Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (38 page)

It is fear of the Niam Niam together with the rocky bar revealed across the river by the falling waters of the dry season that decides the men to return. Crowds of natives march alongside the boat and appear to threaten it. When Capitan Selim wakes early to pray and sees just how many native fires there are along the shore he loses his nerve and refuses to go on.

But this mixed bag of Turks and Europeans had done enough – they had shown it was possible to penetrate the heart of darkest Africa. The race for the Nile’s source had truly begun.

5
•
Sex tourism on the Nile

She cried for marriage, and when married she cried again
.
Sudanese proverb

Muhammad Ali may have initiated the race to discover the Nile’s source; he had also, inadvertently, inaugurated the world’s first sextourism destination. Cairo had been the brothel of the East for centuries. It was no accident that the raunchy stories of
The Thousand and One Nights
(also known as
The Arabian Nights
) were collected in Cairo. The book may have been set in Baghdad but the happenings described were informed by Cairene excess and voluptuousness. Napoleon’s army vastly expanded the need for prostitutes in Cairo, and this remained much the same after he left in 1801. With Muhammad Ali’s embrace
of French learning and his heirs’ embrace of French culture, the popularisation of ancient Egypt by Napoleon’s programme of listing all the country’s monuments and the building with French expertise of the barrage, it comes as no surprise that some of the first tourists travelling the Nile should be adventurous Frenchmen like Gustave Flaubert, lured as much by sex as by the mystique of ancient monuments. And they had to go up the Nile to get their full taste of it because Muhammad Ali, in an attempt to curtail the loose legacy of Napoleon’s army, in 1834 had banished the courtesans of Cairo south – to the Nileside towns of Asyut, Esna and Luxor.

In 1840, the Nile traveller James Augustus St John reported on the
almeh
or
ghawazi
, the banished courtesans of the Nile. St John wrote, ‘In reality what is termed the “dance of the almé” is the opera of the Orientals. All ranks, and both sexes, young and old, delight in the exhibition; and the ladies of the harem, instructed in the art by the almé themselves, perform in their own apartments, for the amusement of their families.’ St John made his way to a village suburb of Cairo where the
almeh
were living. ‘They were all young; none perhaps exceeding twenty; and the majority between ten and sixteen years old. Some few would have been considered handsome, even in London, but the greater number had little beside their youth and the alluring arts of their profession to recommend them.’ St John was led to a coffee house where about a hundred dancing girls were all intent on the enjoyment of the moment. ‘Not being habituated to wine, coffee appeared to produce in them the same excitement and petulant gaiety to which Champagne or Burgundy sometimes gives birth among European women.’ The performance began and St John wrote of the bellydancing, ‘I fear that a company of accomplished almé, engaged by an opera manager, would draw crowded houses in Paris or London.’ He has recourse to Greek: ‘The dance, which is
porneia
mimetic, represents a tale of love; at least, as love is understood in the East.’

He omits any but the most oblique references to the main way the coffee-house dancers enhance their earnings. Muhammad Ali, before banning such girls, employed a
Pezawink bimbashi
, a Captain of the Courtesans, to administer the vice of his country. The girls were divided into four classes and each had to pay a special tax to the government which the
bimbashi
had to collect along with a list of their names. St John remarked, ‘Lately this honourable personage, after a lengthened
delinquency, was convicted of the most nefarious practices, among which was that of inserting in the list of courtesans, apparently through revenge, the names of several respectable ladies: the wives and daughters of his superiors . . .!’

6
•
Flaubert and his ‘little lady’

When the river straw burned, the sieve at home made of straw cried
.
Ethiopian proverb

And the sex tourists came. One of the more famous was Gustave Flaubert. Of course Flaubert, being a romantic as well as a sex addict, had other reasons for his visit to the East. In the mid-nineteenth century there was no more romantic journey than taking a
dahibiya
, a sailing houseboat, to see the great monuments of the Nile at Luxor, Kom Ombo and Aswan.

Flaubert, in search of the romance he had imagined in his first novel,
The Temptation of St Anthony
, set off up the Nile with his equally sexually active pal Maxime du Camp. It was du Camp, a pioneer photographer, who took the first photographs of the monuments of Egypt – from the Pyramids to the temple at Luxor; and it was du Camp who, after a mammoth three-day reading session, advised Flaubert to burn the
Temptation
novel. In between sleeping with prostitutes, Flaubert spent long hours musing on the beauty of the Nile cataracts, or rapids, in Aswan. His letters and diary entries suggest that it was here that Flaubert first came up with the idea for his great novel
Madame Bovary
.

I went up to Aswan in search of Flaubert. I wanted, in a kind of Alain de Botton moment of secular worship, to find the exact spot where Modern Literature was born. But instead of the black-granite rocky islands and surging currents of through-flowing water there were only the placid waters of Lake Nasser – and the giant curved concrete wall of the Aswan dam. The roaring cataracts that had mesmerised Flaubert and caused him to rethink his whole idea of literature were gone, subsumed under masses of concrete. Maybe it was a fitting tribute after all.

But what had caused this momentous idea for a starkly realistic novel
about sex and love rather than the tepid romance of St Anthony? Was it Flaubert’s encounter with the legendary courtesan Kuchuk Hanem a mere ten days earlier?

He and the photographer Maxime du Camp were at the furthest point south of their Nile journey, above the second cataract, now submerged by the waters of Lake Nasser. Flaubert marvelled at the river: ‘The water of the Nile is quite yellow; it carries a good deal of soil. One might think of it as being weary of all the countries it has crossed, weary of endlessly murmuring the same monotonous complaint that it has travelled too far. If the Niger and the Nile are but one and the same river, where does the water come from? What has it seen? Like the ocean, this river sends our thoughts back almost incalculable distances.’

It was here at the second cataract that he decided to give up his desire to rewrite a romance about the East and instead be absolutely rigorous. It was here he decided, surrounded by all that was ancient, to write the world’s first modern novel,
Madame Bovary
.

Flaubert had come to Egypt for many reasons: to escape failure, to rejuvenate his writing, to accompany his friend du Camp; but undeniably also for the simple pleasures of sun and sex. In a way he’s the prototype of a kind of modern traveller – not travelling solely for sex, but motivated by it, with ruins and river journeys as nice extras.

As we have already seen, the prostitutes, banned from Cairo in 1834, had decamped up the Nile. Still, the two determined young men still managed some screwing in Cairo. After satisfying themselves Flaubert paid for his servants to pleasure themselves with local prostitutes and remarked, ‘I shall never forget the brutal movement of my old donkey driver as he came down on the girl . . . all in one movement laughing with his great white teeth . . . the rags wrapped around the lower part of his diseased legs.’ Very quickly Flaubert amalgamated his former romanticisation of the East with an eye for its harsh and often bizarre details: ‘A week ago I saw a monkey jump on a donkey’s back and try to jack him off – the donkey brayed and kicked, the monkey’s owner shouted, the monkey itself squealed, and apart from two or three children who laughed and me who found it very funny, no one paid any attention.’

In Cairo they stayed two months at the Hôtel du Nil. The single photograph of Flaubert in his twenties was taken in the garden of this hotel. This photograph was one of the earliest taken in Egypt, a
calotype, made by immersing the finest Turkey Mill drawing paper in silver iodide solution and exposing it for two minutes through the camera. Flaubert must have been standing very still. His head is covered by what looks like a black fez topping a white turban. He is bearded and beefy, bearlike.

The pose, in the hotel garden in 1850, looks very similar to that struck by a devout Muslim in the standing moments before prayer. Flaubert’s eyes are fixed on the ground a few yards ahead of him. There is something black at the base of the picture, perhaps a window ledge. That’s it: du Camp is inside the hotel photographing the shy Flaubert, who wrote, ‘I would never allow anyone to photograph me. Max did it once, but I was in Nubian costume, standing, and seen from a considerable distance, in a garden.’ (The true narcissist refuses to be photographed; he is matched only by the one who insists on being photographed continually.)

The Hôtel du Nil was Flaubert’s and du Camp’s permanent base in Cairo. The owners were two Frenchmen: Bouvaret and Brochier. Bouvaret was a former provincial actor, a man of dubious taste who longed to make his hotel the ‘the last word in Parisianism’. Flaubert mocked him and his pretensions but stole his name, recalling it months later at the second cataract when he decided to write
Madame Bovary
.

Finally the two friends set sail up the Nile on a barge, a
cange
. Maxime du Camp made notes about their companions:

Slowly they sailed up the great grey-green river, against its constant current but aided by the breeze, always blowing, almost always blowing from north to south. It is this breeze, which balances and overpowers the counter-flow of the river, that has made the Nile such a wonderful conduit through the centuries. Flaubert loved the river with its curves and longueurs but soon became tired of the ruins that all tourists feel duty bound to inspect. He dreamed of the pleasures of the
ghawazi
, the banished dancing prostitutes of Cairo. In E. W. Lane’s
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
, first published in 1836, the author wrote: ‘Egypt has long been celebrated for its public dancing-girls, the most famous of whom are of a distinct tribe, called “Ghawazee”.’ They were different from Egyptians, living apart from the general population, with separate customs, their own social structure, and perhaps even speaking a different language.

When their boat arrived at Esna, a tumble-down town of dust and broken stones, Kuchuk Hanem, the most famous
ghawazi
of her time, sent her procuress, who had a pet sheep, to the river to meet Flaubert and du Camp. The pet sheep’s wool was painted with spots of yellow henna, and it had a velvet muzzle on its nose. They were led to Kuchuk Hanem’s house where she entertained them most royally.

Flaubert was excited. He wrote, ‘One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love . . .’

More than one writer had fallen for Kuchuk Hanem. In the same year that Flaubert met her, George William Curtis observed in his long-forgotten
Nile Notes of a Howadji
(
howadji
means ‘foreigner’) that Kuchuk Hanem was ‘a bud no longer, yet a flower not too fully blown’. When things hotted up he became coy, writing ‘whereupon, here the
curtain falls’. Flaubert was more detailed. He wrote, ‘her cunt felt like rolls of velvet as she made me come. I felt like a tiger.’ In another letter he wrote, ‘Towards the end there was something sad and loving in the way we embraced.’

It was at this point that Flaubert and du Camp made their way further upstream to the second cataract. Already Flaubert’s writing was changing from the purple prose of
St Anthony
. Instead of describing a moon-drenched landscape he wrote, ‘it was shining on my right leg and the portion of my white sock that was between my trouser and my shoe’.

Du Camp later observed of this time, ‘Flaubert’s future novel engrossed him. “I am obsessed by it,” he would say to me. Amid African landscapes he dreamed of Norman landscapes . . . on the summit of Gebel Abusir, which overlooks the Second Cataract, as we were watching the Nile dash itself against the sharp black granite rocks, he gave a cry: “I have found it! Eureka! Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary!”’

On the journey back down the Nile, du Camp and Flaubert again stayed at the Hôtel du Nil. Perhaps it was then that the famous photograph was taken. The posture is so reminiscent of leave taking, of the sadness of parting. Flaubert wrote after his second and last meeting with Kuchuk Hanem, ‘I intensely relished the bitterness of it all; that’s the main thing, and I felt it in my very bowels.’