But most of all, it is a travel-book. Ellen took every opportunity to explore her surroundings, and so the book is, as much as anything, a description of Egypt, particularly Cairo, and Constantinople (Istanbul) during the 1870s. She was always ready, when her work allowed, to jump on a donkey, or other means of transport, and explore.
Like many other western women who went to Egypt she found independence. She was no longer bound by the restraints that 19th century society placed on women. For many this liberating experience was almost intoxicating.
Lucie Duff-Gordon
Until shortly before Ellen had arrived in Egypt, for instance, Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon had escaped from London society to live in a house built on part of Luxor Temple, where she had found complete fulfilment. Lucie was so bitterly critical of Ismail, and his economic policies, that he regarded her with enough suspicion to intercept her mail; there was even a (somewhat half-hearted) attempt on her life of the "make it look like an accident" kind.
A few years later, in 1877, Amelia Edwards was to take her famous "Thousand Mile" trip up the Nile, an experience which not only led her to write one of the classics of Eyptology, but to go on to help establish the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society), which is still one of the foremost learned societies in British Egyptology.
Florence Nightingale’s visit to Egypt in 1849-1850 was to lead to an intense spiritual experience, even having a vision in the Temple of Philae. (She was to write an essay titled "Visions of Temples", in which she related the various temples that she had seen to her spiritual ideas). Like so many other women at the time Miss Nightingale was desperately searching for some meaning in the trivialised life that so many women of her social class, and era, were forced to endure. And Egypt seems to have focused her thoughts; the following year she was to study nursing at Kaiserswerth, Germany, which was to lead on to the achievements for which she has become famous.(Ellen’s own religious beliefs, by the way, do not seem to have been profound. She attended Anglican services as would have been expected of a governess of her time, and describes how she sat through some dreadfully boring sermons. As a governess she would of course have been expected to accept whichever religion her pupil of the time was being brought up in, and so no doubt on a professional level it would have been helpful to her not to have any very strong religious views of her own).
But back to Ellen’s experiences in Egypt.
Immediately after Bairam, Zeynab and Ibrahim, together with their companions Kopsès and Shefket (Ibrahim’s companion, a boy about two years older than him, who was described by Ellen as an "Abyssinian") and the educational staff were to take a trip up the Nile. However, the children had said so much about all the things they were going to see, that first the four Princesses and then Ismail himself decided to go – "our modest party swelled into a royal progress", Ellen wrote.
However, this was to in fact spoil the entire excursion. For a start, it lead to the trip being continually postponed, until Ismail was able to leave Cairo.
At first, thinking that only the children and educational staff would go, Ellen worried about the arrangements for washing sanitary towels, which were not, then, usually disposable, during the trip: "Bearing in mind the periodical cares of the laundry, which often made me seriously contemplate substituting paper for linen." (No doubt blotting-paper, or something like it, would have worked well enough in an emergency).
However, it’s not clear whose sanitary requirements Ellen was thinking of; possibly Zeynab’s and Kopsès’, who would have probably have reached their menarche at about this time, unless Ellen herself had a particularly late menopause.
Indeed, as a Victorian, putting cleanliness next to godliness, she was also worried about how the general laundry would be done. However, as things turned out, she would have done better thinking about food, rather than laundry.
The trip was postponed many times. As Ellen put it: "the cry of "wolf!" was repeated several times, on each occasion with less and less effect, until we began to disbelieve the whole affair." But finally, on 20 January 1872, the trip commenced, from Boulak, the river-port of Cairo.
A Khedival flotilla on the Nile, circa 1880s, perhaps showing some of the steamboats that accompanied Ellen and Zeynab's trip.
The royal fleet consisted of "six large steamers and seven dahabiehs [sailing houseboats]… had the number been only those originally proposed, we should all have been together in one steamboat, as was proper and consistent; but as it was, the larger vessels were taken up by his Highness, his harem, and his general suite, and the smallest steamer [called the Azaziah] was reserved for Ibrahim Pahsa and the Princess. When cabins had been allotted to them, to their two companions, Shefket and Kopsès, to the Princess’s French maid, and to Zohrab Bey [the harem physician] and his nephew, there was no room left for us."
A dahabieh (foreground) and a steamer of the 1870s
So, they were crammed on board a tiny dahabieh, that was towed behind the Azaziah. Right from the start they had difficulties with this:
"We had been told that everything would be prepared for us, so that we had nothing to provide except our own clothing. When we went on board… we found that nothing was ready for us… nothing but the barely furnished cabins." Fortunately they were able to hurry back to Choubrah Road, to get some furnishings from their house. (I can’t help but wonder what kind of monumental tantrum Emmeline Lott would have thrown at this point!)
The fleet set off, stopping first at the site of Memphis, and then crossing to Saqqara, where Mariette was busy at work in the Serapeum with his usual excavation tool, dynamite (see the post on Maggie Benson and Nettie Gourlay). They also visited the tombs of Ty and Ptah-hotep (in fact mastabas), both of which are a few hundred yards directly east of the Serapeum.
This was in fact an extremely bad time for Egyptian antiquities. Archaeological excavation was done by people who were no better than looters, temples were being destroyed to provide building-material for sugar-factories, and sebakh (fertiliser) diggers were removing the sites of ancient towns.
On the way back from Saqquara, Ellen’s donkey-boy thought that she would be impressed by his making the donkey – which he called the "Flying Dutchman" - gallop at high speed. The jolting made Ellen lose all her possessions, including her vital spectacles – which were, however, fortunately found by other members of the party following behind.
Zeynab and Ibrahim were taught on board the Azaziah. This meant the dahabieh being drawn alongside the steamer each morning, to allow the teaching staff to come on board it. The dahabieh was then pulled along behind, on a long rope, making reaching it impossible. This was bad enough if anyone wanted something from their cabins during the day, but was a major problem if anyone should be left marooned on board the dahabieh, as there they had nothing to eat or drink, all the food being kept on board the Azaziah. "Had we known to what we should have been exposed," Ellen wrote, "we would have brought with us some preserved meat in tins, some Huntley & Palmers biscuits, tea, coffee, and sugar, a [water] filter, and an Etna for boiling water."
In an attempt to industrialise Eypt, various Khedives had built large numbers of sugar-refineries (often from the stones of ancient temples). Despite their cost to Egyptian heritage, the refineries were not much of an economic success, as the party were soon to find out.
At el-Minya the fleet stopped so that Ismail could inspect a number of sugar-mills that he had built there. There was a palace at Minya, and a line of troops held sheets of cloth like two walls from the harem steamer to the palace, to "enable the wives of his Highness and their suite to disembark without being exposed to the gaze of men."
The stop was at first expected to take only two or three days, so that the Khedive could put the mills into working order. However, day after day was to pass without them continuing onwards.
So far during the trip Ellen had based her teaching on "history, and charming tales of fiction" (presumably to avoid the history becoming monotonous). The Khedive himself had wanted the childrens’ studies to be "exclusively devoted to the history of Eypt", and undoubtedly this would have been the perfect opportunity to teach Egyptian history; Ellen says that it was indeed her, and Mr. Freeland’s own plan.
Ellen lists the books that she taught this from: Mariette’s Aperçu de l’Histoire d’Egypt, and his Itinéraire. She also used a section called L’Egypte ancienne et moderne of a book called the Histoire universelle. In English they had Sharpe’s History of Egypt. They also had guides to contemporary Egypt.
To us, Mariette’s books show just what a limited grasp he actually had of Egyptian history, even by the standards of the time. Ellen described his version of it:
"Firstly came the Ancient Empire, the age of the pyramids, a period when the art of engraving on stones reached a perfection which has never since been attained. Then the Middle Empire, which was in existence when Abraham appeared, and to the last king of which Joseph was minister. Then came the New Empire, the age of Moses. In a voyage up the Nile the most frequent and glorious monuments belong to this epoch. Lastly, the Lower Empire, in which Egypt fell under the dominion of strangers, Greeks and Romans."
However, marooned at the palace at Minya for an increasing length of time, without anything to relate historical studies to, Ellen reverted back to teaching English one day, French the other.
She also organised games of rounders (the game known as base-ball in America) and hide and seek. At a time when physical activity for "young ladies" was still disapproved of in England, this was enlightened education! Still, she had to make allowances for Zeynab, whose "plumpness interfered rather with her speed."
Confined together in the palace at Minya, Ellen had an opportunity to get to know Kopsès better. "Kopsès", she wrote, "had great vivacity, and wonderful tact for one so young a person: she never intruded her opinions, but when required she expressed them with a free and independent bearing which to our preconceived ideas was totally inconsistent with slavery."
It was at Minya that Ellen unintentionally committed a breach of etiquette, asking Zeynab what her mother’s name was – so far, Ellen had only known her as the "Second Princess". Zeynab declined to answer, and to her great embarrassment Ellen learned that it was the height of bad manners to mention a woman’s name outside the harem.
Zeynab's mother, the "Second Princess" - Princess Jananyar
The men of the party amused themselves by slaughtering the local wildfowl, Ellen by watching dahabiehs sail up and down, each flying the national flag of the person who had hired it – people who were often indeed known to her. They all still looked forward to going further upstream, none more so than the teaching staff’s dragoman (interpreter and message-carrier), Shaheen. One of Shaheen’s wives lived above the First Cataract (at Aswan), and he had not seen her for many years. Despite this, it seems he had plans to take a third wife!But in the end, whatever was wrong with the sugar-mills, not even the Khedive himself, it seemed, could put them into working order. (In fact Minya was instead to later become a centre of Egypt’s cotton-trade). And so after three weeks, the journey was abandoned. The teaching-staff were sent back to Cairo by special train – although when they arrived, no carriage was available to take them back to Choubrah Road, which resulted in some difficulty and ingenuity to reach home!
Life was, for the moment, to return to normal. But plans were being made for Zeynab’s marriage…
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