LUCY RENSHAW WAS the famous “L” mentioned in Edwards’s travel accounts and books. Together, the two ladies embarked on some big adventures, beginning with Italy’s famous Dolomites, a section of steep peaks in the Alps, and culminating in Egyptian sands. Edwards describes how they had “done some difficult walking in their time, over ice and snow, on lave cold and hot, up cinder-slopes and beds of mountain torrents . . .”10and they clearly shared an appetite for robust expeditions. Yet, in spite of all the frequent mention made of “L,” Miss Renshaw is an unknowable figure. Details of her story are scant, some photographs of her are uncertain (in one—if it is indeed her— she’s sporting short-cropped hair, a cravat, shadow-brushed sideburns, and a man’s jacket!11), and the things that can be said about her add up to simple summations. We know, for example, that Lucy was two years younger than Edwards; she sometimes wore a crimson shawl and according to Edwards was “given to vanities in the way of dress”12 ; she had a nurse’s instinct; and she was very practical, capable, and certainly up for an adventure or two. She also liked to pet and feed the caged rabbits on board the dahabeeyah, all of which were awaiting their day in the kitchen pot. The details are slight; there’s not much more to be had. Yet one thing does come into sharp focus thanks to Edwards’s literary flair: Lucy and Amelia were the two women who had arrived fresh from Alexandria in 1873, after forty-eight hours of quarantine, to Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo:
Where every fresh arrival has the honour of contributing, for at least a few minutes, to the general entertainment, the first appearance of L. and the Writer [Amelia Edwards], tired, dusty, and considerably sun-burned, may well have given rise to some comments in usual circulation at those crowded tables. People asked each other, most likely, where these two wandering Englishwomen had come from; why they had not dressed for dinner; what brought them to Egypt; and if they were going up the Nile . . .13
The two disheveled ladies caused a stir, especially with sunburned faces in the age of creamy complexions. Famously, these lady travelers were in Egypt simply to find fair weather and cloudless skies. Edwards, however, was smart and knew how to shape her own tale. She was out to explore matters of archaeological interest too.
Under pale, hot skies, with a sketch pad in one hand, a parasol in the other, Edwards directed her crew and boat-bound companions to tour every archaeological site situated on the banks of the Nile. True to her Victorian sensibilities, she kept house in her dahabeeyah, the Philae—flowers always on the table, fresh brown bread to eat, tea in the afternoon, and a chaise longue on the deck; she rarely roughed it. Camelback rides were a thing designed, in her opinion, to kill a person; she had identified the four paces of a camel as: “a short walk, like the rolling of a small boat in a chopping sea; a long walk which dislocates every bone in your body; a trot that reduces you to imbecility; and a gallop that is sudden death.”14
Edwards’s appreciation of the Egyptian landscape is woven throughout the book that resulted from her travels up and down that glorious river, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. Her account was a wild bestseller in the nineteenth century, and it’s still in print today. She knew it was her best. In it she chronicles her days on the floating dahabeeyah, the open markets that smelled of cardamom and clove where a stall of bright red shoes was tucked beside withered old ladies in black robes. The women could tell you your fortune and sell you dates and oranges or perhaps sell you an entirely different fruit born of Egyptian soil: artifacts like fragments of pottery or pieces of bone.
ABOVE : The Pyramids of Giza, circa 1890
Edwards portrays the pyramids in every shift of awe, wonder, and appreciation: “. . . the Great Pyramid in all its unexpected bulk and majesty towers close above one’s head, the effect is as sudden as it is overwhelming. It shuts out the sky and the horizon.”15 Her words are painterly, luxuriant, sensuous, exemplified here by a description of sand wherein “the beauty of sand more than repays the fatigue of climbing it. Smooth, sheeny, satiny; fine as diamond-dust; supple, undulating, luminous, it lies in the most exquisite curves and wreaths, like a snowdrift turned to gold.”16 Elsewhere, “the towers we had first seen as we sailed by in the morning rose straight before us, magnificent in ruin, glittering to the sun, and relieved in creamy light against blue depths of sky. One was nearly perfect; the other shattered as if by the shock of an earthquake, was still so lofty that an Arab clambering from block to block midway of its vast height looked no bigger than a squirrel.”17
Enchanted by the silks and spices of the bazaars, Edwards was equally repelled by the poorer villages and their “filthy, sickly, stunted and stolid”18 residents, for whom she had genuine sympathy (comparing their circumstances to a situation “not worse . . . than in many an Irish village”) but from whom she also wished to keep a “pleasant distance.” As a British traveler she was more interested in Egypt’s magnificent past (and the glorified imagination of it) than its relatively bedraggled present, where poverty was often extreme. Her observations of people and places were in accord with the times: Britain was civilized; other places, not so much. But unlike many who judged human civilization from the comfort of their armchairs, she was at least there to have a look. To form her own opinions. To see for herself. To learn and gauge what she could.
Edwards’s comparison of a local man to a small “squirrel” reveals not just the size of the ruins, but also her attitude toward the locals, whom she was quick to dismiss and held in low esteem. They were not as “civilized” as she thought herself to be. Edwards’s attitude wasn’t confined to the local people, though. Throughout her tour, Edwards condescends to pretty much everyone on board the houseboat. Lucy is never referred to as more than “L.” Edwards calls one of her fellow travelers the Little Lady, her new husband is the Idle Man, and another is known as the Painter. She never acknowledges the others’ names or quite grants them status as real people in her book. At the same time, she refers to herself as the Writer and in crafting the travelogue was out to entertain as well as educate her reader.
All of the unnamed passengers have hobbies. One plans to hunt crocodiles for a parlor trophy, another to paint a “Great picture.” Edwards’s aim was to cultivate a keen knowledge of the ancient landscape around her. She became an expert on local archaeology while striding across lost ruins and crushing unseen potsherds underfoot. Starting in the North, the journey encompassed a remarkable one thousand miles of sailing. Edwards and her travel companions ventured to the very edge of terra incognita. They turned their giant riverboat around—a vessel approximately one hundred feet long by thirty feet wide—only upon reaching a vast section of unmapped country. Although Edwards was set on making new discoveries underfoot, she was less eager to get lost.
To start any Nile journey by heading south was an unusual choice. Because it was winter, most sailing would have to be done without the benefit of a strong tailwind or favorable currents. But traveling south gave Edwards more time to devour the books in her library, to become well versed in the landscape’s antiquity, and to stop at each archaeological site on her northern return.
She carried Murray’s Handbook to Lower and Upper Egypt like a Bible, and she meditated on how we look at the past. “It must be understood that we did not go to see the Pyramids,“ she muses. “We only went to look at them.”19 One involves active understanding, the other a more passive gaze, and Edwards ensured that she was knowledgeable about all historical relics that came before her. She would always “see” what was before her.
Much to the chagrin of her crew and companions, her wish for this voyage, based on historical sequence and personal preference, created long delays and extra sweat for everyone.
As they drifted south, Edwards drew the sites she saw. With a parasol in her gloved hand she even ventured into dark vaulted chambers and tombs to explore, following her local guide, who was carrying a lantern to light the way:
ABOVE : Map of Cairo and surrounding area, 1882
So we went on, going every moment deeper into the soli
d rock, and farther from the open air and sunshine. Thinking it would be cold underground, we brought warm wraps in plenty; but the heat, on the contrary, was intense, and the atmosphere stifling . . . here for incalculable ages—for thousands of years probably before the Nile had even cut its path through Silsilis—a cloudless African sun had been pouring its daily floods of light and heat upon the dewless desert over head. The place might well be unendurable. It was like a great oven stored with the slowly accumulated heat of cycles so remote and so many that the earliest periods of Egyptian history seem, when compared with them, to belong to yesterday.20
For a lady of Victorian times, Edwards had no qualms about dark places and the unknown; it is not surprising that she wrote ghost stories for a living early in her career. Even dangerous river crossings held a thrill for her. The upper stretches of the Nile were, at that time, difficult to access because of the Aswan Cataract. Only the most skilled and brazen river captains would give it a go, and only the best of boats could hope to make it. A series of whirlpools and fast rapids, the cataract could take anywhere between twelve hours and four days to cross, and that was if the boat didn’t smash into splinters. Although Murray’s Handbook recommended that ladies watch the proceedings from the safety of the shore, Edwards took the helm. She wanted a front row seat and would have stayed there if she hadn’t been lurched around so ferociously that she was obliged to move to the back. Because most tourists did not attempt the crossing, Edwards and group had the Nile more or less to themselves from there on out.
The silence they gained cast a new spell on Edwards. For her, the weight of history could now be felt more palpably in the sultry air. The imagination could fly a little more freely, soaring, as Edwards would often record, like the falcons of old did overhead. They were also moving toward the most anticipated archaeological site of all: Abu Simbel. Consisting of two massive stone temples built in the thirteenth century BC by the Pharaoh Rameses II as a monument to both his military might and his love for his wife, the queen Nefertari, the site was originally situated on the shores of Lake Nasser.21 It was also physically elusive. Giant sand drifts would sometimes bury the site, leaving it only partially visible to those who had trekked so far to see it. At other times, the sands would blow away to reveal majestic rock carvings and hallowed entrances to painted rooms. Not knowing whether they would encounter the ancient monument exposed or hidden, Edwards was in appreciable suspense.22
Then, almost as if fate had played a hand in brushing aside the dunes and drifts, Edwards found a wonder. It was evening, and her first sighting of Abu Simbel arrived as a twilight dream:
As the moon climbed higher, a light more mysterious and unreal than the light of day filled and overflowed the wide expanse of river and desert. We could see the mountains of Abou Simbel standing as it seemed across our path, in the far distance—a lower one first; then a larger; then a series of receding heights, all close together, yet all distinctly separate. That large one—the mountain of the Great Temple—held us like a spell. For a long time it looked like a mere mountain like the rest. By and by, however, we fancied we detected a something—a shadow—such a shadow as might be cast by a gigantic buttress. Next appeared a black speck no bigger than a porthole. We knew that this black speck must be the doorway. We knew that the great statues were there, though not yet visible; and that we must see them soon. At length the last corner was rounded, and the Great Temple stood straight before us. The facade, sunk in the mountain side like a huge picture in a mighty frame, was now quite plain to see. The black speck was no longer a porthole, but a lofty doorway. Last of all, though it was night and they were still not much less than a mile away, the four colossi came out, ghostlike, vague, and shadowy, in the enchanted moonlight. Even as we watched them, they seemed to grow—to dilate— to be moving towards us out of the silvery distance.23
Edwards spent over a week investigating the site from morning to night and only agreed to depart as the complaints and impatience of her travel companions mounted. She made them promise that they could stop once again on the return home, and they did. Edwards’s enchantment with Abu Simbel was profound; it was also the site of her own archaeological discovery. This was the place where she dropped to her knees in excavation.
The unexpected find was a small, square chamber where sand had gathered in a steep slope angled from the ceiling to the floor, lit by a lone sun shaft, and on every wall were painted friezes in bright unfaded color and bas-relief sculptures. She and the other travelers who excavated by her side correctly surmised that the place had never been discovered. Edwards quickly had the ship crew working like “tigers” and sent someone to the nearest village to hire another fifty hands to help. The excavation was underway and “. . . the sand poured off in a steady stream like water.” When all had been cleared away, Edwards, the Painter, and even the Idle Man gathered in the chamber and got busy copying inscriptions, measuring and surveying the find, sketching the walls, and sniffing around for any further surprises. It was at that moment that the Idle Man lifted a human skull from the sand.
ABOVE : A Victorian lady traveler assisted by local men
Could a tomb be underfoot? Were mummies and papyri and jewels only a shovel scoop away? A smaller skull appeared next, one as “pure and fragile in texture as the cup of a water-lily.”24Everyone must have been holding their breath, hearts racing with the thought of a spectacular, gold-covered, ruby-lit, hieroglyphics-laden find.
Unfortunately, the new room proved to be only an empty basement. All archaeological hopes were dashed. What they had found in the decorated room, however, was apparently a lost library. Even if the discovery wasn’t as grand as the group had hoped, Edwards took special pride in it. It was a turning point for her, the moment when archaeology became not just a subject of study but a personal experience.
Lifting fragile old bones from the earth and brushing sand away from ancient objects were no longer activities that belonged to someone else, no longer the remote and exciting discoveries one read about in a book or newspaper article, actions that seemed exciting yet inaccessible. Edwards could now experience the thrill of unearthing a small piece of history with her own two hands. Archaeology was no longer a dream or a distant desire: it had become real.
With that feeling came a heightened awareness of archaeology’s value and its vulnerability. Shoveling sand, she was dismayed to see that workmen “wet with perspiration” were leaning against the paintings, marring their brilliance and smearing the color. She felt conflicted when the Painter scratched their names and the date of the chamber’s discovery into the ancient walls. That was a normal practice back then, but it nonetheless soiled the purity of the place. As Edwards thought about all the artifacts for sale at roadside stalls, the museum collections where prized objects had been stolen from their place, the common looting, and the slow deterioration and loss of some of the world’s greatest historic sites, she was struck by the unshakable desire to do something about it. A bolt of passion. A call to arms. She would appeal to her readers with a question:
I am told that the wall paintings which we had the happiness of admiring in all their beauty and freshness are already much injured. Such is the fate of every Egyptian monument, great or small. The tourist carves it over with names and dates, and in some instances with caricatures. The student of Egyptology, by taking wet paper “squeezes” sponges away every vestige of the original colour. The “Collector” buys and carries everything off of value that he can, and the Arab steals it for him. The work of destruction meanwhile goes on apace . . . The Museums of Berlin, of Turin, of Florence are rich in spoils which tell their lamentable tale. When science leads the way, is it wonderful that ignorance should follow?25
JUMPING AHEAD eight years, Edwards is a woman out of the field and at her desk. Returned to her life in England, she sits in her personal library, which contains over three thousand books. Littered on the shelves and lined up in tall cases are specimens of Greek and Etruscan pottery, Egyptian antiquiti
es, antique glass, engravings, and watercolor sketches. She’s a matronly woman, robust and smart looking, silver hair swept up and braided on top of her head, eyes dark and intelligent, her features rather beautiful. Outside the wild birds are in a tizzy, and “thrushes drop fearlessly into the library to be fed,” while the robins perch on the tops of high books and at Edwards’s feet as she lies “reading or writing in a long Indian chair under a shady tree” on a summer day.26 She has since her travels along the Nile become a reputable Egyptologist in her own right. Edwards has taught herself to read hieroglyphics—a mighty task. She has also redirected her passion for Egypt’s archaeology into something of a savior’s work.
Passions still simmering, Amelia Edwards was the woman responsible for thinking of, advocating for, and ultimately assembling the Egypt Exploration Fund, which was later renamed the Egypt Exploration Society.27 A powerful organizer, she led the way in promoting research and excavation in the Nile Delta. As the society notes in its own organizational history, “Amelia Edwards, together with Reginald Stuart Poole of the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, founded the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882 in order, as announced at the time in several daily newspapers, ‘to raise a fund for the purpose of conducting excavations in the Delta, which up to this time has been very rarely visited by travellers.’” In asking the public for financial contribution, she enabled a host of new investigations and played a critical role in the whole enterprise of Egyptology. Most notably, she was instrumental in recruiting a young archaeologist named Sir Flinders Petrie to her cause.
Amanda Adams Page 3