Such was the situation on the evening before they were to set foot for the first time on Arab soil. When they got up the next morning, Forsskål and Niebuhr found that the young slave girls, as the latter writes in his diary: “have been taken away during the night in complete silence.” The sentence sounds so sad at this point, which marks the end of the long journey from Copenhagen; at the same time it leads us to think of the fate of these young girls. Perhaps Niebuhr and Forsskål had the same thoughts. Perhaps when they found the women’s cabin empty that morning, and when Forsskål thought of the dangers that now threatened the expedition, he remembered his own question at the start of the journey. Why call Arabia Felix “happy”? Why was it always so difficult to catch that shimmering will-o’-the-wisp?
3. A Year in Egypt
After the departure from Rhodes, a new element entered into the affairs of the expedition. The threat of death—death from without in the form of dangerous epidemics and the often hostile attitude of the natives in these foreign parts, and death from within in the form of a resentful man’s desperate plans of vengeance—cast an ominous shadow over all their days. It became the crude reality of their existence and (so to speak) the counterpoint to their search for a “happy” land, that other more or less unconscious motive at the back of their minds. Fear was allied to hope, thus making the picture of the five men simpler, yet at the same time more plastic, as a ray of sunlight brings a relief to life not merely by virtue of the surfaces that catch the light, but also by reason of the lines etched by the shadows. After Rhodes we see the members of the expedition picked out in this cross-lighting.
The threat of death also decisively affected the course of events in more concrete ways. The expedition’s stay in Egypt, which was originally to have lasted only for the month needed for a passage through, now by reason of the new circumstances came to last more than a year, without any other result than to aggravate still further those problems they had wanted to eliminate. In their daily routine, in their letters, reports and diaries, this new situation records the ceaseless fluctuation in the general mood; new impressions momentarily dispel their despondency, and the work of registering them claims their full attention: but it is never very long before new conflicts and new threats betray the murky background to their enthusiasm. This swing of the pendulum characterises the remainder of the expedition—except that the individual swings of the pendulum do not diminish with time, as in the world of reality, but on the contrary increase.
This process begins in Alexandria. The members of the expedition arrived in the town depressed, but the wealth of new impressions soon dispelled their melancholy. Even on the first day Forsskål was engrossed in his botany. The otherwise rather detached scholar was quite overwhelmed at the sight of “the splendid new flora growing here quite openly, not even a hint of which really shows in the forced atmosphere of our greenhouses at home. The people, the country, nature, everything was new to me; all the plants were new. I could think of nothing else but collecting and observing.”
Forsskål was now away for days on end. He went wandering off over the land near the sea from early morning until sunset; or he stood for hours, bent over the same little flower-bed in one of the gardens in the town. The palm trees, which apparently he saw here for the first time, are commented upon with delight in his diary, and in Alexandria he began his search for the rare balsam tree of which Linnaeus so very much wanted to see a cutting before he died. This tree was the prime objective on the botanical side of the expedition, and in Forsskål’s diary we follow his expectations and his disappointments. “They told me to-day that a genuine Mecca balsam tree could be seen in a garden outside the town. Without a moment’s delay I rushed off to seek this rarest of all trees. But at the place I had been told of I found only an empty space where a tree had once stood, perhaps not the right one at all. Later I was directed to a Jew who lived inside the town and who was said quite definitely to have this rarity planted in a stone jar. The Jews live in their own quarter, which is reached by a single door from the street; and in the houses there are nothing but dark passages leading from one family to another. I braved these rather dubious ways, but found nothing apart from Mormordica balsamina. The moment was not yet to be when the genuine Opobalsamum could be seen and described.”
It was to come. For the present there were plenty of other rarities to see and describe. In the company of Niebuhr, Forsskål visited the relics of Alexandria’s greatness. They made their way from place to place on donkeys, which everywhere stood ready saddled on the streets for hire. They saw the ruins of Cleopatra’s palaces, Pompey’s Pillar, and the famous obelisks, not to mention the catacombs beneath the town, whose dark passages they dared not enter until they fired off a few pistol shots to frighten away the jackals that lived there. Forsskål discovered that the houses in Alexandria were built of the same kind of stone as was found in the hillside where the catacombs had been hewn out, and supposed that these had originally perhaps been only a quarry, where the work of creating a new town underground kept pace with the cutting of the stone for the other town on the surface. The philosopher in the botanist rose to the surface; and standing before the many memorials to the past, he time after time began to brood upon the course of history: “My ignorance of these matters could in no way diminish my respect for the ingenuity and industry of these earlier generations as evidenced by these splendid ruins, nor alter the realisation that our great works of architecture, of which we are so proud to-day, will probably also in the fullness of time become ruins themselves. It is uncertain whether they will be esteemed as highly by posterity as we with good reason honour the memorials of the ancient Egyptians.”
Most of the ruins which Forsskål and Niebuhr visited in 1761 had already been described by another traveller from Denmark, the young naval officer F. L. Norden, whom Christian VI had sent to Egypt in 1737 and who had sailed up the Nile as far as Nubia. Norden recorded his journey partly in words and partly by means of a large collection of engravings, which appeared after his death in a splendid publication called Voyage d’Egypte et de Nubie, the third and last volume of which had been issued only six years before the Greenland left Copenhagen. As there was already a map of Alexandria in this work, Carsten Niebuhr decided not to add any map to his own description of the town, but instead devoted himself to checking the more important of his previous predecessor’s survey measurements. While engaged on this work, he unexpectedly found himself in a difficult situation. A bit of high ground near Pompey’s Pillar had proved to be a suitable place for taking bearings because it commanded a view of a large part of the old city wall. While Niebuhr was working with his instruments, a crowd quickly gathered round him: “One of those present, a Turkish merchant, noticed that I had directed my astrolabe towards the town. He was so curious that he insisted on looking through the instrument’s viewfinder, and was rather disquieted when he saw a tower standing upside down. This gave rise to a rumour that I had come to Alexandria to overturn the whole city and stand it on its head.”
At first Niebuhr was not disposed to take much notice of the talk this aroused. But then signs of unrest began to appear in the town. The matter was laid before the governor, and Niebuhr’s Turkish servant refused to accompany him when he had this terrible instrument of destruction with him, so that Niebuhr had to replace him by another who was less apprehensive. On a number of occasions people tried to tear his astrolabe away from him in order to break it. Very soon he only dared use it outside the town, but there too misunderstandings occurred. One day Niebuhr wanted to take some readings of the altitude of the sun in the southern part of the Nile delta: “As I was working, a peasant from a nearby township came by and appeared to be very interested. As I wanted to show him something he had never seen before, I directed the eyepiece of the quadrant towards the town, but he too was quite terrified to see all the houses upside down. He asked my servant what the cause of this could be; and the latter answered that the Government was dissatisfied with the i
nhabitants of that particular town and had therefore sent me to destroy it. The poor peasant became greatly distressed and asked if I would not wait long enough for him to go and bring his wife and children and his cow to safety. My servant assured him that he had two hours left, and the peasant rushed off home.”
Then came a swing from the comic to the grave, and from enthusiasm to dismay. During their stay in Alexandria the members of the expedition lived in the house of the French Consul; and when one late afternoon they went up to the flat roof to enjoy the cool of the evening as the sun sank over the roofs and minarets of the town, they suddenly witnessed a distressing scene in the street below them. A number of Bedouin robbers who had made their way into the town from the desert were discovered by the populace, and those of them who did not succeed in escaping were surrounded in front of the consul’s house and beaten to death by the angry crowd. This gruesome event made a profound impression on the European scholars, for whom this first encounter with Oriental brutality was a warning of the risks they themselves ran if ever they had to face a hostile and excited mob. From that day on Niebuhr only dared use his astrolabe when he thought he was completely safe.
The perils surrounding them still included the one represented by von Haven. At the beginning of October, Niebuhr wrote to von Gähler, once again referring to the Dane’s purchase of arsenic and giving full details of his attempt to get control of the finances of the expedition and make himself its leader. Right from the start von Haven had been at daggers drawn with the others, said Niebuhr, and he told how not only he himself but also Baurenfeind and even Kramer had finally told von Haven that they wanted no more to do with him. “What is one to think of the kind of man who is completely lacking in courage and yet possessed of an enormous desire to dominate?” Niebuhr ended his letter by repeating his own threat to shoot von Haven if he tried to poison them. It is clear that he was seeking von Gähler’s help to rid them, on their arrival in Cairo, of their intolerable colleague. Of the need to be rid of him all were agreed.
During their time in Alexandria, however, no further news came from the ambassador in Constantinople, and on 31st October they left the city aboard a small Egyptian vessel which took them along the coast to Rashid or Rosetta, lying near the western arm of the Nile where it runs into the Mediterranean. For Forsskål their arrival at the Nile delta meant a whole series of new revelations: the endless flocks of migratory birds which kept to the inland lakes, the broad flat fields where rice and clover were grown between isolated clumps of tall palm trees. In Rashid they found lodgings with some Franciscan monks; and a few days later one of these monks accompanied Niebuhr, Forsskål and Baurenfeind to a watch-tower on the outskirts of the town, from which they had an extensive view over the green delta. There Baurenfeind made one of his most successful drawings of the whole expedition. Forsskål, too, attempted a description of the view: “From this point of vantage we saw this incomparable landscape, the town of Rashid, the citadel in Aboukir, Lake Madie, the Mediterranean sea, the long reaches of the Nile with its islands and banks, all spread out in front of our eyes in the glory of the Egyptian summer.”
On 6th November, the journey was continued on a Nile boat to Cairo. When the wind was against them, five men had to go ashore and haul the heavy vessel upstream with a rope. In this way they made very slow progress; but the gentle tempo suited Forsskål very well, because every time he saw a rare flower on the bank he had plenty of time to jump ashore and fetch it for his collection. The rest of the time he sat on deck following the changes in scenery along the river: its palm trees, its brown mud houses with their flat roofs covered with great piles of seed corn, which every morning attracted a flock of small birds; the rice spread out to dry on large areas of earth stamped flat by children of about the age of ten, the girls completely naked, the boys wearing only a red skullcap; and now and then a man riding on a donkey in a threadbare blue coat, or a woman wading out of the river with an earthenware jar on her head.
At sunset they anchored some little distance outside the towns. Because of the frequent river robbers, they had to mount a guard every night. He could be seen walking back and forth on the deck, a black silhouette in the moonlight, along with the stubby mast and the long slanting boom. If any suspicious rustling noises were heard among the reeds, the guard fired his pistol once or twice to show that the people on board were armed and ready to defend themselves. The crack of the shots resounded harshly in the steaming night. Once some men were heard running barefoot close by the boat and a terrified heron flapped into the air, blacker than the night. The guard lowered his pistol and watched the bird disappear and all was quiet again in the flat, sucking flood-land.
2
On 10th November, 1761, the expedition arrived in Cairo. Von Haven described their lodgings in town in a letter which he sent a fortnight later to von Gähler, a letter which reflects the concern of an elegant gentleman of the world for problems of comfort and etiquette.
“On the evening of the fifth day, we arrived in Cairo harbour. The next morning, Wednesday, 11th November, the Dutch Consul’s interpreter came to accompany us into the town. Meanwhile I remained with a Frenchman near our luggage, which I later had carried to the house that had been rented for us in the French quarter from M. Clément. When we got there, I saw to my great consternation that the house consisted of only three very poor rooms, without any furniture and without any glass in the windows. They told us it was customary in this country to let houses without furniture and without glass in the windows, and that it was up to us to furnish the rooms and fit glass in the wall openings. The Frenchman, who saw the difficulty of our position, immediately offered to provide us with some furniture. The Dutch Consul offered us his house; and here there would in fact have been room for us all. Our doctor, Herr Kramer, accepted a room there with thanks; whereas I for my part did not think it would be entirely advantageous to take accommodation in this house, partly because it is so far away and partly because the Venetian Consul—from what I have been able to discover—is the declared enemy of the Dutch Consul. Finally, the Frenchman offered me an excellent and extremely comfortable apartment in the house of M. Bezoardin, the most prominent French businessman in this country, and I accepted their offer, particularly as this house was situated in the French quarter. Herr Baurenfeind has a room with the Capuchin monks. Herr Forsskål and Herr Niebuhr are now living alone in the house which was rented for us all from M. Clément. There we also have our servants and our kitchen. We have our own food prepared for us, since we brought from Alexandria the necessary fuel, wine and so on.”
Apart from this last detail—the shared kitchen, which soon begins to give rise to new and dramatic suspicions—they had discovered an arrangement that operated to general satisfaction. By insisting on keeping the primitive accommodation rented from M. Clément, the two friends, Forsskål and Niebuhr, had managed to isolate von Haven, while he in turn was delighted with his comfortable accommodation and with the company of the French diplomats and businessmen, with whom he held long and cultured conversations about Voltaire and Mademoiselle Clairon. No doubt the amiable Kramer was pleased at the chance to get away from his scheming compatriot and from Forsskål’s and Niebuhr’s rather disturbing energy and initiative. Since leaving Copenhagen he had not been able to do anything, had not collected a thing nor written a line. He needed a holiday. It was extremely exhausting to have to watch the kind of energy that Forsskål and Niebuhr displayed.
The other two were hoping for a reply from Constantinople to say that von Haven was to be separated from the remainder of the expedition. But when at length, more than a month after their arrival in Cairo, they received a letter from the Danish Ambassador, its contents were a bitter disappointment. Von Gähler began by expressing his consternation at what they had written from Rhodes; nevertheless he was reluctant to believe that von Haven could really have had such frightful plans. It would be altogether too infamous, too awful. Therefore he was of the opinion that an attempt shou
ld be made for the present to go on living as colleagues with the Danish philologist, and above all not to let him realise that Kramer had informed them of his purchase of arsenic. As far as they possibly could they must try to conceal their anger and dislike of him, and pretend that relations between them were friendly and based on mutual confidence. Above all, they must not allow what they knew to be passed on to others. Anything of that kind, von Gähler said, would be in the highest degree displeasing to His Majesty, and could easily draw upon them his extreme disfavour. In this connection, Niebuhr was reproved for mentioning that, if circumstances made it necessary, he might have to shoot von Haven. “An act of violence of this kind, by drawing the attention of the entire world, would be most untimely and would in large measure destroy not only the fame which has grown up round the royal expedition but also the honour of the entire nation and the confidence with which the world’s most distinguished scholars are following your expedition.” Finally, von Gähler informed them that he had passed on a report of the matter to His Excellency the Minister of State, Baron von Bernstorff, in Copenhagen, to whom he had also transmitted their request to be separated from von Haven. Now it depended on Bernstorff alone what decision was to be reached in this matter; and until his orders had been made known, von Gähler urged them to remain in Cairo and preserve the unity of the expedition.
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