls, and the ultimate goal was getting the viceroy to grant a concession. Even though Said was generous in his awards, there were far more people jockeying for an audience and for influence than there were available projects. Competition was fierce, but the potential profits were worth the trouble.2

  Said was accommodating. He was perceived as an ingenuous man-child who could be easily tempted by lavish descriptions of new technologies. In front of one of his palaces was a broad open space where he liked to conduct troop maneuvers. During the summer, it was impossible to use because of the excessive dust. A European merchant convinced Said that the problem could be solved by covering the courtyard with iron. The expense was prohibitive, but Said agreed to it. The space was paved, which eliminated the dust issue. The metal became so hot in the summer sun, however, that it burned the feet of the soldiers through their shoes, and the iron eventually had to be removed. Because of unwise decisions such as these, Said gained a reputation as an easy mark for a clever entrepreneur with a scheme.

  Some of that reputation was deserved. He gave out concessions at a far greater rate than either Abbas or Muhammad Ali, and tended not to assess the financial risks beforehand. But Said also was plagued by avaricious European consuls and their business allies, who took advantage of the power disparity between their governments and Said. Rather than treating the concessions as glorified permission slips, consuls and businessmen argued that they were actually contracts between the Egyptian government and private parties. That meant that if the project did not come to fruition the Egyptian government could be held partly liable and required to indemnify the concessionaire.3

  Though he did not agree with this interpretation, Said lacked the power to reject it. Beginning with Napoleon, Europeans had extended their extraterritorial rights, and had managed to place themselves under the legal umbrella of their consular representatives rather than the Egyptian government. These arrangements, known as capitulations, had begun centuries earlier as agreements between the Ottoman Empire and the states of Europe. Initially, they had been negotiated from a position of strength by the Ottomans, but as the balance of power shifted, European governments were able to demand more
privileges. By the time of Said, the situation had reached an absurd level. Europeans could rarely be tried in Egyptian courts, no matter how local the crime. Instead, they were turned over to their consuls, who could choose to prosecute or not.4

  In business deals, the capitulations often gave the Europeans carte blanche. Few consuls had an interest in granting Egyptian claims against European entrepreneurs. If Said wanted to deny a European claim, he had to appeal to third-party arbiters, and often these were European aristocrats, more likely to sympathize with the way the consuls interpreted contracts than with the viceroy of Egypt.

  Said was aware of the risks. He didn’t trust the consuls, and once referred to them as “wolves.” But he took the chance of incurring excessive costs because he saw no other viable path. He was in the same quandary as dozens of other rulers of non-European countries: he needed European capital in order to change his country enough to resist European influence. It was a problem without a good solution, and one that bedeviled Said’s successors in the twentieth century as much as it compromised Said himself in the nineteenth. The peoples of Egypt, of the Middle East, and of much of the world outside of the United States and Europe have been struggling to catch up for more than a century. It was frustrating for Said when the game began. A century and a half later, that frustration gave way to bitterness, and to hatred.

  In 1854, however, Said looked to a brighter future. He was young; he had a zest for life; and he was the ruler of an ancient country blessed with fertile soil. He also could draw on a reservoir of good will in Europe. Compared with Abbas, any successor might have been greeted warmly, but Said had made many friends in Europe and among the European community in Egypt and was hailed as the agent of a new and better future.

  Ferdinand de Lesseps was therefore only one of many who saw the elevation of Said as a wonderful opportunity. Hearing that Said had assumed power, Lesseps wrote to him immediately. Said had not yet developed that reputation as an easy mark, but Lesseps had known the prince on and off for twenty years, and must have recognized that Said could be persuaded to endorse an idea that had been rebuffed by his predecessors.

  While running his mother-in-law’s estate in Berry, Lesseps had been searching for a grand project. Though the Suez Canal was only one of the many possibilities, there is no clue as to what the others might have been. Lesseps is the sole source of information about his activities in the years following his disgrace, and he left no record of what other plans he might have considered. He had been following the progress of the Study Group since its inception, and he was in occasional contact with several of its members. He also carried on a correspondence with the Dutch consul general in Egypt, M.S.W. Ruyssenaers, an old friend who knew everything and everyone in Alexandria and Cairo. Since at least 1852, Lesseps had been analyzing the surveys and blueprints assembled by Enfantin’s group, and he had been one of many who lamented that Abbas had closed his mind to European influence. In April 1853, he wrote to Abbas in a futile attempt to convince him to undertake the construction of the Suez Canal. In arguments that would later prove persuasive to Said, Lesseps spoke of the grandeur of the project and its financial benefits, but Abbas was unmoved.5

  It seems that Lesseps made these overtures on his own. Without the earlier work of the Study Group, he would have had a hard time acquiring such a keen grasp of the relevant details, yet the exact nature of his relationship with Enfantin and the Study Group is sketchy. According to his competitors, Lesseps stole both the idea for the canal and detailed surveys that had been compiled by the Study Group. According to his partisans, the general idea of a canal was common knowledge, and Lesseps simply took it upon himself to implement it. Had Abbas remained in power, this chicken-and-egg question would have been moot. But events soon made it central.

  From the moment he heard about the death of Abbas, Lesseps planned to go to Egypt and present the canal idea to Said. He wrote to Said in late July. He received a response a month later, warmly inviting him to visit, and he left France in late October 1854. What he did then is open to debate. He may or may not have stopped in Lyon on his way to his ship in Marseille, and he may or may not have visited the offices of François Arlès-Dufour, one of Enfantin’s closest aides. And while in Lyon, he may or may not have been given documents that he then used as source material for selling the project to Said.6

  There is no way to know for certain. Lesseps always maintained that he drew up plans on his own, but, given the later acrimony between him and Enfantin, that is precisely the position he would have been expected to take. In a similar vein, Enfantin’s self-interest would dictate the alternate story. However Lesseps obtained the preliminary plans, by the time he arrived in Alexandria in November he was armed with information on the possible canal and options for various routes. The Study Group had been unable to arrive at a consensus over which path was best, but they had at least narrowed the choice to two options: either a direct route from the Mediterranean, cutting through the isthmus to the port of Suez, or an indirect route using the Nile and then fashioning a ship canal from the outskirts of Cairo to Suez. Lesseps was certain that only the direct route made sense, and he refused to consider any alternatives. From his perspective, the indirect route presented political and financial obstacles that would doom the project to failure.

  Disembarking in Alexandria, he was met by Ruyssenaers and a representative of the viceroy, who escorted him to a palatial villa near the Mahmoudiah Canal, several miles away. Though he was a private French citizen with a comfortable but by no means substantial income, he was treated as visiting royalty. A phalanx of servants lined up to greet him at the main entrance, all Turks and Arabs save for a Greek valet. The palace had recently been used by one of Said’s wives, who had borne him a son. It was outfitted with every convenience, and every luxury: silk bedding, brocaded upholstery, gold-embroidered towels, marble dressing rooms, and a set of servants whose sole responsibility was to prepare his coffee and supply him with water pipes.7

  Informed that the viceroy was ready to receive him, Lesseps dressed in his most formal attire, replete with the medals and orders of merit he had been awarded during his years in the diplomatic service. He wrote to Madame Delamalle that his reason for dressing that way was to show Said “respectful deference,” but the actual reasons were probably more complex. As a private citizen, he had no actual standing in Egypt, and though he had warm memories of his friendship with Said, he didn’t want to rely purely on good will. By festooning himself in the regalia of a high official, he may have wanted to give the impression that he had more influence in France and in Europe than he actually did.

  In addition to his history with Said, Lesseps had one other asset. His cousin Eugénie de Montijo had recently become Empress Eugénie, and though his degree of closeness with her was a matter of gossip and speculation, Lesseps’s exact position in the international hierarchy must have been difficult for Said and his court to gauge. Just as Lesseps thought it best to give the impression of power that he didn’t truly possess, Said thought it best to treat his old friend as someone who did.

  The two men met for the first time in fifteen years in the formal audience chamber of the Ras al-Tin Palace, and according to Lesseps, it was as if only a short spell had passed since they had last seen each other. Lesseps, who had developed the silken tongue of a diplomat after long years in that profession, showered the new potentate with compliments. Said, in turn, reminisced about his youth and thanked Ferdinand for supporting him even at the risk of incurring Muhammad Ali’s displeasure. He then invited Lesseps to come with him on a trip across the desert to Cairo. Military parades were planned, and Said hoped that Lesseps would be his honored guest. Ferdinand, who was looking for such a chance to be alone with Said, said yes.

  Knowing of Said’s passion for shooting and hunting, he had brought a pair of revolvers from France as a gift. He saw the viceroy several times before the trip began, once as a guest during the formal audience hours, and once in Said’s private apa
rtments for a desultory few hours spent reclining on divans overlooking the gardens of the palace while languidly smoking and drinking coffee, the caffeine doing battle with the light-headed stupor that washed over them as they inhaled the pipes. They talked about many things, but Lesseps did not raise the matter of the canal.

  Furnished with an Arabian horse by Said, Lesseps joined the royal party on its journey south on November 13. Winter was setting in; though the days would have been temperate, the nights in the desert were cool. After crossing the lake separating Alexandria from the mainland, they were soon surrounded by the sands of the Libyan Desert, where Napoleon’s troops had slogged in parched determination half a century before. Lesseps rode on his own for a time, and then arrived at the camp that evening. Tents had been pitched in neat rows, and the imperial compound mimicked the opulence of the palace they had just left. Lesseps’s tent was furnished with an iron bed covered in silk. He was then taken to a larger tent where the viceroy and his court were gathered. Food was served on Sèvres china, and ice water was provided. The army, meanwhile, had set up artillery pieces for demonstrations, and in between the booming of the cannons, the imperial party received news of the siege of Sebastopol. England and France in alliance with the Ottomans were fighting a war against Russia for murky reasons on the Crimean Peninsula, but it was the only war going on, and news of it was prime entertainment. The conversation rambled for hours, and at one point Said talked excitedly about his desire to do something dramatic to mark the beginning of his reign.

  Two days later, just before dawn, Lesseps woke up, wrapped himself in a red dressing gown, and peeled back the flap of his tent. He gazed on the desert. “A few rays began to light up the horizon,” he wrote. “To my right, there is the east in all of its limpidity; to my left, the west is dark and cloudy. All of a sudden, I saw a rainbow, with all of its vivid colors, spanning east and west. I swear, I felt my heart beat faster, and I had to stop my imagination from seeing this as a sign of the alliance spoken of in the Scriptures, of the true union between the West and the East, and as a message that today would see the success of my project.”8 Harbinger or not, Lesseps took the rainbow as a cue to broach the subject of the Suez Canal.