Armchair travels with Florence

By Jill Kamil
I am sure I am not alone in imagining Florence Nightingale as a rather plain, dull but dedicated nurse, too busy attending the wounded in the Crimean War to take time off for herself. Well, as her letters make clear, she had more to her bow than that.
This determined young woman who fought for seminal changes in health care and sanitation codes, and who has created a place in the still chauvinistic male world of the 19th century for the educated nurse, was far from plain. She was an attractive, intelligent, well-read young woman and, moreover, one of the earliest and more observant leisure travellers in Egypt.
She came in the winter of 1849-50, and was one of the first women to make a journey up the Nile. In those days there were no floating hotels, and her trip took five months, a rather daunting experience for a young woman of only 29 years old.
The group tours characteristic of today bring crowds of visitors queuing up to enter monuments. Tour guides bemoan the fact that the crush prevents their giving lectures inside the tombs, and they are obliged to describe the wall decorations in front of three-dimensional maps and plans outside, thus limiting their visual impact. Far more relaxing is to be an armchair traveller of the past.
I picked the paperback edition of Letters from Egypt, published by Gaddis & Company in Luxor, and headed for the Maadi Yacht Club. I chose a seat -- a bamboo chair with arms, which was the nearest I could find to an armchair -- put my feet on the stone ledge overlooking the Nile, watched the white sails of passing feluccas against the clear blue winter sky, and then gave myself over to Florence Nightingale's descriptions.
"We spent many days among the tombs of the Mameluke Sultans," she wrote. "So wild, so dreary, so beautiful, so deadly fair, as they raise their spirit-like heads in the desert, you become an afreet yourself wandering among them!"
Today, the tombs of the sultans are a part of greater Cairo. The complex of Sultan Qalawun, the monuments of El-Nasir Mohamed and the minarets of countless Islamic monuments rise above the crowded mediaeval city where once they were more isolated. The magical aura of the past has assuredly disappeared, even while the historical importance of the monuments remains.
I flipped some pages:
"In the evening we went to Karnak; the night was dark, the moon had betrayed us. No one can describe the desolation of riding over the desert by night! We could see little. All I know is, that one man held me on behind, while another led my ass; and the blasts of sand in your face, though there was no breath of wind, were the only thing stirring beside ourselves, and the howling of the wild dogs all around us!. In this silent procession we followed one behind the other for about a mile and a half till we passed under palm trees; and a little farther, a gleam of moonlight shining out, we saw on either side a ghostly avenue, gigantic sitting sphinxes, with their faces toward us, nearly as close as they could be placed, but most of them headless, limbless, or overthrown. The intellectual and physical force (there typified) lay in the dust. Its body, that is, lay there, -- its spirit had vivified the world!"
Today there is no riding about in the desert around Luxor at night. Nor is there the kind of privacy that Florence Nightingale experienced. Perhaps it is only in the heat of summer, when most travellers prefer to escape to the cool of air-conditioned hotels and swimming pools, that an adventurous traveller might persuade a local resident to hire a donkey and accompany him or her along the road that once linked Luxor and Karnak temples, along all that remains of that "ghostly avenue" of sphinxes that once linked them.
Florence's long, descriptive letters to her family tell of a life now vanished. She gives her views on the country, its history and its people. "That evening we left Osyoot (Asyut), with a splendid wind, we ran aground several times. The fact was, that the Modeer (Mudir), who came to look at us, was so pleased with our boat (and it is indeed the best on the river, we have seen none at all like it), that he sent his four carpenters to measure it, which they did with their hands, and having carefully measured one side measured the other too: they admired the boat aloud.
"Now you know you must not admire anything among Mahometans, except by a pious ejaculation," Florence elaborated. "You must not say to a mother, 'What a pretty child!' but must say, 'Mashallah', or what God wills ... you may not praise the thing, but the Creator! and if you don't, you draw upon the thing the 'evil eye'... Now the carpenters had admired our boat, and the consequence was, that we ran aground perpetually."
Florence Nightingale's letters were edited and privately printed by her sister Parthenope in 1854, and were circulated in 1854, the year in which she went to the Crimea. As I read her sensitive, authoritative words, illustrated in this publication of her Letters with the splendid landscapes of David Roberts; as, moreover, I handled the book, exquisite in design and binding; and as I read the words in this diminutive 19 by 22 cm publication, I knew why I had relegated to a high shelf a whole pile of recently published bulky editions of Egypt: The Complete Pyramids, The Complete Tutankhamon, The Complete Valley of the Kings, all of which might be "complete" in historical and archaeological detail but which lack spirit, and placed Florence's A Journey on the Nile in place of honour on my coffee table.
As editor of the publication, Anthony Sattin, the writer and journalist who compiled Letters from Egypt' A Journey on the Nile. 1849-1850 points out: "Less than thirty years had passed since Champollion had established the principles for reading hieroglyphics and the spelling of place names and of the names of ancient gods and pharaohs had yet to be standardised." Indeed, some of Florence Nightingale's place names are notable for their originality but phonetic accuracy: Osyoot is Asyut, and Ipsamboul is, of course, Abu Simbel.
Sattin writes in his Introduction: "For a traveller to appreciate a visit to the Nile sites in the era before guided tours and package holidays, a fair amount of background reading was necessary ... Florence arrived extremely well prepared for Egypt, having consulted the Prussian ambassador to London, Baron Bunsen, who was an Arabic scholar and whose five-volume Egypt's Place in Universal History was published between 1848 and 1859."
By this time I had consumed two glasses of fresh lemon juice. A slight wind had arisen, and the great golden orb of the sun was sinking into the haze of the horizon. But there was still light enough for me to read Florence's comments about the "wonderful race of men, the Egyptian priesthood:
"...the great difference between their priesthood and ours, and the way to define it, seems to be, not that the priesthood had got hold of all the offices political, legal, religious, scientific, and administrative, but that all knowledge and science being holy, the profession of any science made the priest. It was a national state of mind, of which we can have hardly any idea. Religion and law were its two characteristics. It was not as if a great and ambitious body had by degrees worked itself into all the power and influence of the country; it was as if the power and influence of knowledge, being sacred, made their possessions sacred. It was a part of religion as much to take care of your health as to go and sacrifice in a temple, therefore the doctor was as much as priest, or a sacred character, as the Hierophant or the Sacrificer. The priest was not the doctor or the lawyer, but the doctor or the lawyer was a priest."
What wonderful observations. I would that our tour guides could come up some such. I wish that visitors today had the time to ride to Dendera on a donkey, as had Florence. Such a pity that Badrashein and Memphis are no longer the magical places described in her Letters and not the run-down and neglected areas they are today (with the sole exception of the Museum at Mit Rahina). And I would that ... O yes, let me say it ... I would that Thomas Cook and Son had never started running package tours from London to steamers on the Nile, and thus set a fashion that has snowballed into today's mass tourism, where people are fatigued merely getting from one place to another, and where they crowd into monuments, lean against walls, and slowly contribute to the deterioration of the wonderful reliefs they have come to see.
Oh for the good old days!
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