Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (40 page)

Like all intellectuals Colet was jealous of physical charms that trumped intellectual ones. Not that she hadn’t been beautiful in her
day, but a life spent sitting around reading books doesn’t develop the body along the same lines that dancing and fornicating do. Flaubert’s description of Kuchuk Hanem emphasises her broad shoulders, her powerful head and, yes, her beautiful throat that smelled of sweet turpentine.

The journey up the Nile was exactly what Colet had expected. She wrote in her diary that ‘The Nile surpasses all photographs but only if you are holding your hat – it is very breezy.’ She landed at Esna with one thing in mind, to find and speak with her lover’s ex-love.

There was no assistant courtesan with a decorated sheep to meet Louise as there had been for Flaubert and du Camp. The ship would stay a day and two nights. Most visitors were taken in
carrotta
, donkey carts, to see the ruins at Kom Ombo. Louise walked up the hill with a dragoman from the ship leading the way. All along he tried to convince her that there was no one of that name –
kuchuk hanem
only means ‘little lady’ he tried to explain. In the shadows, spies were watching.

On the second night she went back again. Again Kuchuk Hanem’s spies told her of this strange woman. In the end, for amusement, Kuchuk Hanem summoned the ageing French beauty to her spacious town house, built with the wealth of a thousand conquests. The women were waited upon by two giant Nubians, one with a single eye.

Hanem was older than Colet had imagined and was thick around the middle; she was watching Colet with her still powerful eyes. Her ankles were still beautiful though, her legs slim.

Yes, she was known as Kuchuk Hanem. What was that to the
howadji
? She made a joking aside to her maid, older than she, a woman with infinitely understanding eyes and grey tresses, a black gown and arms knotty and veined with work. Every element of opposition had been rolled out of her form, perhaps by centuries of despotic rule by men and Pharaohs alike, perhaps by her life as maid to Kuchuk Hanem and others.

Hanem’s eyes were huge, almond perfect, outlined in kohl enough to make each one still a precious object. She listened to the babbling story and understood it. Since Flaubert’s time she had mastered not only Italian but also fluent French. Colet was insistent about one thing: ‘Did she remember this man?’ She proffered the photograph. Kuchuk Hanem nodded. She recalled the two men – the first photographers ever to ascend the Nile. How could she not?

Now the delicate bit: what was he like, how had their night of love
been? Kuchuk Hanem roared with laughter: ‘There are no nights of love! Only days when we imagine such things. Your husband was a writer, you say. It was another good story for him to tell the world, no doubt.’

Yet when Colet left, Kuchuk Hanem checked again the photograph she had been given by Flaubert, who had implored Maxime du Camp to part with this keepsake, this memento of a few hours so many years ago.

10
•
The calling

The eye of the horse is the bit
. Egyptian proverb

Maxime du Camp photographed grand things, or people. He resisted the urge, though the site was venerated, to take a picture of a single young lady’s footprint preserved already some weeks in the sand by the infatuated tour guide in Luxor (this gives some idea of the increase in tourist volume since then: a tourist’s footprint would last about three minutes in most sites in Egypt now). It was the footprint of Florence Nightingale, who, as we have already noted, was travelling up the Nile at the same time as the louche novelist.

Florence was travelling without her parents, with friends of the family. The object was to see the great ruins of the Nile, and come to some decision about marriage. She had just turned down a proposal from one of England’s most eligible young bachelors, Richard Monckton Milnes – a wealthy poet, politician and friend of many in high office. He would become one of the closest friends of Richard Burton, Nile explorer and translator of
The Thousand and One Nights
(one of Florence’s favourite books and, in another translation, her preferred reading on her Nile voyage). Milnes had already made his own Nile cruise with a disreputable pal who brought along a hammer and chisel to remove any ‘hieroglyphic friezes’ that took his fancy. They also brought panes of glass to seal the windows of the
dahabiya
, or houseboat, against the cold and the mosquitoes (you can get both in winter along the Nile). Milnes returned to England with the soubriquet ‘the first Englishman to enter the harem’. It was not this that put Florence off. She loved the man. Nor was she concerned by his interest in the
perverse (though she may not have been fully aware of it). The reason she had declined his hand was because she felt she had a higher purpose, a purpose she would discover in Egypt on the Nile.

That Florence Nightingale narrowly missed marrying England’s most famous pornographer – as Milnes later became – is something only an inhabitant of an alternative universe can really relish. I mean, what if she had? Monckton Milnes was a gentleman and poet, a bon vivant, a great and generous entertainer, friend of the good and the great – what did it matter that he had a penchant for the Marquis de Sade, whose work occupied pride of place in his ‘Aphrodisiopolis’?

That Florence did not marry a porn collector naturally only happened because she took a Nile cruise. Of course it would have been bad for nursing, thousands would have suffered and possibly died, and she did have a calling to be a nurse. But still, something perverse draws me to the idea of Florence Nightingale spending her life with a man with the greatest collection of dirty pictures in Europe. A year after her return from Egypt she would still write, ‘I know that if I were to see him again . . . the very thought of doing so quite overcomes me. I know that since I refused him not one day has passed without my thinking of him.’

Though Florence had said no to Milnes before she left for Egypt, he had evidently given her time to think it over. Her Nile cruise with some family friends was to help her decide, or to get over him altogether. Instead it coalesced her long-held dreams and gave them the courage to speak for themselves. Almost any life of external achievement and prominence looks inevitable in hindsight, but with Florence Nightingale the effect is absurdly noticeable. She seems destined to stand up for women’s rights.

Her father William had been given the choice aged twenty-one of inheriting £100,000 – the equivalent of £7,000,000 today (the money went a lot further then because of the greater differentials in income) – as long as he changed his name from Shore to that of his childless benefactor great-uncle Peter Nightingale. The catch was: if William Nightingale had no male heir, then he had to ignore his daughters and send the money to the nearest male relative in turn.

Naturally he said yes, ditched Shore, became Nightingale and looked forward to fathering several sons. He had two daughters. One born in Naples who was called by the Greek name for that city, Parthenope, and one born in Florence who fortunately was called not Firenze but
Florence. Parthenope was Florence’s elder sister, and it’s just as well she had no ambitions of her own to be a nurse. Parthenope Nightingale doesn’t quite sound right (how about Napoli Nightingale?). Parthenope was often ill; in fact in their youth they both were, and Florence often nursed her. Parthenope would later write with the insight of sisterhood but not its sentiment, ‘I believe she has little or none of what is called charity or philanthropy, she is ambitious – very, and would like well enough to regenerate the world with a grand coup de main or some fine institution.’

The parallels with that other ambitious young person, Flaubert, travelling up the Nile at exactly the same time, has been drawn to our attention by the clever and diligent researches of the writer Anthony Sattin. Both were looking to make their mark in the world but neither had a clear idea until they had embarked on a pilgrimage up the Nile to its higher reaches. But whereas Flaubert is a clear-sighted hedonist, with all the ennui and sadness that relentless pleasure-seeking entails, Florence is a buoyant enthusiast, burning with a desire to serve and fuelled with a sense that God has plans for her. This is why her sister’s analysis gives a skewed impression. Florence, though ambitious, is not shallow or conventional. In fact the impression gained from her writing is of someone very likeable.

As the journey progressed Florence realised that momentous changes were occurring in her inner life. Much of this mutation was brought on by her appreciation of the unity of ancient Egyptian religion with Christian and Islamic spirituality. With her Unitarian Church background it was probably easier for her to make that leap of connection; nevertheless it reveals her as quite beyond the literalist Christians who saw nothing but barbarity in the ancient works. Florence wrote that the image of Ramses at prayer ‘taught me more than all the sermons I ever read’ about the relationship between the human and the divine. At Abu Simbel she noted in a letter, ‘I never thought I should have made a friend and a home for life of an Egyptian temple.’ She was not the first spiritually sensitive person to have thought thus: the Sufi mystic Dhun-Nun al-Misri was known to have lived some years in an ancient Egyptian temple despite being a Muslim; reputedly he could read hieroglyphics, there still being, in the eighth century, Coptic speakers who could interpret them.

Florence had learned five languages as a child – home-schooled by her father – and now she learned to read hieroglyphic inscriptions. Her
keenness is more invigorating than Flaubert’s likeable response at Abu Simbel – ‘How sick I am of temples.’ Florence experienced something of a revelation within the temple of Seti on the west bank of Luxor – she simply noted down, ‘God spoke to me again.’ At Philae, in the Osiris chamber, she buried her gold cross, to symbolise the fruitful union in her mind of Osiris and Jesus.

We live in an age of scepticism and mockery, which serves its useful purpose of dealing with hypocrites and charlatans, but not all things outside our current comfort zone are false. The conventional and easy pose of the honest sceptic blinds us to those whose naive language of revelation actually relates to real events. To say that Florence had been spoken to by God is merely to state that she received an impulse whose source was mysterious to her. But here we find an inner awakening of a conviction to help others and to sacrifice all hope of a conventional married life. Monckton Milnes hadn’t a chance.

But how could she turn these intuitions into action? She had long been keen on nursing the sick. Indeed during a flu epidemic in England when she was sixteen she had nursed her whole family and fifteen sick servants – it had been the ‘sole real activity’ of her youth. That she excelled at organising such things must have been obvious to all. But no gentlewoman ever became a nurse in the 1850s. A nurse in those days was a byword for drunkenness and promiscuity. Her parents would not even allow her to study the subject.

But back in England she did not give up. Her ambition drove her to write a novel entitled
Cassandra
, excoriating the absence of chances for women. Her later books on nursing proved she was an able writer, but this wonderful passage drawn from her Nile letters shows her talent: ‘The golden sand, north, south, east, west, except where the blue Nile flowed, strewn with bright purple granite stones, the black ridges of mountains east and west, volcanic rocks, gigantic jet-black wigwam-looking hills.’ Anyone who has visited south of Aswan will recognise this description at once.

Writing, however, was not enough. When it became obvious that she would pursue nursing at any cost her father settled upon her £500 per annum – more than enough for her to live an independent life without being married. Slyly he had outwitted the terms of his own sexist inheritance. Florence managed to study in Paris and Germany. A great inspiration was Elizabeth Blackwell, a young Englishwoman who found that the only place where a woman could study medicine was
at the New York State Medical School. When she arrived the all-male student body took a vote on whether she should be allowed to study with them. She was, and went on to graduate top of her class. In 1853 Florence was allowed to take up a job as superintendent of a nursing home for gentlewomen in London. A year later when the Crimean War broke out she travelled as part of a group of volunteer nurses. Her dedication was unharmed by her striking good looks, and she stood out as the ‘lady with the lamp’. Queen Victoria asked to meet her and Florence was able to make suggestions to alleviate the poor quality of English nursing.

Strangely, a hundred years later in Cairo, in the 1950s, nursing was still not considered among well-born Egyptian families to be a suitable profession for a young woman. The same charge of loose behaviour was levelled at the poorly paid Egyptian nurses. But the tide was turning – British-run military nursing academies brought the spirit of Florence Nightingale back to the Nile. My own mother-in-law had to battle the scepticism of her parents to become a trainee nurse in a military academy. She later rose to become the administrator of a hospital and told me that her greatest teachers were the British sisters at her first training college. No doubt the spirit of Florence united with Osiris would have approved.

11
•
The island

The love of the cat and mouse: they eat each other while playing
.
Nubian proverb

The stories of
The Thousand and One Nights
hang over the Nile quite as much as those of the Bible. The
Nights
, even before their definitive translation by Richard Burton, had seeped deep into the European conception of the East. In the East the stories are somewhat looked down upon. Not just because of the vulgar content of a few – the case of the masturbating hashish addict caught with an exposed erection in a Cairo bath house is hardly bedtime reading for the genteel – but because, the over-cultured and the religiously obsessed believed,
The Thousand and One Nights
were always stories for the people, entertainments for the unlettered. But that was precisely the secret of their survival, which
continues to this day. The stories contain material beyond the merely amusing or even moral; they have the value, as many non-degraded traditional tales do, of providing an abstract model of human predicaments sufficiently accurate and shorn of irrelevant detail actually to be of use to the hearer. Without wanting to make the
Nights
sound like a self-help book, there is no denying that some of the stories, or the stories within the stories, are genuinely capable of stimulating insights into life that are useful in the twenty-first century. As they have been since their conception as oral tales, and since their first collation in the tenth century in Cairo.