The Fall of the House of Wilde (4 page)

Algeria offered him the first agreeable taste of the exotic, and he pronounced his first day ‘the most exciting [he] had experienced since [he] left England'. ‘Nothing can exceed the variety and incongruity of costume you meet with in the narrow streets of Algiers,' he wrote, providing the reader with ample evidence. In Algiers, he wandered through the maze of streets and found the place wondrous and satanic. He met with an English physician resident in Algiers, who escorted him through the bazaars and informed him about the customs and histories of the multi-ethnic groups that made up the Ottoman Empire – the Moors, the Burnoose, Kadees, Jews, Turks, Arabs, the Swauves and Spahees, Bedawees and Kabyles. The diversity of peoples in Algeria inspired his curiosity in ethnography, a topic on which he would write much over the years.

When the sea was calm William could spend the day productively. What he observed from deck or lugged on board to examine – including a dolphin, which he dissected over three days – furnished material for future scientific papers. Part of his purpose in scrutinising sea life was to test the accuracy of the anatomical findings of the French naturalist and zoologist George Cuvier. He saw this French scientist as an exemplary man of the Enlightenment, in that ‘it was this [Cuvier's] knowledge that rescued animals from their supposed vegetable existence – this it was that called a fossil world into being . . .' Equally important for William was Cuvier's advancement to the highest ranks of French society through merit as opposed to class. Cuvier, according to William, ‘belonged to a country whose government cherishes science, and where the wealth of talent can purchase rank, and the labour of discovery and research is rewarded by even the highest offices of the state'.
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Mulling over the French Academy of Science's respect for Cuvier's learning, William, for neither the first nor last time, vented his ire on British public institutions' attitude to research. He was speaking about himself. Had money or support been forthcoming, he would ideally have devoted himself to research, and given his single-minded perseverance, there is no knowing what he would have achieved.

Doing nothing was quite painful for William. Though he speaks of drinking brandy and rum on deck with the crew, he also read volumes of books on board. By the time he visited Egypt, he knew everything about the country.

After five days at sea, on 13 January 1838, the ship anchored at Alexandria. Pandemonium greeted them, as donkey boys and camel drivers jostled for their business. William made good his escape and rode off to his hotel on the back of a donkey. The next morning the party visited the two red granite obelisks nicknamed ‘Cleopatra's Needles' and ‘Pompey's Pillar'. It fascinated William that these blocks of stone contained ‘a record of some of the mysteries of the religion of the most extraordinary, the most enlightened, as well as the most ancient people of the world'. It appalled him in equal measure that the donkey boys offered to chisel away pieces of the great stones for them to take away as souvenirs. ‘They did not at all understand our desiring them to desist . . . they laughed most heartily,' wrote William. Official control over ancient ruins was only introduced in the 1840s. Worse for William was the sight of ‘HMS' carved on the obelisk by the English. William suggested, in an article he wrote for the
Dublin University Magazine
, that the obelisk be removed to England to serve as a ‘testimonial' to Nelson's victory.
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He obviously was not troubled by the principle of appropriation or by considerations of imperialist grandeur.

Group visiting did not suit him. He preferred to wander off with Paulo, whom William describes as a Maltese servant, and who acted as his companion on explorations off the beaten track. Together they came upon an Arab slave den, which must have made William think he had dropped anchor in a dream world innocent of moral constraints upon the imagination. There were ‘primitive' extravaganzas galore. Boys and girls who had scarcely reached puberty engaged in unrestricted sexual licence. And ‘young ladies, although nearly in a state of nature, . . . were already beginning to assume the modesty of Mohammadan women, and to attempt a covering over their faces, while the rest of their persons were totally devoid of garments!' Nubian women danced a striptease for the insatiably lustful William, who lost himself in a state of ‘reverie'.
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The group departed Alexandria and travelled with eager anticipation down the Mahmudija canal to Cairo. The next morning two guides fetched William and Paulo to take them on donkeys to the tombs and pyramids of Sakara and Dashoor. En route William stopped in the Libyan desert to chisel a rock partly covered with sand, as he suspected the rock once formed the boundary of a vast city running from the pyramids to the Nile. He suggested that if one were to clear away the sand, many tombs and excavations would be found. He speculated that ‘it may be in some secret or traditionary knowledge of this kind that originates the story told by the Arabs, of there being a subterranean passage all along from the chambers of Sakara to the pyramid of Cheops'. If William were to visit the site today, he would have the satisfaction of seeing his conjecture was correct.

The expedition took him through the rubble of Egypt's ancient capital at Memphis. The land William rode over was covered with debris of pharaonic antiquity, with human bones and ‘pieces of broken mummy cases' littering the area. Femurs served as sticks. Locals peddled yellowed human skulls. Every object, for William, held potential significance. One object that attracted his attention was a mummy's abnormally shaped humerus, the later investigation of which yielded another scientific paper.

With the intention of visiting the mummy pits of the sacred birds and the pyramids at Giza at daybreak, William bedded down with Paulo and the Arabs in a sepulchre. The Arabs, having warmed to this zealous traveller, organised William's pallet in one corner and arranged the lid of a mummy-case for his pillow. Unable to sleep, William made off with his pipe to a nearby hillock and brooded on the ground beneath his feet. If only he could ‘dwell inside the ancient minds' of the pharaohs, of Joseph, of Herodotus, of Sesoratis, and see the world as they had done. He wanted to give ‘shape, form, and life itself to the undulating line of grey sand that occupied the space between [him] and the glowing fertile plain of Fayoum'.
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William wanted to compress all eras of history into one tableau in his mind and was as fascinated by the wonder of this archaeological dream romance as he was frustrated. The idea that what once was could never perish intrigued him, and he yearned for pad and pencil to clarify his thoughts. That this synchronous present can be thought but not made visible was what Freud realised in Rome when he compared the palimpsest of the city's ancient ground to the functioning of the unconscious.

William continued his brooding in the sepulchre. There the spectacle of the Arabs' dark bodies glowing from the illuminated fire, along with the ‘peculiarly aromatic smell', enchanted him. He savoured the magical beauty of their prayer chant, the shrill, reedy notes of an Arabic voice piercing the vastness of an African night. There too he listened to their stories that needed no translation, so mesmerising was the voice of the teller. Their urge to pass time telling stories reminded him of the Irish, and led him to conclude all humans are of one kind – it is only custom and social conditions which differ. The strangeness of spending a night in an inhabited tomb reinforced William's belief that each culture is structured by a system of codes, practices, dos and don'ts, taboos and sensitivities. He thought, for instance, ‘how the superstitions and prejudices of countries and people vary. How few English would like to inhabit tombs, surrounded by the mouldering remains of human bodies, as the Arabs of Sakkara do.' He thought ‘as long as [his] memory lasts that scene shall never fade'. William had an intuitive awareness of the relativity of culture – it saved him from the worst offences of Western superiority.

William rose with the sun and set off to visit the mummy pits of sacred animals. He intended to take back to Ireland for further investigation a number of the urns, which contained the embalmed ibises, the sacred birds so famed in Egyptian mythology. But an odd lapse of planning found William without a light. With the urns some thirty feet below the surface, it meant he would have to crawl in the dark through infested passages. ‘My curiosity got the better of my fears,' wrote William. With the invaluable help of the nimble Alee, an Arab boy who assisted him, he succeeded. William described the feat as follows.

All was utter blackness; but Alee, who had left all his garments above, took me by the hand, and led me in a stooping posture some way amidst broken pots, sharp stones, and heaps of rubbish, that sunk under us at every step; then placing me on my face, at a perpendicular narrow part of the gallery, he assumed a similar snake-like posture himself, and by a vermicular motion, and keeping hold of his legs, I contrived to scramble through a burrow of sand and sharp bits of pottery, frequently scraping my back against the roof. Sometimes my guide would leave me, and I could hear him puffing and blowing like a porpoise, as he scratched out the passage, and groped through the sand like a rabbit for my admittance. This continued through many windings, for upwards of a quarter of an hour, and again I was on the point of returning, as half suffocated with heat and exertion, and choked with sand, I lay panting in some gloomy corner, while Alee was examining the next turn. I do not think in all my travel I ever felt the same strong sensation of being in an enchanted place, so much as when led by this sinewy child of the desert through the dark winding passages, and lonely vaults of this immense mausoleum.
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The venture left him unconscious and only after a lapse of time did he come around and see the bounty he had harvested – six urns. William's readiness to go to any length to further his research may have been his way of proving to himself and to the world that he was cut from rare cloth.

But it was not all about the pursuit of knowledge; William was equally determined to undertake physical challenges. And there were few more hazardous than climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid. Few have attempted the ascent and many who did lost their lives. Nevertheless, William decided to give it a go. He shed hat, shoes and jacket, and hired two Arabs to assist him. He scaled the lower part easily enough. But as he advanced upwards, the polished, smooth stones made it more difficult. One guide had to place his raised hands against the projecting edge as the other took William in his arms, placing his feet on the other guide's shoulders. One man mounted to the next joint of the exterior by climbing on the other man's shoulders and they proceeded warily upwards. William wrote, ‘some idea may be formed of my feelings, when it is recollected, that all these stones of such a span are highly polished, are set at an angle less than 45, and that the places we had to grip with our hands and feet, were often not two inches wide, and their height above the ground upwards of four hundred feet; a single slip of the foot, or a slight gust of wind, and, from our position, we must all three have been dashed to atoms, long before reaching the ground'.
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He reached the summit and if ever there was a moment that could be called ‘the Romantic sublime', this must have been William's. He had scaled the first manmade mountain to rival nature. William could not resist carving his signature onto the Great Pyramid – adding to the Egyptian glyptic art his own autograph of steely Western will. Chateaubriand, the writer often regarded as the founder of French Romanticism, too carved his name on the pyramids for history to witness, though he neither inscribed it on the top nor used his own hand – he sent an emissary to sign on his behalf.

Crowds of tourists at the base of the pyramids waved and gestured, amplifying his pleasure. It amused him to see these tourists picnicking, content, he assumed, with just seeing things. William wanted to taste, to sense the total experience. For him, this was better done alone than in a group. His best moments were those stolen from company, wandering alone through the bazaars or haunting Cairo's coffee houses, absorbing the aromas of coffee and tobacco smoke. He liked nothing better than to slip into the rhythm of the husky baritone voice of a turbaned Arab storyteller. ‘Tis true,' he said, ‘that as I sat and listened among the crowd I could not understand one word he uttered; but I saw the fire in his eye, I felt the power though not the meaning of his language, and caught the spirit of his song, though I could not fully appreciate the letter; for such is eloquence – proudest, noblest of the innate powers of man, which all can feel – the untutored Indians surrounding the Mohawk warrior, equally with the refined audience of the gifted senator.'
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It is said that the writer Bram Stoker was one of those mesmerised by William's storytelling, and put the inspiration for a tale he wrote on Egypt, ‘The Jewel of Seven Stars', published in 1903, down to William.

When tobacco became an inevitable accessory to William's intellectual life, we do not know. What we do know is his view on stimulants, and his opposition of temperance societies for their disapproval of tobacco. In his view, the superior quality of Eastern tobacco acts differently on the nervous system. ‘It has neither the sickening nor narcotising effect of ours, but a gently stimulating action on the intellectual powers; at the same time it soothes and tranquillises the spirits.'
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He suggested duties should be lowered so ‘the poor man' could purchase these Eastern stimulants, affording him a bit of ‘luxury'. Only a man who knew the necessity and pleasure of smoking could extol tobacco to the extent he does. He wrote of the ‘natural perfume' of the tobacco from ancient Laodicea, and described the ‘long pipe of cherry-tree; or plain wood' through which it is best smoked. Relishing it as one would an art object, he described the pipe ‘ornamented with blue, pink, or scarlet silk, fastened on with gold thread, wrought in a frame in a most ingenious manner', ‘the mouth-piece of amber, ornamented with enamel, and in some with precious stones'. More likely, he was talking of himself when he wrote, ‘The Mohammadan is often as extravagant in the number and equipment of his pipes as is an Englishman in his dogs, guns, or horses.'
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