The Linguist and the Emperor (17 page)

Power or knowledge, knowledge or power. When all is said and done, which is the shadow and which is the substance? Which is worth having? Which is worth striving for?

Chapter Eleven

The Weight of the World

August 1922.
Cairo.
The Abdin
Palace.

SIGNOR GIOVANNI MARRA,
a historian dressed in a formal morning suit, and suffering in the intense heat, nervously waits in the enormous reception room for the arrival of the king, Fuad.

The palace is meant to be grand, with high ceilings and marble floors and much gilt and carved wood. There is something depressing about the official rooms. An imitation of a Western notion of what is royal, they are like a stage setting where Fuad can play at being king for the benefit of the foreign diplomats and visiting dignitaries.

Small signs of shabbiness everywhere surprise and even scandalize the rather stupid Signor Marra. Like a housekeeper, he meticulously notes the defects in his memoirs: the silk wallpaper is stained here and there by swatted insects; the drapes are frayed though they hang from magnificently gilded cornices; the vitrines containing medals and ribbons and coins are dusty and even cracked, etc.

It is as if Fuad, demoralized by the presence of the British, has let things go—an inference Signor Marra does not draw. Indeed, he is the kind of historian who comes to few conclusions, being content merely to record what he can.

A servant in livery interrupts these observations to lead him to the king, who is walking in the garden. The royal greets his visitor in a high-pitched drawl, interrupted every few words with a harsh, guttural bark. A bullet is lodged in Fuad’s throat, fired by a half-mad cousin. Visitors are warned to take no notice of the noises which punctuate His Majesty’s conversation.

The interview succeeds in winning Signor Marra the permission he needs. He is the first foreigner to be given access to the lower vaults of the Citadel, Saladin’s sprawling twelfth-century fortress which dominates the city.

In the dark, airless chambers, amid snakes and rats, Marra finds the moldering records he has been seeking, accounts which go back to the short period when Napoleon ruled—or rather,
tried
to rule—Cairo. Calling himself “Sultan Kebir,” the Great Sultan, Napoleon issues endless edicts and dispenses “enlightened” humane justice—justice which becomes less enlightened and more harsh and even barbaric as Napoleon learns the bitter lesson that to capture a great foreign city is not the same as to hold it.

1798.
SHUBRA KIT.
A place near the watermelon patches of Rahmaniya and the Nile. In the annals of military history, the first encounter between Napoleon’s troops and the Mamelukes—an insignificant skirmish at a place named Shubra Kit—is passed over in silence.

Instead, when the battles of the First Empire come to be taught in the military academies of France’s Second Empire, attention is focused on the great struggle that takes place on the vast plain before Cairo, with its larger-than-life proportions and its ancient pyramids looming in the background.

Yet it is during this first skirmish that the basic approaches of the adversaries are put to the test. Napoleon puts his faith in strategy and calculation here. Whatever heavy artillery he has managed to drag over the desert he now uses with mathematical precision. The Mameluke leader, Murad, relies on the desperate personal courage of his men, and on his vastly superior cavalry.

There are the infinite number of incalculable elements involved in any battle. Napoleon’s men are exhausted, demoralized, and on the point of open rebellion. After the brutal desert crossing, when Napoleon had first reappeared among them, he had been openly taunted: “Well, General,” a man calls out during inspection, “are you going to lead us to India next?”

Napoleon further alienates the men by turning on the rebel and answering disdainfully: “No, it is not with such men as you that I would conquer India . . .”

India is beside the point, except perhaps as a metaphor for the ends of the earth, the place where Alexander the Great’s men finally mutinied and would go no further, an allusion that would not be lost on Napoleon. The real question is whether Napoleon can conquer and hold Egypt with “such men” who, for all their complaining, and despite their general’s disdain, are truly heroic.

It is a question almost immediately answered, on that day in Rahmaniya when the French get their first sight of the Mamelukes. The entire army would have been annihilated when Murad bey suddenly appeared above the watermelon patches and the Nile were it not for the merest chance.

Looking up and seeing the huge, well-armed Mamelukes on their sleek horses, the Frenchmen despair. But lo and behold, Murad bey, after surveying the scene, retires. The Mameluke army the French imagine is behind him—just on the other side of the hills—is not there. Leaving his main force some miles away, Murad has come with only a scouting party, giving the Frenchmen time to scramble from the river, toss away their watermelons, and prepare to battle.

The next day, early in the morning, Napoleon leads his no-longer-naked men toward the encounter, switching from the defensive to the offensive. He seeks to engage the enemy in this isolated place as opposed to Cairo where, in case of a disaster, they would be able to fall back behind the walls of the great city.

Murad also undergoes a change, switching from the offensive to the defensive. Shortly after the French arrive, he sizes up the situation. After some preliminary fighting—little more than skirmishing—the wily Mameluke again retires, his warriors swiftly retreating on their Arabian mounts.

Made uneasy by unfamiliar French tactics, for the first time unsure of himself, Murad has no intention of fighting a decisive battle here. Let the French torturously make their way toward Cairo. There will be more heat, more unbearable thirst. The villages will be empty and the canals will be dry and surrounded by salt marshes. From tombs and ruins snipers will harass the foreigners . . . and they will arrive in Cairo ready for the slaughter.

Dawn, July 21, 1798. A plain before Cairo.

THROUGH THE HAZE
of sand that grows thicker as the sun rises, the French soldiers can see the thousand mosques of Cairo in the far distance, their graceful minarets outlined against the brightening sky.

Closer to the battlefield, but still miles away, are those most ancient monuments, the pyramids, with their guardian: that colossus with its leonine torso and human face whom the Arabs call “Abu Hol,” the Father of Terror; and whom the Greeks call Sphinx, or Strangler, for the death it exacts from those who can not guess the answer to its question; the riddle of our humanity.

Between its gigantic paws is the “plaque” of Thuthmosis IV (1400
BC
). As a young prince hunting wild gazelle in the desert, he had fallen asleep here and dreamed that by clearing the creature of centuries of sand (it was more than a thousand years old even then) his reign would be blessed with a glory equal to his grandfather’s, Thuthmosis III, the greatest warrior of Egypt.

Here war is a story as old as the pyramids of which the Arabs say:
All mortals are afraid of time, but Time is afraid of the pyramids.
When ancient Memphis, before Cairo, was the capital, then, too, great armies clashed on this plain.

Indeed, the scene Napoleon and his thirty-eight thousand Frenchmen have come to Egypt to enact has been played out here so often, that were it not for the modern guns and the European uniforms, the date might have been one, or two, or three, or four millennia before.

The very stars that have begun to fade overhead—the
Coma Berenike,
the tresses of Queen Berenice—take their name from just such a violent moment. War raged among the Ptolemies, and elephants brought from the heart of Africa trampled down men and clashed with one another. While these great beasts, maddened by the fumes of drugs and prodded on by their handlers (the “heavy artillery” of the day, each one equal to a thousand soldiers), a lovesick Queen, Berenike, cut off her beautiful hair and laid it on the altar of the gods, praying for victory for her husband.

She bequeaths to history a passionate story: how she killed her mother whom she found sleeping with her fiancé; and how she then came to Egypt and had fallen deeply in love with her new husband, Ptolemy III. “Brave girl, a splendid crime it was that won you your prince,” the Alexandrian poet Callimachus sings.

More important than her story—for Champollion—she leaves behind her name: Berenike (or Berenice), one of the four royal Ptolemaic names,
Berenike, Arsinoe, Ptolemy, Cleopatra.
It will be repeated again and again, century after century, in various combinations and with sundry epithets, weaving a tapestry of sound that Champollion later unravels on obelisks and papyri and tombs and monuments.

What are the accidents by which our past is remembered! Berenike cuts off her beautiful hair to safeguard her husband’s life and a priest at the temple steals it for his sensual pleasure! If the hair had not been stolen; if the queen had not found out about it (having taken her victorious husband to the temple to show him her sacrifice); if the royal couple, enraged, had not decreed death for all the priests (since which one was the fetishist-thief could not be determined); if the court astronomer Conan had not been so imaginative, if he had not saved the day by declaring that it was a god, none other, who had taken her flowing tresses and arranged them in the sky, would Champollion and his rival Thomas Young both have been so quick to guess that
  signified “Berenike”? Would her name—written not only on stone, but in the heavens as well—have so quickly come to mind?

The
Coma Berenike,
the hair of Berenice!

It is not only on the linguists, on Young and Champollion, that these ancient stars shed their light, but on the awed French soldiers as well. They feel the solemnity of the moment as they march across the vast, empty plain among the pyramids and tombs.

Call it awe, call it a dream or an illusion which takes hold of everyone here. Even in daylight, even when the sun comes out in all its strength and scorches both the victorious and the vanquished, even then the echoes of time can be heard and the weight of the past is palpable.

Marching quickstep—103 paces per minute and in close line formation—a unique feat achieved by Napoleon’s severe discipline and drilling—the men prepare for battle.

“Soldiers!” Napoleon addresses them with a rhetoric as grand as the occasion requires: “From the height of these monuments, forty centuries of history look down upon you . . .”

There is the sound of trumpets and drums. The band begins to play the
Marseillaise,
but it is interrupted by the strange trilling of Oriental music, of tambourines and flutes, and savage battle cries.

Through the haze of sand and sunlight comes the sight of thousands upon thousands of men galloping across the plain on horseback. The Mamelukes have arrived.

“
WHEN THEY FOUGHT
an enemy, the Romans sought to crush him with the weight of the world,” Bonaparte had told his generals beforehand. “We will do the same.”

But as rank upon rank of splendid horsemen cross the plain toward the waiting Frenchmen—Napoleon has opted for a stationary line of defense in the face of Murad’s vastly superior cavalry—it seems suddenly that the “weight of the world” is on the Mameluke’s side.

Fall in! the cry goes up at the sight of Murad’s troops, as the moment for which Napoleon has been long preparing arrives.

The men have already taken up their positions, the infantry forming five large hedgehogs or squares six ranks deep with heavy artillery (eighteen pounders) placed at each of the corners.

Inside these squares are stationed the scanty and inadequate French cavalry, held in reserve. An order for them to charge would be a futile last resort, they know, and would only be given in the face of general disaster.

Napoleon has commanded that the men wait until the galloping horsemen are mere paces away. They are to remain immobile and unflinching in the face of the shock attack—the Mameluke specialty—and then they are to fire in unison, remaining in position for the next wave of riders.