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 solid 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