Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (32 page)

Her: ‘He tried to seduce me!’

Him: ‘Are you sure?’

Her: ‘Sure?’

Him: ‘Well. He’s a man.’

Her: ‘Is that all you can say? He tried to force me.’

Him: ‘All right. He’s a monster!’

Her: ‘I said as much. I said I would never be unfaithful. Whatever happened.’

Him: ‘What did he say? Did he mention me?’

Her: ‘No.’

Him: ‘Not at all?’

Her: ‘No. But what about your prospects? Your promotion? I feel bad.’

Him: ‘To hell with them. We will return to France and live as paupers. With our honour intact.’

Her: ‘That is what I said to him exactly!’

Him: ‘You did?’

Her: ‘And I said if you found out you would most likely ask for satisfaction . . .’

Him: ‘You suggested to the commander of the army in Egypt that I would challenge him to a duel?’

Her: ‘Yes, I did.’

At this point Lieutenant Fourès probably leant forward, cradled his head in his arms and whimpered for mercy.

Bonaparte was touched by her innocence but kept up the attack. A stream of love letters and fine gifts found their way to her. Many more heated conversations must have followed in the Fourès household. After a lengthy siege, Pauline Fourès relented and became Napoleon’s mistress.

7
•
The stone

‘The land of my fathers!’ said the louse remaining on the bald head
.
Sudanese proverb

Meanwhile at the very end of the Nile, in the town of Rashid on the right-hand channel that drains with little ceremony into the Mediterranean, the influence of Napoleon was being felt. In Rashid, better known to us as Rosetta, the local Turkish fort, built in the fifteenth century, was being improved and better fortified. All kinds of stone, any that could be found lying around, was used to strengthen walls. Recycling the stone of former buildings had always happened in Egypt. Memphis, it is said, was used to build Roman Cairo; and the cover stones of the Pyramids provided Islamic Cairo with some of its best stone. In the ground of Rosetta a stone with three kinds of script was about to be rammed into the wall of the fort when a young lieutenant of engineers noted its singular appearance. He reported it quite casually to his commanding officer, who knew at once its importance and sent it to Cairo strapped to the back of a camel (the roads were generally too poor for carts, though Napoleon improved them, of course). One of Napoleon’s 167
savants
, the men who had accompanied the invader to study every aspect of Egypt (so igniting the new subject of Egyptology), Michel Ange Lancret, studied it in detail as the mysterious rock, a piece of diorite (it was thought later to be basalt, a mistake made because of the wax coating it was soon to receive), lay in state in a palace in the Ezbekiya area of Cairo.

Let’s muse on that side of Napoleon for a moment and get back to the stone later. Have there been any other invaders in history who insisted on studying the people and place they were invading? Though some argue that the effect of Napoleon was purely destructive, his desire for knowledge, for its beneficial increase, cannot be questioned. Most invader types think they know it all already. Cromwell wasn’t about to start learning Gaelic when he started rampaging round Ireland. Hitler didn’t go into the Ukraine with a microscope and a butterfly net. The only ones who did, that spring readily to mind, were those other Nile invaders the Arabs, who brought with them a culture that would, through the translation of Aristotle and a new openness in enquiry, kick-start the Renaissance. Interestingly it was an Arab scholar
who, nearly a thousand years before the Rosetta Stone was decoded by a Frenchman, would discover the meaning of the majority of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, knowledge that would be lost in the West until the nineteenth century.

By bringing his
savants
, it was almost as if Napoleon sensed that the Nile required more respect than a mere ragtag invasion. His interest is not commercial, it is military – he wishes to conquer the East and strike at England’s power in India. His eye is on glory. But to justify such action he needed also to increase knowledge. In the same way, an explorer justifies his love of adventure by bringing back news and scientific data from places that are dangerous to visit. Perhaps it is no surprise that Napoleon’s scholarly invasion of the Nile should have had far more lasting effect than his military one. The desire to control, it seems, always defeats itself in some way, whereas the desire to understand can lead to greater alignment with events and with nature, ensuring prolonged usefulness.

Napoleon’s scholar who first saw the stone recovered at Rosetta knew it was extraordinary. It was decided that the thing would be best shipped to France to be studied in the Academy.

8
•
The great Cairo balloon fiasco

The fool thinks that wherever he sleeps is home
. Egyptian proverb

The Rosetta Stone was fated, though, to move in a mysterious way. Part of it involved Nicolas-Jacques Conté, the inventor of the modern pencil, the Conté crayon, and several rather unsuccessful balloons.

Any modern visitor to Luxor has the chance to see the Nile and the fabulous temples from the privileged position of a balloon, usually at sunrise. These are giant hot-air machines, with a booster pack of propane roaring their blue flames upwards from within the twenty-five-person basket. From up there the temples look like smashed cake decorations, lightly dusted with corrosive sand. Your fellow passengers get slightly hilarious, perhaps anticipating the promised cold Luxor beer at the end of the flight. Some, like me, might be hiding their nerves – in 2009 one of these monsters hit a mobile-phone mast and crashed, seriously injuring sixteen people. When the burners
are switched off the silence is palpable. Gradually, as the novelty wears off, sound creeps to your ears; you notice the rustle and creak of the cables, the squeak of the canopy above. Someone asks if they can smoke – as a joke – and they are told it’s fine, go ahead: bluff called, no one tries it.

As the sun rises it cracks the horizon, like some elemental wink, and floods everywhere with light and warmth. You cannot miss the Nile, as the fast-moving sunlight reveals its perfectly looped bends. The intense green band of palm trees higher up on the west bank contrasts with bright yellow sand and the faint grey-green of the river. It looks like a loose rope that has been half buried in nature, needs tightening, pulling clear of the enfolding ground. Thankfully the balloon doesn’t burst. Even before the 2009 accident, they haven’t all been as safe. The very first balloon attempt was at the hands of Conté, army officer, favourite of Napoleon, artist, inventor and the man who covered the Rosetta Stone in wax. This was after Napoleon and Pauline had made a special visit to see it.

Napoleon said of Conté, ‘he is a universal man, with taste, understanding and genius, capable of creating the arts of France in the middle of the Arabian Desert’. Conté had dabbled in both hydrogen and hot-air balloons in France. He was eager in Egypt to overawe the locals with the magic of the occident. Napoleon had already tried this with his
savant
Claude Berthollet, who demonstrated the latest experiments in magnetism and chemistry to a group of Islamic scholars. They remained impressively unimpressed. When they were asked for their comments, Sheikh El-Bekri said, ‘Can he make me be in Morocco and here at the same time?’ Berthollet replied that he couldn’t. ‘Oh, then, he is not even half a sorcerer!’

The balloon, it was intended, should restore the wow factor to French techno-superiority. Conté worked day and night to get his apparatus ready, though he was distracted by another project that Napoleon had pressed upon him: to produce an exact copy of the script on the Rosetta Stone. Conté was unsure how to do this and focused instead on what he did know about – balloons. He ordered the printing of notices publicising the event. They read: ‘On Friday 21st we intend to fly a vessel (balloon) over al-Ezbekiya lake by means of a device belonging to the French people.’

On the appointed day in front of 100,000 people in Ezbekiya Place the contraption was readied. The envelope of the balloon Conté was
extremely proud of – he had arranged for it to be made in red, white and blue by the skilled tailors who worked in the tent bazaar in Cairo. This envelope was held open by the use of a stout pole. Suspended beneath was a cylindrical basket containing a large cauldron filled with oil. From this a giant wick extended. With much hurrahing and noise of trumpets the wick was lit.

Abd al-Rahman Al-Jabarti, the Arab scholar who chronicled Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, wrote, ‘The smoke sought to rise to its centre but finding no escape, so it drew the apparatus aloft with itself. They cut the ropes and it soared into the air . . . then it began to sail with the wind for a very little while.’

But disaster was at hand. Just as an earlier experiment had led to a balloon catching fire in the desert, this time the heat from the huge wick had burned through the ropes securing it in place. Al-Jabarti continued, ‘the bowl fell with the wick and the cloth sail followed suit. The French were embarrassed by its fall. Their claim that this apparatus is like a vessel in which people sit and travel to other countries in order to discover news and other falsifications did not appear to be true. On the contrary it is like the kites which household servants build for festivals and other happy occasions.’

Another own goal for the boastful Gauls.

Conté turned his attention to the mysterious stone and how to record its message most perfectly. His experience of printing made it obvious – the stone, with its graven words and images, could be used as a printing block. Daubed in wax (which remained until 1999 when it was finally cleaned up), the stone was set in a clever invention of the irrepressible Conté. Using the great weight of the stone (over fifteen hundredweight), he set it in a frame so that it could be tilted on to a sheet of paper. Inking the stone with a roller, the weight pressed down on the paper causing an image to be printed. Large numbers of copies were made and distributed, enabling anyone to have a go at cracking the secret of the stone.

The Rosetta Stone was famous – and was shifted to Alexandria to be shipped to France at the first opportunity.

9
•
How the British got the Rosetta Stone

‘There is no hill we did not fart at,’ said the donkeys
. Ethiopian proverb

It is well attested that Napoleon, coming from Corsica, which the British under Nelson invaded in 1794, had, in his youth, wished to join the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy was then, as it would remain, despite Napoleon’s efforts, the greatest naval force in the world. Did he apply? It seems he petitioned an uncle to try and get him some kind of introduction. But after a few weeks at military school he saw that the future was in artillery and his naval ambitions waned.

If Napoleon had joined the Royal Navy the world would have been saved a lot of bother. Maybe he would have served under Nelson instead of fighting him. But he didn’t, and so these two mighty warriors were destined to meet in Egypt – where else? But what if the real and lasting result was not that France lost and England won – round one at least – but that incidentally Britain got hold of the Rosetta Stone by beating the French? That the main thing of value going on then and there was not all the bloodshed and rallying of ships but a simple transfer of booty? Let’s pretend so anyway.

The British dominated the Atlantic but hadn’t entered the Mediterranean in a year, owing to French supremacy there. Once word escaped that Napoleon had invaded Egypt their fleet swept through Gibraltar’s straits looking for action.

It wasn’t easy to find the French. Nelson stopped in Sicily and even did a little sightseeing at Syracuse. (After the impending battle he would meet here for the first time Lady Hamilton, wife of the English Ambassador, later establishing a ménage à trois with them.) Even when they found the French and were hastening to do battle before the sun set, Nelson dined well with his officers. The French, meanwhile, were dining a little too well. They were still aboard Admiral Brueys’ flagship at a briefing dinner when the British hove into view.

Where are we? At the extreme left-hand exit of the Nile just before Alexandria. But in the sea, not the river. The French fleet had pole position – defending any ingress into Egypt and up the Nile. Nelson, who did not realise that his sole purpose here was to capture a stone with a bit of ancient scribble gouged into it, drew closer and closer to the moored French fleet.

Many of the French were on land and sailors had to be parcelled out to man boats they usually did not serve aboard. The British slowed to fix spring anchors, a device to help them moor alongside French vessels and blast the hell out of them. Much has been made of the English decision to get between the French ships and the land, Nelson and his officers reasoning that there must be enough space to manoeuvre, otherwise they would not have moored there. But it seems this tactic was not decisive; that was almost certainly the element of surprise and Nelson’s ability to press home an attack fiercely.

The Reverend Cooper Willyams was the chaplain aboard HMS
Swift-sure
and he recorded his experience of the battle:

The British plan was to fire at night from two sides on the disoriented French. Nelson ordered each ship to carry four lights at its crosstrees, and a white ensign illuminated by an oil lamp hung in its midst. This would serve for recognition. By such arrangements the British were able to avoid shooting each other while pouring shot into the anchored French fleet.