A Thousand Miles Up the Nile

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Life at Thebes is made up of incongruities. A morning among temples is followed by an afternoon of antiquity-hunting; and a day of meditation among tombs winds up with a dinner-party on board some friend's dahabeeyah, or a fantasia at the British Consulate. L. and the Writer did their fair share of antiquity-hunting both at Luxor and elsewhere; but chiefly at Luxor. I may say, indeed, that our life here was one long pursuit of the pleasures of the chase. The game, it is true, was prohibited; but we enjoyed it none Wat een verrukkelijk boek is dit. Toen reizen nog een avontuur was, toen Egyptische oudheden nog half onder het zand lagen, toen je zelf onderweg nog eens een tombe kon openen, of een waterpijpje roken met een lokale sjeik.

As enthralling as any work of fiction, A Thousand Miles up the Nile is the quintessential Victorian travel book. In 1873, Amelia B. Edwards, an upper-class Victorian spinster, spent the winter visiting the then largely unspoiled splendors of ancient Egypt.height, touched his beard, and said with a magnificent melodramatic air:— "If they sleep, they shall be bastinadoed till they die!" Rameses III, though not nearly so beautiful as the tomb of Seti I, is perhaps the most curious of all. The paintings here are for the most part designed on an unsculptured surface coated with white stucco. The drawing is often indifferent, and the colouring is uniformly coarse and gaudy. Yellow abounds; and crude reds and blues remind us of the coloured picture-books of our childhood. It is difficult to understand, indeed, how the builder of Medinet Habu, with the best Egyptian art of the day at his command, should have been content with such wall-paintings as these. It is a classic travelogue that provides a fascinating and enlightening look at the history and culture of ancient Egypt and the Sudan. The wall-sculptures at Gournah are extremely beautiful, especially those erected by Seti I. Where it has been accidentally preserved, the surface is as smooth, the execution as brilliant, as the finest mediæval ivory carving. Behind a broken column, for instance, that leans against the south west wall of the sanctuary, 26 one may see, by peeping this way and that, the ram's-head prow of a sacred boat, quite unharmed, and of surpassing delicacy. The modelling of the ram's head is simply faultless. It would indeed be scarcely too much to say that this one fragment, if all the rest had perished, would alone place the decorative sculpture of ancient Egypt in a rank second only to that of Greece.

A really fun travel book; that is, fun to read while travelling, even if one is not sailing up the Nile. I find it harder to complain about modern travel, for one thing.And there, writing those charming letters that delight the world Lady Duff Gordon lingered through the last few winters of her life. The rooms in which she lived first, and the balcony in which she took such pleasure, were no longer accessible, owing to the ruinous state of one of the staircases; but we saw the rooms she last inhabited. Her couch, her rug, her folding chair were there still. The walls were furnished with a few cheap prints and a pair of tin sconces. All was very bare and comfortless. The most interesting part of this book to me was when she arrived at Aswan. Edwards described the old city harbor and old Souq meticulously, and she could simply draw in the readers' minds how the people were wearing and dealing with tourists in that time. Also, the decorative depiction of the second oldest hotel in Aswan, the Grand Hotel. We now returned to the large hall, and not being accomplished in the art and mystery of sitting cross-legged, curled ourselves up on the divans as best we could. The Writer was conducted by Mustapha Aga to the corner seat at the upper end of the room, where he said the Princess of Wales had sat when their Royal Highnesses dined with him the year before. We were then served with pipes and coffee. The gentlemen smoked chibouques and cigarettes, while for us there were gorgeous rose-water narghilehs with long flexible tubes and amber mouthpieces. L. had the Princess's pipe, and smoked it very cleverly all the evening. Still Rameses III seems to have had a grand idea of going in state to the next world, with his retainers around him. In a series of small antechambers opening off from the first corridor, we see depicted all the household furniture, all the plate, the weapons, the wealth and treasure of the king. Upon the walls of one the cooks and bakers are seen preparing the royal dinner. In the others are depicted magnificent thrones; gilded galleys with parti-coloured sails; gold and silver vases; rich store of arms and armour; piles of precious woods, of panther skins, of fruits, and birds, and curious baskets, and all such articles of personal luxury as a palace-building Pharaoh might delight in. Here also are the two famous harpers; cruelly defaced, but still sweeping the strings with the old powerful touch that erewhile soothed the king in his hours of melancholy. These two spirited figures — which are undoubtedly portraits 36— almost redeem the poverty of the rest of the paintings. The inner walls of this great courtyard, and the outer face of the north-east wall, are covered with sculptures outlined, so to say, in intaglio, and relieved in the hollow, so that the forms, though rounded, remain level with the general surface. In these tableaux the old world lives again. Rameses III, his sons and nobles, his armies, his foes, play once more the brief drama of life and death. Great battles are fought; great victories are won; the slain are counted; the captured drag their chains behind the victor's chariot; the king triumphs, is