In their replies Forsskål and Niebuhr clearly showed their disappointment at this inconclusive answer. Admittedly, wrote Forsskål, they had not so much to fear there in Cairo, partly because the house they were living in was not good enough for von Haven, partly because they were surrounded by so many Europeans that it would be inadvisable for him to attempt any outrages of that kind. But soon the expedition was to proceed into the desert, where they would be living exclusively among wild Arabs. “Your Excellency will surely understand how intolerable it will be for us all if we are constantly having to remind ourselves that we are living in the greatest danger, of which one of our own colleagues is the cause. The other day he again demanded, in the greatest anger and indeed with threats, that we turn the leadership of the expedition over to him. We referred to the royal terms of reference in which it is quite expressly declared that we are all equal, but this did not trouble him; on the contrary, he declared that the problem would soon be solved. As far as I can see, he has already given all too many signs that he will not hesitate to do something terrible. We would be a much happier company if he was not among us.”
Niebuhr said the same: they would all be very much happier if the hope von Gähler held out to them could be realised. He admitted that the ambassador was right in deprecating his determination to shoot von Haven: “But who could look on dispassionately if what we all fear were to happen somewhere where there is no court of law? I therefore humbly express the hope that Your Excellency will not put too unfavourable an interpretation on my remarks when reporting them to His Excellency Baron von Bernstorff.”
Little more could be done for the present. The fuse that Forsskål had ignited on Rhodes brought no explosion in Constantinople. Now the spark had to travel all the way to Copenhagen before there was any hope of a result. Forsskål, Niebuhr and Baurenfeind continued their work in Cairo while waiting in considerable tension for Bernstorff’s reply.
3
There was plenty to do. The following months were a busy time for the Danish expedition. Already at the beginning of January, when the short Egyptian winter was over, Peter Forsskål set out on long excursions into the desert, spending the night in small towns, sleeping on a mat of straw, and pursuing his botanical investigations for days on end, accompanied only by a couple of Arab assistants. In the middle of January he was in Caid Bey, on the caravan route to Suez; at the end of the month he was out again, and this time continued as far as the towns of Matara and Birk, where the Mecca caravans usually set up camp. When spring began in earnest, he travelled back to Alexandria to collect the flowers which had shot up after the rainy season; and at the beginning of March he was pursuing his botanical studies once again in the desert valley around Matara.
The result of his inexhaustible energy was a collection of more than 120 different species of flowers, the greater part of which were completely unknown. In addition, there were packets of seed which, with the collections gathered in Turkey, made up several hundred varieties. There were also his observations of the country’s fauna. No sooner had he succeeded in collecting this material than he set himself down in his workroom in M. Clément’s house in Cairo to begin to catalogue his finds. During the spring of 1762 the results of his work were presented in the form of two papers: Descriptiones Plantarum Floræ Aegyptico-Arabicæ and Descriptiones Animalium. On 30th July he wrote to Linnaeus to say that the work was finished and that his two papers had been sent off to Marshal Moltke at the Court in Copenhagen. “I have put in an urgent plea for them to be printed at once. But I do not know whether the people in Copenhagen will not oppose this on the grounds that they are written by a foreigner and not by the Danish natural historian, so-called, in the expedition.” Forsskål’s doubts proved justified—but that is a story in itself.
In addition to these very comprehensive zoological and botanical works, Forsskål devoted himself during his stay in Cairo to another aspect of study quite outside the field assigned to him in the royal instructions. In Constantinople and again in Alexandria he had been captivated by the Orient’s wealth of unusual commodities; it amused him to wander through the market-places of the towns in the late afternoon, when the worst of the heat was over, and there, in conversation with the traders, find out the purpose of the different commodities, their ingredients, and their cost. In Alexandria he investigated in very thorough fashion the way the Arabs baked their bread; and whenever he was on his botanical expeditions in the desert and happened in the evening to reach one of the small towns where the caravans rested during the day and made ready to strike camp and continue their night’s journey under the desert stars, he was conscious of encountering a new world of splendour, a world which soon proved as engrossing as his flowers.
While working in M. Clément’s house on his two scholarly publications, he found it made an agreeable change as sunset approached to go to meet the incoming caravans. There he would stroll about for an hour or so in the dusty light that hung about the bales of goods, the kneeling camels, and the silent figures that walked about barefoot in the sand wearing their ankle-length garments. There he found the caravan from Mecca, consisting of up to several thousand camels. It was on its way to Cairo with emeralds, pearls, diamonds, hyacinths, musk, civet, Indian cotton and silk garments, and balm of Gilead. One month after the end of Ramadan, Forsskål saw the caravan once more leaving Cairo and setting out on its return to Mecca. Now it was taking with it silks with interwoven silver and gold threads, glazed and unglazed paper, French and Venetian clothes, blue and white linen (which was called Greek although it was made in Cairo), sewing needles and knives, gunpowder and shot, syrup and sesame oil, white and brown honey, beans, peas, lentils, rice, wheat, and all kinds of edible grain, not to mention nails, salt and ammonia.
Other evenings he visited the caravan that came up from Sennar, deep in the Sudan, which was called the djellabe and was led by coal-black men with yellow, violet or scarlet shawls over their shoulders under their short curly hair. They halted their animals in front of ogelet-ed-djellabe, the inn of the djellabe, and came to fetch coral and amber for jewellery, beads and mirrors, sabres and guns. With them from Africa they brought slaves and slave girls; young boys of about eight who cost only 25 mahbub; young men from twenty to thirty who could be got for between 35 and 40 mahbub; eunuchs that cost up to 110 mahbub; young women costing up to 40 mahbub for virgins, for those who were not virgins up to 30 mahbub, and for those who knew how to prepare food up to 60 mahbub. But the caravan from the Sudan also brought other things than slaves: here was a pack of monkeys for only a few para each; here parrots for 2 mahbub each, but costing 25 mahbub if they could speak; here were whole tusks of ivory, and there red, black, white, and yellow rhinoceros horns, of which the yellow were the best; here were ostrich feathers and the special ostrich oil used for rheumatism; there were whips of elephant hide, gold-sand for alchemists, date seed and paternoster peas used for making into necklaces; salt for making tobacco stronger, powders used in the manufacture of quick-acting aphrodisiacs, and lupin seeds which must only be eaten cooked; there were melons and beans of gigantic size; chishim seed for sore eyes; here the rare gumarabic from Kordofan, used for making medicines, dyes and bleaches; and there dried gumbo fruits, so good for colic, and genuine tamarind pasties, so good if one has eaten too many gumbo fruits.
Even in our own days what remains of the Sudan caravan can still be seen in the Nubian desert along the banks of the Nile, perhaps in the evening at a distance, when the long file of camels makes a fringe along some sandy ridge, or perhaps at closer quarters, when the caravan halts some morning in the market-place of a small township and is surrounded by children and barking dogs. Now it is almost exclusively animals that are driven northwards to the markets in Sohag and Cairo. It is as though with time all the riches of deepest Africa have been sold out; here there are no gumbo fruits, no gold-sand, no monkeys. Nor, of course, is there any of that other human cargo that one’s thoughts might turn to: none who could prepare food, none goin
g cheap because they were not virgins.
Peter Forsskål’s researches among the caravans in Cairo and during his expeditions into the desert were only made possible by virtue of his quite exceptional linguistic gifts. Niebuhr reports how, during his stay in Cairo, he not only acquired a complete mastery of Arabic in its main form, but also gained considerable familiarity with the dialects spoken in the delta. Nevertheless, his ardour often involved him in dangerous encounters. One afternoon in the neighbourhood of Matara he strayed away from his assistants and was attacked and thrown to the ground by an Arab who was after money. The only thing that saved his life was the arrival of his assistants at the last moment to chase the robber away. For his long journey back to Alexandria he was warned not to ride straight across the desert but instead to take the slower route along the river bank; these warnings he disregarded, with the result that just short of his destination he was surrounded by hostile Bedouin. It was an unpleasant experience. We can read about it in a letter he sent to Linnaeus when he got back to Cairo: “I was quite prepared to be set upon by robbers on my way to Alexandria, and I was not disappointed. But I had taken no more with me than I could afford to lose without great damage, and I was simply clad in an ordinary peasant dress. These Arabs are generally kind enough to let one keep one’s life, so long as one does not put up any resistance and merely hands over to them what they demand. They left me no more than my trousers, a cap, and a shawl to cover myself with. Even my shirt I had to deliver up to them.”
But even to desist from offering resistance and to give the robbers what they asked for was something the obstinate and argumentative Forsskål found it almost impossible to submit to. Time after time he forgot his own rules, provoking those who held the whiphand with the same cold disdain with which he had once faced the all-powerful officials in Sweden. Up to now luck had been with him; but one afternoon as he was helping Niebuhr with some of his readings out by the pyramids, his obstinacy confronted the two of them with a very grave situation.
4
While Forsskål was engrossed in his botanical expeditions, Carsten Niebuhr had in his own way been almost as busy in Cairo itself. In his quarto-size diary his description of the town fills no less than 149 pages, in addition to the numerous plates he had engraved from his own and Baurenfeind’s drawings. Niebuhr began his investigations by compiling a detailed map of the town; he described its different quarters, its mosques and all its large squares; he gave an account of the water supply from the Nile, and the methods used for filtering the water; he described the inhabitants of the city, their manners and customs, their clothing, form of government and their trades—the last being specified very carefully, with long lists of imports and exports. There were exhaustive sections on water machines (sakiyas), mills, oil-presses, agricultural implements, musical instruments, sal-ammoniac, and all the descriptions are accompanied by clear and comprehensive working drawings, among which are sketches of a piece of equipment which Niebuhr called “a chicken stove,” and which in principle corresponds to our incubator. Even the various games of the Egyptians were the object of profound study; he says that “it is not of the greatest importance to know how the inhabitants of the Orient spend their leisure hours; but as these little games current among the people are generally very ancient, they might perhaps cast some light on various expressions used by ancient authors”—which was precisely what Professor Michaelis had thought and said.
Niebuhr came very close in these months to answering the complex questions which the German professor had put concerning the practice of circumcision among the Arabs. This he did partly by talking to Arab scholars, but also by experiences of a more direct nature. One visit to a distinguished Arab which Niebuhr paid together with Forsskål and Baurenfeind became a memorable experience. We may allow Niebuhr himself to report: “Whilst we were one day visiting a rather distinguished Arab of Cairo at his country estate, six or seven miles outside the town, Herr Forsskål and Herr Baurenfeind expressed the wish to see and to draw a young girl who had been circumcised. Our host immediately gave orders that a young peasant girl of eighteen years old should be brought in, and he allowed them to see everything that they wanted to see. In the presence of various Turkish servants, our artists drew the whole thing from nature, but with a trembling hand because he feared unpleasant repercussions from the Mohammedans. But as the master of the house was our friend, none of them dared make any objection.”
Carsten Niebuhr’s diagrams of the mechanism that was used for irrigation of the Egyptian fields, the so-called sakiya
Carsten Niebuhr’s outstanding achievement during his stay in Cairo came about in his capacity of surveyor. The Danish naval officer F. L. Norden, mentioned earlier, had furnished his great work on Egypt and Nubia with a detailed map of the Nile from the second cataract as far as Cairo; but he had omitted the at least equally important stretch from Cairo to the Mediterranean, where the river splits into two main streams, the one with its mouth at Damietta, the other at Rosetta. Because of the extreme density of population in these districts, and because of the consequently large number of small towns, a map of this part of the Nile was almost as complicated a task as the mapping of the river as far as the second cataract. This was the task that Niebuhr now undertook. Already on his way up he had carefully entered all the small towns from Rosetta to Cairo on a preliminary sketch map; but he had not yet looked at the second of the two main streams of the river, the stretch from Cairo to Damietta. From 30th April until 15th May, 1762, together with Baurenfeind and two Turkish servants, he took a river journey to Damietta and back again. At all the larger towns he took readings of the sun’s altitude with his astrolabe, a rewarding task in that flat landscape where almost everywhere the true horizon could be determined with considerable exactitude. Moreover, he used his compass to determine the direction of the Nile at each of the towns they passed through; and this despite the fact that he had to give up using his instruments inside the town, where invariably they attracted an angry crowd who believed he was practising witchcraft. Instead of surveying the streets and squares of these towns by taking careful bearings and compass readings, he had patiently to pace the main street and its surroundings and to note down the number of paces, so that from these data he could later work out his plan.
On the basis of these investigations Niebuhr succeeded in identifying no less than 174 towns between Cairo and Damietta, and 135 towns between Cairo and Rosetta. Of every one of the towns he recorded the name in both Arabic and in European characters, together with the compass bearing of the Nile at that particular place. While he was working on this map—the first of his many large-scale maps—he came to adopt a procedure based on a simple principle; this principle he later elaborated, but already here in the initial stages it was, by its sheer simplicity and originality, of vital importance for the expedition. Indeed, so long as it adhered to this principle it prospered; and whenever it abandoned this principle, it suffered disaster.
Niebuhr, together with von Gähler, had already realised in Constantinople how necessary it was for the members of the expedition to travel in Arabic dress, something which at that time was most unusual for Europeans in the Orient. In Cairo he became convinced that it was not sufficient merely to go dressed as an Arab and to be able to speak Arabic; they must also be able to live in the manner of the Arabs, eat the foods the Arabs eat, live in their houses, sleep as they do on mats of straw. Only in this way would it be possible to have an opportunity of making real contact with them and of avoiding the diseases that would inevitably strike them down if they attempted to continue living the European life in this totally different environment.
This also meant in practice that the members of the expedition must be prepared to adjust themselves to the life of the ordinary people, and in so doing renounce those privileges they might have enjoyed from their letters of introduction to prominent men. Wealth sets one at a distance; and in the poverty-stricken Arab towns it looked all too strange and conspicuous. Inde
ed, even before Niebuhr left on his trip to Damietta, he had come to see the dubious value of such privileges when translated into practical and concrete terms. He mentions how, when he needed a native helper, he preferred to approach an ordinary merchant and ask him to provide somebody, rather than have a man recommended by some important official personage. “When a man of this kind hears he has been recommended by some prominent person, he at once imagines that he has struck it rich. From that moment on, he will neglect no opportunity of increasing the money due to him, or of trying to make himself indispensable. In order properly to display his ardour, he pretends that every step taken is fraught with danger, even when there is absolutely nothing to fear. In such circumstances I have always found it best to apply to honest native traders, for they know pretty well as a rule whether there is anything to be feared in such and such a district, or not. Moreover, they have their own boatmen and camel leaders, who attach more importance to being on good terms with the trader on whom they depend than they do with some other official person from whom they can only rarely expect anything.” Niebuhr chose his guides from among ordinary people, just as he also preferred to seek his information from “poor students, who are always pleased to receive a little gift,” instead of applying to influential people “who have more important things to occupy them, and who are moreover too proud to want to talk for hours with a Christian.”
Niebuhr’s remarks bear witness to his realistic outlook, an outlook without preconceptions or prejudice. Nobody could be less presumptuous. In the year 1762, when the concept of colonial expansion was still thought of as implying only a question of which European country was to control these foreign peoples, he discovered that the only way to gain the confidence of such people was to have renounced one’s own self, to have acquired their language and their dress, and to have adopted their modest way of life. These ideas can scarcely be claimed to have dominated the minds of subsequent generations. The last two hundred years in Asia and Africa have been based on precisely opposite principles.
Arabia Felix Page 11
