Although Lucie missed her family acutely, her new life in Luxor embraced her and she increasingly turned her back on her English home. When her husband came out to Egypt in 1864, the couple spent just three weeks together. She came to resent the hordes of European visitors that now descended upon Luxor each winter, writing scornfully, “Thebes has become an English watering-place. There are now nine boats lying here, and the great object is to do the Nile as fast as possible.”30 Following the publication of her remarkable Letters from Egypt, tourists came to seek her out as yet another attraction. In 1867 Lucie wrote to her husband, “This year I’ll bolt the doors when I see a steamer coming.”31 Good health continued to elude her, but she found peace and contentment in her little house over the sanctuary at the southern end of Luxor Temple. Built originally by the English consul, Henry Salt, in 1815, the house is said to have accommodated Champollion when he visited Luxor—and, two years later, some of the French naval officers sent to transport the Luxor obelisk to Paris. By the time Lucie moved in, it was little more than a hovel, yet she called it “my Theban palace.”32 She also shared it with various uninvited guests—“The bats and the swallows are quite sociable; I hope the serpents and scorpions will be more reserved.”33 In hot weather, she lived in a room open on one side, from where she could watch the boats on the Nile and the sunset over the Theban Hills.
Lucie finally succumbed to illness and died in July 1869. When Amelia Edwards visited Luxor just five years later, Lucie’s house was as she had left it, “her couch, her rug, her folding chair were there still.”34 It took a novelist’s sensibility to appreciate the special allure of the place: “We were shocked by the dreariness of the place—till we went to the window. That window, which commanded the Nile and the western plain of Thebes, furnished every room and made its poverty splendid.”35 Lucie’s seven years in Luxor were the longest any European had spent in Upper Egypt. Even after her house was pulled down in 1884 during the excavation of Luxor Temple, she was remembered by the local people: “every Arab in Luxor cherishes the memory of Lady Duff Gordon in his heart of hearts, and speaks of her with blessings.”36
Another casualty of the temple’s excavation was an altogether grander dwelling, the house of the British consul, Mustapha Aga. Situated between the columns of the processional colonnade, it had played host to an almost endless round of parties each winter season as wealthy, aristocratic British travellers descended upon Luxor: “In the round of gaiety that goes on at Luxor the British consulate played the leading part. Mustapha Aga entertained all the English dahabeeyahs, and all the English dahabeeyahs entertained Mustapha Aga.”37 The menu for dinner on 31 March 1874, when Amelia Edwards enjoyed the Consul’s hospitality, was not atypical: “White soup (turkey); fish (fried samak); entrées (stewed pigeons, spinach and rice); roast (dall=shoulder of lamb); entrées (mutton kebobs, lambs’ kidney kebobs, tomatoes with rice, kuftah); roast (turkey, with cucumber sauce); entrée (rice pilaf); second course (preserved apricots, rice and almond pudding, rice cream, sweet jelly with blanched almonds). Drinks: water, rice-water and lemonade.” Followed by “pipes and coffee,” and all accompanied by native musicians on “fiddles, tambourine and darabukkeh.”38 It is surprising that the invalids who came to Luxor for tuberculosis did not return home with heart disease.
Of course, well-heeled travellers could not stay at the consulate full time, nor did they want to spend weeks aboard their dahabiyas, however well appointed. What they wished for was a grand hotel in the European style, with all the comforts of home but the climate of southern Egypt.
Ever since Thomas Cook organised his first tour to Egypt in 1869, hotels have sprung up all along the Nile’s eastern bank. From budget hostels in Luxor’s malodorous backstreets to a five-star luxury resort on its own private island in the Nile, establishments great and small accommodate the thousands of visitors who flock to Luxor each year. Modern tourist palaces are fast muscling in, but the grandfather of them all still stands elegant and serene, occupying the prime spot on the corniche.
Since it opened its doors in January 1907, the Winter Palace has been as much a Luxor landmark as the temples of the pharaohs. Built in colonial style amid tropical gardens overlooking the Nile, the hotel’s yellow stuccoed façade, replete with balconies and balustrades, presents an enduring image of early twentieth-century grandeur. But a building in so prominent a position was bound to divide opinion. In 1910 Pierre Loti, a French naval officer turned travel writer, wrote disdainfully of the Winter Palace:
a hasty modern production which has grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal hotel, obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of iron. Twice or three times as high as the admirable Pharaonic Temple, its impudent façade rises there, painted a dirty yellow. One such thing, it will readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure pitiably the whole of the surroundings.39
While the French may have bemoaned the hotel’s aesthetics, the British were more interested in its mod cons. Two medical officers with the splendidly Edwardian names of W. E. Nickolls Dunn and George Vigers Worthington, who were serving at the “Luxor Hospital for Natives,” wrote gushingly of the Winter Palace in their 1914 volume, Luxor as a Health Resort. They declared, “It is impossible to over-state the value to a visitor, be he in pursuit of pleasure or health, of such an hotel”40 and went on to describe “a magnificent hotel fitted with all the luxuries of the age … a splendid modern building.”41 Understanding their readers’ primary concerns, the medics singled out the hotel’s bathroom and kitchen arrangements for special praise:
The hotel is well supplied with suites, with private bathrooms attached: the rooms are all lofty, large and spotlessly clean … The kitchens, a feature of the hotel, are all above ground, staffed by Europeans, and are beyond criticism. The water supply comes from an artesian well in the garden, sunk through the rock by the Government experts, and no other water enters the hotel with the following exception: It has been found that the Nile water is preferable for making tea and coffee, consequently a pipe conveys the water to the coffee kitchen where it passes through a Berkefeld filter and then enters directly into a boiler, from which it is drawn. It can only be obtained after it has been boiled … There is no occasion to advise people to use Evian water for the cleansing of their teeth—they could drink the water in the bathrooms with impunity, if so inclined.42
While today’s guests would do well to ignore this last piece of advice, it is still true that the Winter Palace has the best views in Luxor: “The north-west front looks on to the river, the Theban plain and, beyond the plain, the Theban hills with their glorious and ever changing lights.”43 The garden may no longer include “6 acres of vegetables and fruit grown … under the supervision of a European head gardener,”44 but it remains an oasis amidst the bustle and noise of downtown Luxor.
The arcades under the elegant horseshoe-shaped terrace are occupied by various boutiques. Those on the southern side sell jewellery and textiles, while the Aladdin’s cave of Gaddis and Co., family-owned booksellers since 1907, still occupies the entire street frontage of the northern arcade and supplies one of the widest ranges of reading material in Luxor. Its neighbour, the venerable but ever-dingy Cheops Travel, offers guided tours of dubious quality to the west bank and tickets to the sonet-lumière at Karnak Temple. The corniche in front of the hotel remains a favoured spot for hawkers of all stripes to ply their trade. In the space of a hundred yards, I am offered “taxi,” “shoes,” “newspapers,” “caleche,” “ferry-boat” and “felucca.” The list of offerings can have changed little in a century.
Inside the grand entrance of the Winter Palace, calm and decorum are restored once more: high ceilings, marble floors, silken rugs and fez-wearing attendants work their magic. On the main staircase, art nouveau ironwork spirals gracefully upwards. In the dining room, chandeliers and gilded mirrors catch the light pouring in through sumptuously pelmeted, full-length windows with their unrivalled views of the Nile. Jacket and
tie are de rigueur in the 1886 restaurant, while afternoon tea is served daily at 3 p.m. in the Victorian lounge (originally the hotel ballroom). In the bedrooms, thick walls and soft bedding reduce the outside din of traffic to a distant, muffled hum (although the muezzin’s call to prayer at 5 a.m. provides a rude awakening). The guests who stay in this cosseted, pampered palace of luxury are as remote from Luxor’s hard-pressed citizenry as the Ottoman rulers of Lucie Duff Gordon’s day.
Since marking its grand opening over a century ago with a New Year’s Eve costume ball for the cream of European royalty, the Winter Palace has hosted its fair share of dilettantes and celebrities, from King Farouk to Omar Sharif, and it remains the hotel of choice for visiting heads of state and government. But perhaps nobody has graced its shady verandah more famously than George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert (1866–1923), fifth Earl of Carnarvon and co-discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Born into aristocratic luxury and succeeding to the earldom at the age of twenty-four, Carnarvon added to his family’s already considerable wealth through his marriage to an heiress of the Rothschild banking dynasty. As a leading member of the idle rich in those heady days before World War I, Carnarvon lived a life of unashamed hedonism.
A passion for speed—he later founded a renowned stud and became a noted patron of horse-racing—led him to take a keen interest in the newest technological innovation of the day, the motor car. But a motoring accident in Germany in 1901 left him disabled and prone to bouts of rheumatic pain in his legs, especially during the cold, damp winters at his Hampshire estate, Highclere Castle (now famous as the set for Downton Abbey). As a remedy, from 1903 onwards, he took to spending the worst winter months in the warmer, drier climate of Luxor; from 1907, as might have been expected, he stayed in the colonial elegance of the Winter Palace. In a typical year, he would arrive in early February and remain in residence until the end of March, a stay of six or seven weeks.
While sipping cocktails on the terrace and watching the ferries and feluccas ply the waters of the Nile, Carnarvon developed an interest in Egypt’s ancient past, and found himself drawn to the burgeoning discipline of Egyptology. For their part, Egyptologists were certainly drawn to Carnarvon, for what he lacked in historical training he more than made up for in wealth. Archaeologists with high ambitions but limited resources made a beeline for the earl. And so it was in 1907 that Carnarvon was introduced to the brilliant but irascible Howard Carter, forging a partnership between patron and practitioner that would result, fifteen years later, in the greatest archaeological discovery of all time—across the Nile from the Winter Palace, in the heat and dust of the Valley of the Kings.
From the initial discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb on 26 November 1922 to the official opening of the burial chamber on 17 February 1923, Carnarvon stayed in Luxor, where he was joined by other members of his family, participants in a news story that gripped the world. Carnarvon and Carter were at the centre of this whirlwind, so on 28 February 1923, seeking a few days’ peace and quiet, the earl left for Aswan. He should have stayed put at the Winter Palace. On his journey south, he was bitten on the cheek by an infected mosquito, and he inadvertently nicked the top of the bite when shaving. Blood poisoning set in and Carnarvon was hastily moved to Cairo for medical treatment; but it was too late. In the early hours of 5 April, he died at the age of fifty-seven—not from the pharaoh’s curse (his co-discoverer Carter lived to a ripe old age), but from the deleterious effects of the river and its abundant insect life. Carnarvon’s demise was just another case of death on the Nile.
IN THE SOUTHERN PART of Luxor, the temple and the nearby Winter Palace are the most prominent buildings. But they are not the city’s only attractions. Another building, in the northern part of Luxor, holds equal fascination as a site of antique religion and modern tourism. An hour’s gentle stroll along the corniche from the southern sanctuary bring you to its “mother temple.” The site we know today as Karnak is the greatest religious complex in the world. It has been described as “the noblest architectural work ever designed and executed by human hands.”45 In ancient times, the Egyptians knew it simply as “the most select of places.” It was no exaggeration.
The statistics alone are humbling: the site measures nearly a mile long by half a mile wide, covering an area equivalent to 168 football pitches. There are ten pylons, as many courts and at least twelve separate temples within three distinct sacred precincts. But figures scarcely do Karnak justice. Amelia Edwards summed up the effect of Karnak on the visitor with her customary literary flair: “The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one’s own dumbness, and littleness, and incapacity, too complete and crushing. It is a place that strikes you into silence …”46 Even after Luxor Temple had been newly excavated from the accumulations of centuries, it still ranked “second … to Karnak for grandeur of design and beauty of proportion.”47
The monuments of Karnak were continuously added to and rebuilt over a period of some two thousand years, the focus of royal patronage from the Middle Kingdom to the Roman Empire. The main temple, dedicated to the Theban god Amun-Ra, was founded in the Eleventh Dynasty (2050 BC), at a time of civil war in Egypt. Its royal patron, King Intef II, no doubt wished to win divine favour for his struggle for national domination. Amun-Ra was clearly pleased with the gesture, for the Thebans duly won the war, their victory ushering in a period of great cultural achievement. The subsequent Middle Kingdom saw the erection of stunning cult buildings at Karnak, foremost among them the White Chapel of Senusret I, constructed for the king’s jubilee in 1888 BC. Its beautiful relief decoration is without equal in all of Egypt. Another civil war, three-and-a-half centuries later, resulted in another Theban victory. This time, to thank their divine protector, the royal family elevated Amun-Ra to the position of state god. Karnak, his principal cult centre, became the focus of building activity on an unprecedented scale. Endowed with huge estates, it was also an economic institution of national importance, its priesthood the most powerful in the country.
The Karnak complex is laid out along two ceremonial axes, with a large sacred lake at their junction. The principal axis extends from east to west, from the sanctuary at the rear of the temple to the great gate-towers at the entrance. Along this great processional route lie a sequence of courts, embellished with obelisks, shrines and altars. The most impressive construction is undoubtedly the vast hypostyle hall of Seti I and Ramesses II—a room so vast that it makes you feel like an insect. Everyone who sees it in person comes away overawed. From David Roberts’ evocative paintings to a starring role in the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, this great space with its 134 papyrus-shaped stone columns never fails to impress. Behind the hypostyle hall lies the holy of holies, containing a granite sanctuary installed by Alexander the Great’s successor, Philip Arrhidaeus; and behind that, at the far eastern end of the main axis, is the sumptuously decorated Festival Hall of Thutmose III, complete with scenes of the king’s military campaigns in Syria.
The whole sequence of courts, from east to west, was designed to track the passage of the sun across the heavens from its rising to its setting. (At dawn on a few days in early December, the sun rises directly between the gate-towers, recreating the hieroglyphic sign for the horizon, the place of daily creation, before one’s very eyes.) But the orientation also had a practical, as well as a theological, purpose. For like most Egyptian temples, Karnak was a place not only of spiritual but also economic activity. Ministers and merchants, as well as priests and prophets, travelled to and from its hallowed courts. Since the principal means of communication was the Nile, it made sense for the temple to be easily accessible from the riverbank. Indeed, Karnak’s great stone quay, where ships of all shapes, sizes and cargoes would have docked in ancient times, has recently been excavated in front of the temple. A short canal linked it with the river and would have allowed craft to load and unload directly in front of the temple’s main entrance.
The importance of the Nile in the life of Kar
nak is illustrated by one of the most spectacular episodes in its long history. It began on 2 March 656 BC when a splendid flotilla set out from the royal residence at Memphis, bound for Thebes, some six hundred miles to the south. This was no ordinary convoy: its purpose was to convey Princess Nitiqret, daughter of King Psamtik I, to the great temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. There, she would be received by the priesthood and acknowledged as the future God’s Wife of Amun, the most important sacred office in Egypt after the High Priest himself. The institution of God’s Wife held great religious significance and equal political importance. When held by a close female relative, it gave the king the means of controlling the Theban priesthood and, by extension, the southern half of the country. For a monarch such as Psamtik I, whose origins and power base lay in the remote north-western Delta, winning over Thebes was a key objective. So, in the ninth year of his reign, Psamtik I sent his eldest daughter to join the college of priestesses at Karnak with the aim of securing her eventual succession as God’s Wife of Amun.
In overall charge of the journey was the flotilla commander Sematawytefnakht, and the next sixteen days of sailing up the Nile were to be the pinnacle of his career, the most important two weeks of his life. Planning for the journey had been going on for months in advance. Royal messengers had travelled upstream the length of the route, to persuade and cajole all the provincial governors through whose lands the flotilla would pass to supply provisions for the princess and her enormous retinue. Each governor would be responsible for providing the bread, beer, meat, poultry, fruit and vegetables to feed the convoy. In this way, the royal exchequer would be spared the entire burden of financing such a costly undertaking, and the regional potentates would be able to display their loyalty to the ruling dynasty.
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