The second dam, opened in 1970, but effectively filling up for the previous six years, completely submerged a country: Nubia. This was the romantic country that interwar tourists such as Agatha Christie were the last to travel through.
Christie visited Egypt many times. The first time she fell in love with her first husband Archie Christie. But she had, for some reason, an aversion to sailing the Nile until her marriage to her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist fourteen years her junior. In 1933, when she was forty-three, they took a romantic cruise up the Nile, which naturally became one source of inspiration for the archetypal Agatha Christie mystery Death on the Nile.
Agatha Christie made her Nile journey a decade after the discovery of Tutankhamen. The excitement of that find provided a new impetus to Nile tourism. Christie visited almost all Nileside sites, including that of Akhnaten’s palace at Amarna. She was so taken with Akhnaten she wrote a play about him. It has been performed only rarely – by amateur and repertory theatre groups. It has never opened in the West End, which may have something to do with its having eleven scene changes and over twenty speaking parts. I think, though, there is an excellent case to be made for turning Akhnaten (or maybe it should be Akhnaten!) into a musical; with Nefertiti, Akhnaten and Tutankhamen all involved it would make a spectacular production.
Christie’s love affair with the Nile not only resulted in the Poirot novel Death on the Nile, she also collaborated with the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville on a whodunnit set in ancient Egypt called Death Comes as the End.
With Glanville she had an intimate correspondence, reflecting a relationship that remained platonic but emotionally was every bit a love affair. Ten years younger than Agatha, Glanville had, she always said, ‘a talent for living’. Glanville would confess to friends that he was in love with the homely detective writer; and she kept his letters bundled with those from her husband. When Agatha wrote of Stephen to Max Mallowan she always sandwiched any praise of the Egyptologist with extravagant praise of her husband. Stephen would jokingly refer to his attraction to Agatha with his friend Max, who perhaps chose not to be too aware of what was really going on.
Mallowan himself was an Assyriologist not an Egyptologist, and there is no doubt that Agatha loved him. Perhaps agape and sex went well together for him, whereas eros and a shared dream of love on the Nile were reserved for Stephen.
Christie’s Egyptian novel Death Comes as the End (‘a novel of jealousy, betrayal and murder in 2000 BC,’ my 2001 reprint warns me) contains some of the clunkiest dialogue she ever wrote. Usually her characters speak entirely convincingly in their narrowly defined but acutely observed surroundings. In ancient Egypt Imhotep, the world’s first architect, paces up and down saying, ‘Can I not do as I please in my own house? Do I not support my sons and their wives? Do they not owe the very bread they eat to me? Do I not tell them so without ceasing?’ Imhotep as Victorian Dad, perhaps, but not a patch on her usually precise capture of contemporary mores, speech and character. Agatha should have stuck to the present, and she knew it: only her love of the Nile allowed her to stray.
47 • Agatha’s trunk
When the bull is in a strange country it does not bellow.
Sudanese proverb
It felt almost as if I had cruised the great river, after watching again, following a long gap, the 1978 film of Death on the Nile. The novel and the film are quintessential Christie material, as if the mystery of the past, the archaeological subtext so to speak, parallels in some necessary way the forensic exertions of the rotund but astute Poirot. A Frenchman called Auguste Mariette was the founder of Egypt’s first archaeological museum, the French having always had, since the debut of the savants under Napoleon, a proprietorial attitude to ancient Egypt. It was another Frenchman, François Champollion, after all, who worked out the key to reading hieroglyphics. And, strangely, it was in Champollion Street, just behind the great museum in Cairo, that some of the bitterest fighting of the 2011 revolution took place, as if control of the country should be decided under long-departed French eyes. So French, or even Belgian, intellectual superiority in mystery solving is a key part of the Poirot/Nile scenario, one ramping the other up to a sort of critical mass – for just as The Hound of the Baskervilles defines Sherlock Holmes, so Death on the Nile seems to define not just Agatha Christie but some essential element of Nile romance.
There may be a simpler explanation. The Nile is the river of death. As we have seen, crossing to the western side, where all the tombs are, was the fate of all who had died, the Nile becoming a veritable Styx. One might even say that Christie had stumbled upon the red nature of the Nile – because Death on the Nile is, of course, a story of thwarted passion as well as murder.
I had always assumed that Christie made only one visit to Egypt, but actually she made several. I became intent on tracking down some of the details of her own Nile experience, not so much as a further insight into her work but rather because of a fellow feeling for another confirmed Nilist.
Agatha Christie’s favourite Cairo hotel was not the Mena House, which is out by the Pyramids and always touted as ‘her hotel’ (in fact she only ever stayed there briefly and didn’t enjoy her stay); she much preferred what is now the Marriott on Zamalek, a place previously known as the Gezira Palace Hotel. Agatha had first stayed there in 1910 with her mother. They remained for three months for ‘the season’. It was Agatha’s coming-out season – far cheaper than a similar affair in London and considered almost as good. On the same island was the celebrated docking facility for Thomas Cook. From here one could travel to Luxor or Aswan aboard the SS Setti, the PS Tewfik or as Agatha did, the PS Karnak, which became the model for the paddle steamer in Death on the Nile. It was at this wharf that the celebrated archaeological booty from Tutankhamen’s tomb was unloaded in 1923, en route from Luxor to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Agatha’s hotel, the Gezira Palace, stood, in her day, in sixty acres of beautiful gardens. It borders the Nile, and was formerly the palace built for Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, when she arrived for the opening of the Suez Canal and, reputedly, had an affair, consummated in one of the gazebos in the gardens, with Khedive Ismail. The Gezira Palace is today, in its nucleus, very similar to what it must have been like in Agatha’s time. The ceilings are high and the fans turn the air lazily, high above you. But when Agatha returned in 1933 with Max Mallowan she would have been disappointed not to stay at the Gezira; in the early 1920s it became the private residence of Habib Lotfallah Pasha, returning to its hotel role only in 1961. But the island of Zamalek, also known as Gezira (which means ‘island’ in Arabic), was always the start of any journey up the Nile. From here she would have proceeded up to Luxor and another favourite hotel, the Cataract at Aswan. On all these journeys she was never one to travel light, and it is interesting to glean from her own accounts what she actually packed.
In her memoir about helping her archaeological husband Max, Come, Tell Me How You Live, she recounts the humiliation of having to buy ‘O.S.’ clothes – ‘outsize’ – for her journey. She resorted to the ‘tropical department’, first for a sola topee (‘brown, white and patent’), though she is tempted by a double terai hat, which was available in pink. The double terai was a much esteemed traveller’s hat as it had a double skin, thus protecting your head from the sun. Being too large for sailing trousers or jodhpurs, Agatha plumped for plain coats and skirts made of shantung. This was a woven raw silk cloth, with a rough texture, hard wearing and favoured by the wives of empire builders. ‘I am transformed into a memsahib!’
Other specialised clothes would include a Burberry coat and skirt – most useful for the cold winter nights one can experience on the Nile. This set of garments ‘unites the freedom of the upper part of a Norfolk jacket with expanding pleats, and the smartness below the waist of a skirted coat’. It was recommended for shooting, walking and golf – and Agatha was a keen golfer, especially in her youth. She had even tried surfing when, on a world tour wit
h her first husband, she stopped in Hawaii. Strangely, she is probably the first Englishwoman ever to have stood up on a surfboard.
But there will be none of that on the sedate Nile cruise. She might include, again for the surprising cold of the Egyptian night, a pair of ladies’ fleeced knickers bought from Dickins and Jones. Agatha was a keen motorist and for wet weather included her motoring rainproof made of gabardine with a camel fleece lining.
She would have quite a few evening dresses for special occasions, and these would require the dress shield, or dress preserver – essential when few dresses were washable and dry cleaners might be few and far between. The dress shield went under the armpits and stopped the dress becoming drenched in smelly perspiration. It was especially useful for ballgowns. In this era before the widespread use of deodorants the smell of ladies’ perspiration was not considered offensive. Indeed in Agatha’s ball-going youth ‘gentlemen used to like what we called a “bouquet de corsage”’.
Then there were the accessories: hat guards, motor scarves, puggarees (hatbands for further sun-protection), night socks and night caps, garters and eyeglass cords, bootlaces and dressing-gown girdles; cork soles, belts, several fans from Liberty, two ‘housewives’ (handy collections of needles, thread and tiny scissors), hairbands, Indian gauze combinations, Milanese silk knickers, cream Japanese silk petticoats, linen knickers and a tea gown. Then there were a dozen fancy cambric handkerchiefs and a dozen bordered handkerchiefs with the monogram ‘A.M.’ and not ‘A.C.’.
Agatha hated zips but bought a zipped travelling bag: ‘life today is dominated and complicated by the remorseless zip’. In the trunk would also be several ‘fountain and stylographic pens’. Agatha always believed that a pen could work for years without giving trouble in England, but the moment you went abroad it would go on strike, ‘either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper’. She took just two pencils, as pencils are ‘fortunately not temperamental’.
Next would be not one but four wristwatches. One to wear, three to pack. The sandy winds that blow around ruins were deadly for an ordinary wristwatch of the 1920s and 1930s. She would reckon on a watch lasting a week at best.
Books of course. Often she had to relinquish space to make room for those of her husband. A plaid rug for picnics. She was ready for anything, it seems, even love on the Nile.
48 • King Tut’s swift
The birds of different rivers speak different languages. Ethiopian proverb
Agatha, married to an archaeologist, met Howard Carter several times. In the early years after his great discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922, he was to be found ensconced each winter in his desert dwelling where he worked on cataloguing all the remains he had found. The building was a cube of mud with a tiny garden lying in the shadow of the house. His laboratory, where he unwrapped mummies, was in the Valley of the Kings. Melting off the resin that sealed the mummies’ shrouds with a soldering iron, he found within the wrapping jewelled objects more wonderful even than those that had been stacked in Tutankhamen’s tomb. One intrigued Agatha Christie when she later saw it: a ring of blood-red carnelian carved in the shape of a migrating swift – along with swallows, swifts are constant winter migrants to the Nile valley. The red sun’s shape is attached to the swift, the setting sun which must die each night, the soul which must fly like the swift to another place unknown.
I had seen a swift land awkwardly on a clifftop out in the Eastern Desert. There was some danger in this. If the swift could not flap its way to the edge to drop off into a thermal, it would die, as its legs are far too weak to carry it anywhere and it can neither perch nor walk. To make a nest the swift must catch its materials on the wing – floating pieces of hay, feathers, seed pods falling – and take them to whatever eave or overhanging rock it favours. The construction is plastered together with saliva, a less attractive nest than that of the house martin, whose masterful lodgings are made from wet mud pellets and grass plastered to the side of a wall.
Coming from England as I do and growing up with house martins nesting under the eaves of our house and swallows and swifts feeding at sunset on the insects above the cornfields, I had the sense growing ever stronger that the world as I saw it was, without intention from me to force it that way, circumscribed by familiar faces that all along my Nile journey – through reading and travelling – kept appearing, as if to remind me that life itself is as connected as a river system, that the tendency towards unity outweighs the forces of entropy. In short I saw swifts following the course of the Nile south. They are the original explorers of the Nile, from sea to source and beyond.
It isn’t difficult to confuse house martins, swallows and swifts from a distance. Closer up, swifts are the larger, sleeker and more aerodynamic, house martins the smallest and chubbiest, with white underparts to identify them. They all fly south in winter. I have been in the desert and seen one exhausted, a house martin, perched on the wing mirror of a Land Cruiser, panting for breath it seemed. The Bedouin driver fed it water in a saucer and it revived, flying onwards towards Lake Nasser.
Though Aristotle mentions the migration of swallows down the Nile, this knowledge was not widespread. As late as the time of Gilbert White, the eighteenth-century clergyman naturalist of Selborne, it was thought that some birds hibernated during the winter. Swallows rarely migrate in very large groups unless held up in fog or other difficult weather; then, groups can accumulate rather like the bunching of walkers at a single stile. They depart at different times and make their way over Europe in the autumn and across the Mediterranean and down the Nile to east and southern Africa.
The first men migrating north had only to follow the birds flying overhead. They must have followed them down the Nile to the sea and beyond. And, millennia later, come the new migrants, people like Agatha Christie and Howard Carter, returning each year to the East, like swallows and swifts in their own right.
Part Six
BLOOD ON THE NILE
From assassination to revolution
1 • To the end of the Nile
A sharp thorn, moving with the river’s flow, stabs without being seen. Rwandan saying
The Nile fascinates. It mesmerises tourists such as Agatha Christie, but it also captures the minds of men set on wielding power and influence. Influence bears the same relationship to power as a stag’s antlers do to his status: there is an assumed and useful correlation between size and fighting ability, but it is not set in stone. A weak deer with fine antlers may be able to bluff his way for a very long time. It is fascinating to see those Mesopotamian statues and friezes of symbolically full-antlered stags as if they were saying this is a man. So, with the Nile, controlling it has an influence beyond any physical power it can exert.
But influence it has. And the way that influence was focused and amplified in the twentieth century was through the construction of dams.
Three of the world’s greatest engineering feats are still to be found in Egypt: the Pyramids, of course, but also the Suez Canal and the Aswan high dam. And the last two (and probably the first) are not the result of a professional engineer, a committee of responsible technocrats or a government ministry. Both the Suez Canal and the Aswan high dam are the result of two amateurs who just wouldn’t give up. In the case of the Suez Canal it was the failed French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. De Lesseps capitalised on having been the tutor of the then ruler of Egypt, Khedive Ismail. This immensely fat royal was starved by his father but secretly fed spaghetti by de Lesseps. The Khedive never forgot, and forced de Lesseps’ plan through against, at first, stubborn French and British government disapproval.
One suspects, reviewing the history of the Red Nile, that history is not made by parliaments, committees, companies – it is made, rightly or wrongly, by determined individuals or small groups of determined individuals. Just as Lenin toppled Tsarist Russia with nineteen fello
w revolutionaries, so too are many of the events we have examined the result of determined, if not obsessive, individual action by people who might have no official backing. Outsiders in many cases, who find themselves through sheer persistence in the right place at the right time for their one-shot message to ring home.
In the case of the Aswan high dam, the British had for years considered Egypt’s section of the Nile to be just one piece of the whole river. They contemplated controlling the river nearer the source – using the Owen Falls dam to turn Lake Victoria into a reservoir, cutting a canal through the Jonglei, draining the Sudd and using dams on the Blue Nile, all to take complete control of the river from source to sea. But politics was never going to let this happen. Upstream countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda could be coerced into grudging co-operation but never really trusted with controlling Egypt’s water supply. The dam of 1902, its height raised in 1912 and 1933, was considered a brilliant work of engineering. But it had simply never occurred to anyone to build a second dam there so big that it would turn the whole of fertile Nubia into a giant lake. To the British, such an act of violence against the homeland of an indigenous people would have been unthinkable. Whatever else may be said about the British Empire, its track record of defending minority and tribal cultures within the countries it ruled is impeccable compared to the treatment many received after independence. The British treatment of the Nagas in India, the Penan in Borneo and the Nubians in Egypt was far better than what was meted out after the countries’ majority groups took power. That Egypt gained a hydropower system and a source of reliable water benefited the farmers downstream. It had no benefit at all for the 100,000 Nubians who lost a homeland that had been theirs since pharaonic times.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 47