Napoleon in Egypt (50 page)

The French had never seen such beasts before. Denon described how “we saw something long and brown between a number of ducks. It was a crocodile, around fifteen or eighteen feet long, asleep. Someone fired a rifle at it, whereupon it slowly slid into the water, and then came out again a few minutes later.”
¹¹
Soon they came across even larger crocodiles: Denon saw one twenty-eight feet long, and records that “several trustworthy officers” even claimed to have seen one forty feet long, which must have been a truly massive beast.
^*
12

+++++++++

By January 26, the French were approaching Thebes. According to Denon: “At nine o’clock in the morning, rounding the part of a range of mountains that formed a promontory, we suddenly saw spread out before us, in all its glory, the sight of ancient Thebes, the ‘city of a hundred gates’ described by Homer.”
¹³
Desvernois describes what happened next: “At the sight of these gigantic ruins, at the vast sweep of ancient stones and remains which occupied such a great place in the history of antiquity, all the columns of the French division resounded with applause. The soldiers spontaneously lined themselves up in their ranks and presented arms to the sound of the drums and the playing of the military bands.”
¹⁴
Denon was filled with patriotic pride at this demonstration: “The feelings which I experienced in the presence of such great monuments, and the electrifying sight of an army of soldiers of such civilized sensibility, made me overjoyed to be their companion, and rejoice in being French.”
¹⁵
On the foreshore, ancient temples and colossal human figures rose amongst the stones, whilst across the river in the sunlight stood the magnificent temples of Karnak and Luxor, with two obelisks standing over seventy feet high, covered in hieroglyphics. It was sights such as these which led Denon to conclude, in awe: “The Greeks invented nothing.”
¹⁶

Besides recording these sights with pencil and sketchpad, Denon was also beginning to speculate about their significance. He became intrigued by the lines of hieroglyphs which adorned so many of the temples. The French officers had asked Moallam Jacob if he knew how to decipher them, but he was forced to plead ignorance: they bore no relation to any Coptic or Arabic script that he knew. Some of the more knowledgeable officers thought they bore a resemblance to Oriental pictograms, and speculated that the hieroglyphs might be an early form of Chinese. But in reality, the meaning of the language of the hieroglyphs had by now been lost, forgotten for over one and a half millennia.

During the centuries after the time of the pharaohs, several cults in Egypt had continued to worship the ancient gods in temples whose walls were covered in hieroglyphs. But in the fourth century
AD
the fanatical Christians of Alexandria had sacked most of these, and in 391 the Roman emperor Theodosius I decreed that all pagan temples should be closed. By now only a few temples dedicated to the ancient gods remained, but the closing of these meant that those who had been able to read the hieroglyphs no longer passed on their knowledge. Within just a few years a tradition that had lasted for over 3,000 years suddenly vanished into oblivion.

After sketching the temples at Thebes, Denon joined Desaix and they rode off to explore the hinterland, eventually coming to “the city of the dead,” the Necropolis, where large galleries of ancient tombs were carved deep into the face of the rock: “I entered these on horseback with Desaix, believing that these dark recesses could only be a sanctuary of peace and silence; but scarcely had we entered into the shadow of the galleries than we were assailed with javelins and stones by an unseen enemy.”
¹⁷
Denon and Desaix beat a hasty retreat: the tombs were the home of savage troglodytes who lived a fugitive existence beyond the law. Next morning, before they set off on their march once more, Denon found time to sketch the scattered stones of a large fallen statue, which he thought might have been Ozymandias—the ancient Greek name for Rameses II.

Despite being in charge of a full-scale military campaign, Desaix took a surprisingly deep interest in the ancient ruins along their way. In his report to Napoleon, written on the very day he arrived at Thebes, he described the site: “There are two obelisks, of incomparable size and workmanship. . . . Transported to Paris, they would cause a sensation!”
^*
18
The soldiers too took an interest in these ruins, and some carved their names into the walls of the temples. They were not the first to attempt this method of recording their passing presence, and were in fact inspired by the example of soldiers who had preceded them into this region some 1,500 years previously. As a result, one can now read on these temples beside the Nile the names of French soldiers such as “A. Jacquet,” “Louis Luneau” and “Louis Guibourg” carved alongside “Julius Tenax,” “Valerius Priscus” and “‘Quintus Viator,” men of the Roman legion that penetrated into Upper Egypt in the first century
AD.

Yet most of the French soldiers found better things to occupy their time during their all too brief halts. To begin with, only a few would venture into the Nile to bathe themselves and wash out their sweat-encrusted uniforms. But when it was realized that the crocodiles were not so fearsome as they appeared—as long as they were not disturbed or approached too closely—many of the men took advantage of the cool waters of the river after their long marches, which often covered as much as thirty-five miles in a day. Meanwhile others would go scavenging for wood and brush for fires to warm themselves against the chill of the night and to cook whatever food was available. In the manner of the times, Desaix’s division lived off the land through which it passed, purchasing or simply requisitioning supplies at local markets and in the villages. The local population soon learned to flee, taking their livestock with them. Regiments would often march with strings of cattle and goats bringing up their rear, but with over 3,000 mouths to feed each day, provisions were frequently in short supply. As a result, the men sometimes went without food after a hard day’s march, and were occasionally left starving. They would then take matters into their own hands, as in this harrowing scene described by Denon:

A soldier emerged from a hovel, leading after him a goat which he had taken; he was followed by an old man clutching two infants at his chest. He placed them on the ground, fell to his knees, and without uttering a word he revealed by his torrent of tears that the children were going to die if the goat was taken away from them. But blind and pressing need was not stopped by this heartrending scene and the goat already had its throat slit.
¹⁹

Others, however, showed mercy. Denon recorded how at the very same moment, another soldier came on the scene

carrying in his arms another child that a mother, in flight before us, had obviously abandoned in the desert. In spite of the weight with which he was loaded down, his rucksack, his rifle, his ammunition belt, and the exhaustion of four days’ forced march, the need to save this unfortunate little creature had made him carefully pick it up and carry it for six miles in his arms. . . . While I had been horrified to see hunger reduce a fellow human being to the savagery of a wild beast, this other soldier soothed my distress, returning me to humanity.

By now Denon had begun to suffer from ophthalmia, his eyes stinging, oozing tears of pus. Yet unlike many of his fellow sufferers, he appears to have retained a certain clarity of vision, if his sketches are anything to judge by—though later travelers would point out that they contained a number of mistakes, particularly in his recording of hieroglyphics. Most have put this down to the speed at which he was forced to work, as well as the occasional cavalier disregard for detail, but if he was suffering from ophthalmia this may well account for some of his lapses.

Meanwhile Desaix’s division continued on its rapid march south to the far limits of Egyptian territory, quickly making ground on Murad Bey. At Esna, Desaix discovered that Murad Bey had only left the previous night, and twenty miles upriver at Edfu, the French even caught sight of 200 Mamelukes and their baggage train disappearing into the hinterland across on the eastern shore of the Nile.

But beyond Edfu, conditions deteriorated as Desaix embarked upon a rapid march inland in a desperate attempt to cut off Murad Bey’s retreat. Denon described how “on the 30th we departed at dawn. After marching for an hour through cultivated land we entered mountains composed of crumbling slate, sandstone, white and rose-colored quartz, brown pebbles and a few pieces of white coral. After five hours of marching through the desert, their boots torn to pieces, the soldiers wrapped around their feet whatever cloth they had; they were devoured by raging thirst.”
²⁰
Eventally Desaix was forced to return to the Nile, where they arrived at Taudi to find that “the Mamelukes had just aban doned the village, leaving their plates, dishes, even the soup they had prepared, which they were going to eat as soon as the sun had set, for this was the month of Ramadan, during which . . . even soldiers do not eat while the sun is above the horizon.”

By this stage the plentiful verdant regions were behind them, and even the riverbanks themselves were becoming increasingly arid, with only the occasional wretched village containing a few dilapidated mud huts, some empty earthenware storage pots and a few chickens. This region had an entirely new feel to it, as Denon noticed:

The families of Arab-cultivators on the border of the desert . . . present an image of that tranquil monotony which is never disturbed by the shock of a single novealty, of that calm which leaves a length of time between each event of life, of that quiet, where every thing succeeds peaceably in the soul, where little by little an emotion becomes a sentiment, or a habitude of principle, where, in a word, the lightest impression is analyzed; and this to the degree, that, in conversing with this description of men one is altogether astonished to find in them the most nicest distinction [
sic
], and the most delicate sentiment, by the side of the most absolute ignorance.
²¹

The French trudged forward beneath the relentless sun, their columns now accompanied by flocks of vultures which wheeled in the cloudless blue sky overhead. As they marched across the sandy valleys, almost the only signs of life on the ground were the occasional tracks of gazelles, which fed on what little vegetation there was by the river, and then hid in the vast silence of the desert. But as Denon grimly observed: “The tracks of these elegant and frail creatures were almost always followed by the footsteps of a beast of prey.”
²²

As the French doggedly pressed on over the last stages of their march to the borders of Egypt, a number now began succumbing to the hideous heat: “It boiled our blood. . . . Nothing is as frightful as this death: the victim is suddenly surprised with a disorder of his heart and no assistance can save him from the faintings that succeed.”
²³
Finally, on February 1 they crossed to the eastern bank of the Nile to reach Aswan (ancient Syene), having covered over 250 miles of the most inhospitable terrain in just ten days. They were now almost 600 miles from Cairo, at the cataracts that marked the southern edge of Egypt. General Belliard stood high on the hillside above the river, watching his troops embarking:

Above the camp, on the promontory of the western mountains, is a view, from which one can see to the west an immense desert, and to the east the awe-inspiring spectacle of the steeply sloping rocks over which spill the waters of the Nile. They seem to indicate that here are the limits of the civilized world. Nature seems to be telling one:
Stop, go no further
. To the west is Elephantine Island, contrasting its greenery and clumps of palm trees against the arid mountains which surround it; to the east are the ruins of ancient Syene.
²⁴

Desvernois paints an equally vivid picture: “The famous cataracts of the Nile are simply whirlpools formed by the waters of the Nile flowing over rocks and producing a number of powerful small cascades scarcely a few inches high; this occurs when the course of the Nile is contained between the barren rocks of the rising mountains.”
²⁵
Only the pernickety Savary proved less impressed, finding Aswan “no more than a collection of little mud-brick houses . . . surrounded by sand . . . which would not exist if it had not been a halting post for the caravans passing up the Nile into Egypt and a military outpost of the Roman Empire.”
²⁶
And this was not all: “One of the inconveniences of such regions is that of being devoured by vermin, which even the greatest attention to personal hygiene does not always get rid of. We had been told that in the tropics they perished in the excessive heat; but this was just a fairy tale—here they multiplied to an intolerable degree, but the army just had to put up with this latest pestilence.”

Below the cataracts the French discovered fifty river craft laden with baggage which the Mamelukes had abandoned. They had fled Aswan two days before Desaix’s arrival and crossed into Sudan, dispersing into the Nubian desert. The French now set about establishing them selves in Aswan, where the inhabitants were largely Nubians, black Africans rather than lighter-skinned Egyptians. The new conquerors made themselves at home in this outpost in characteristic fashion. “An inscription of the French tricouleur was carved into the granite on the highest rock above the Cataracts and saluted by several rounds of musket-fire, marking our taking posssession of all of Upper Egypt, and its furthest point, where like the Romans the French had carried their arms to victory.”
²⁷
As ever, the soldiers were quick to follow suit, adding such inscriptions as: “Dupraville chaceur [
sic
] de la 21 [i.e. 21st Demi-brigade, Belliard’s command] 1799”; “J. N. Cuvillies. Chasseurs 21. Victory or Death.”
²⁸
Unfortunately, in this case it must have been the latter, for sometime afterward his colleagues carved a black cross beside his inscription.