Anthony Sattin, author of the acclaimed novels Winter on the Nile and Lifting the Veil, is well versed in the history of travel along Africa’s most famous river. Here, he looks back at how things have changed over the past few centuries.
The Nile is the lifeline of Egypt, always has been, always will be. Hemmed in by desert on both banks, and running more or less due north, it has provided sustenance for the valley’s people and a structure for the year. Their calendar was divided into three seasons: Akhet, summer, the time of flood, Peret, the autumn sowing season, and Shemu, the spring harvest.
For as long as people have lived beside the river, they also appear to have sailed on it. Prehistoric rock carvings found in the desert to the west of the Nile show sailing boats powered by large, lateen-rigged sails. While lesser mortals floated on papyrus skiffs, ancient pharaohs sailed in long boats of Lebanese cedar, although the full-length boat, buried more than 4500 years ago beside the Great Pyramid in Giza, is powered by massive oars. Cleopatra famously used a barge to seduce Mark Antony – burnished with gold, as Shakespeare imagined it, and wafting perfume on the breeze. Later Roman emperors also enjoyed the rite of passage, boarding ship to sail on the river of history, although the pleasure waned after the Emperor Hadrian’s lover, Antinoös, was drowned in the river in 130AD. It was never clear whether the young man’s death was an accident, or a sacrifice to the river, but whatever had happened, the emperor expressed his grief by deifying his favourite and founding cities in his name.
But perhaps we should thank Napoleon Bonaparte more than anyone for the way we see the Nile. Napoleon had big plans when he invaded Egypt in the summer of 1798: he was going to revive the glory of the pharaohs and take control of the fastest route between Europe and the East. Then Nelson sank the French fleet off the Egyptian coast and Napoleon hurried home. If Napoleon revived anything, it was an interest in the Nile.
While the French army fought its way along the banks of the Nile, the soldiers marching in their woolen uniforms (how tempting the cool river must have looked!), a posse of French scholars followed behind with instructions to describe, in words and images, everything they saw. Literally everything. Every monument, every type of person, every shrub, plant and tree that grew on the land, everything that swam in the river. This wasn’t the beginning of western interest in ancient Egypt – that already existed – but the resulting 23-volume Description of Egypt did more than anything before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb to stimulate interest in the place.
After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the Mediterranean and the Nile were reopened to trade and civilian traffic. Your average Grand Touring Milord, setting off in search of experience, adventure and the odd piece of art or antiquity to decorate the stately home, now began to look to Egypt for his pleasures. Many less elevated Europeans soon followed in their wake. Charles Irby and James Mangles, a pair of British naval officers, were typical of the new wave. Not content with merely seeing Egypt, in the spring of 1817 they were commissioned by Henry Salt, the British consul in Cairo, to sail south. They sailed for Abu Simbel with the Cairo-based Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni and a plan to clear the sand dune that covered the entrance to the Great Temple of Ramses II. They stopped at Philae, just above the Aswan rapids, and as it was 4 June, they raised the Union Jack over the ancient temple and fired a 21-gun salute to celebrate the 79th birthday of mad King George III. “We frightened all the natives round,” Belzoni reported, “who could not imagine why we wasted so much powder.”
Over the next twenty years, the number of foreigners coming to see the glories of Egypt’s past increased dramatically. Some went specifically to see the Nile and its monuments, their curiosity stoked by the growing antiquity collections in Europe. Others took a break on their way to or from Britain’s growing empire in the east. All of them needed looking after.
There were several European-style hotels in Alexandria and Cairo by the 1830s and Samuel Shepheard opened his iconic Cairo establishment in 1841. But there were no hotels south of Cairo until much later in the century. Happily, by the 1840s there was already a guidebook to Egypt, written by the celebrated Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. In his two-volume account of what to see and how to see it, Wilkinson made clear that the only viable way to travel south was by boat, preferably a dahabiya.
The word ‘dahabiya’ is Arabic for ‘the golden one’ although the origins of this Nile vessel go back long before the Arabs: an ancient Egyptian would have been familiar with the outlines of the boat, if not the intricacies of its cabins, nor the contents of its trunks. As well as dahabiyas, there were also smaller Nile sailing boats – single-cabin cangias and feluccas, open boats with no cabins. Whichever boat one rented was going to be home for several months, so Wilkinson recommended having it properly kitted out. The first thing to do, after the rental had been agreed, was to have it taken across the river to the less-populated Giza side of the river and have it sunk, to kill off the rats and other vermin. Raised, dried, repainted, it could then be kitted out from the Cairo souks. “The only things not to be found, or not worth buying in Egypt,” Wilkinson assured his readers, “are guns, instruments, and books.” Another Englishman, travelling in the 1840s, also recommended taking a recipe book in case one met acquaintances along the river and had to mount an impromptu dinner party.
In the absence of skilled guides to the antiquities, books were essential to the success of a tour. There was already a ‘very well composed’ library at the Egyptian Society in Egypt, which travellers could consult for free. But it was as well to bring your own, as Florence Nightingale did when she spent the winter of 1849-50 on the river. Along with Wilkinson’s book, she took some thirty other volumes – her sister described her as being “laden with learned books”.
Nightingale spent three months on her dahabiya, which she claimed was the largest on the river, but still only had two sleeping cabins (her maid slept in the salon). Gustave Flaubert, travelling at the same time, was on a smaller cangia and took a little longer. However long the tour, the instructions were always the same: sail as far south as fast as you can. The Nile touring season began after the summer, when the temperatures dropped a little, the river was high and the winds blew from the north. The idea was to reach Aswan while the river was still high enough to have your boat pulled over the rapids. So if you happened to reach Luxor when the wind was up, the captain would sail straight past, knowing you would see it at leisure on your way back. At the southernmost point of your journey – usually Abu Simbel – the mast was taken down, the oars attached and you floated and were rowed back north.
Gardner Wilkinson also suggested that “when the steamer is established on the Nile to run between Cairo and Thebes [Luxor], a traveller who is interested in antiquities should only take advantage of it for going up the river.” The steamer service was already running in the winter of 1849, but Florence Nightingale ignored Wilkinson’s suggestion. She only used the steamer to speed her letters home, vowing: “I would never go in a steamer on the Nile, if I were never to see the Nile without it.”
Twenty years after Nightingale and Flaubert sailed upriver, the Nile was busier than ever, with many people attracted by the opening of the Suez Canal. Among them were the Prince and Princess of Wales, on an exclusive tour organised by the ruler of Egypt, and thirty-two Britons on a tour led by Thomas Cook. This was Cook’s first Egypt venture and it gave clear signals of what was to come. Cook boasted that his clients were served Yorkshire bacon, salmon from Liverpool and Cheddar cheese, but The Times correspondent WH Russell, travelling with the royal party, complained that Cooks’ tourists were “all over the place. Some are bathing off the beaches; others with eccentric head-dresses are toiling through the deep sand after an abortive attempt to reach Philae.”
Within twenty years of that inaugural tour, Egypt had become the mainstay of Cook’s worldwide business. Many other entrepreneurs followed and, with so many foreigners travelling up the Nile during the winter season, the experience – the way we see Egypt and the Egyptians – was transformed. The river was cut and the flood halted by the opening of the first Aswan Dam in 1902, but by then, you could also do the whole thing by rail.
The lower section of the Nile, between Cairo and Luxor, has been closed to traffic since the early 1990s, which has made the Luxor to Aswan section a busy stretch of water. Egyptians prefer to use their roads and rails for transport, but there are now more than three hundred floating hotels shuttling foreigners up and down this southern stretch, as well as a large fleet of feluccas and a growing number of dahabiyas. And that suggests that however changed the nature of a visit, however crowded the sights, the lure of the Nile is as strong as ever. And as ever, we want what people have always wanted, to have the river and the sights to ourselves. If only…
Anthony Sattin charters a dahabiya and organises two Nile sailing tours a year. His next one will depart in November 2011. Details from
A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt will be published by Windmill on 30 June (£8.99). Lifting the Veil: Two Centuries of Travellers, Traders and Tourists in Egypt was published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks in May (£9.99).
Plan your trip Getting there British Airways (www.ba.com), BMI (www.flybmi.com) and EgyptAir (www.egyptair.com) all have direct flights between London and Cairo. Cheaper, albeit non-direct options are available from Lufthansa (www.lufthansa.com), Alitalia (www.alitalia.com), Swiss International Airlines (www.swiss.com) and KLM (www.klm.com).
Reaching Luxor or Aswan from Cairo is easily done using internal flights (EgyptAir) or the government railway (www.egyptrail.gov.eg).
Getting around Over 300 floating hotels, ranging from the bare basics variety to the ultimate in luxury, now cruise between Luxor or Aswan. Wooden feluccas and dahabiyas also ply this route, and make for a more traditional experience. A few cruises operate on Lake Nasser, allowing visitors to sail right up to Abu Simbel when the tour buses are long gone.
When to visit The best times to visit the Nile in Egypt are in February-March and October-November. In these months the weather around Luxor and Aswan is sunny and hot (25-30 degrees Celsius), but the lack of humidity means the warmth is not overwhelming. The temperature around the pyramids in Cairo during these times is five to ten degrees cooler, which makes for pleasant touring.
Visas Three-month tourist visas are needed for most visitors to Egypt, but they are easily acquired at points of entry. Fees vary with the nationality of the visitor: UK citizens £15, USA citizens US$15, EU nationals €25.
Find out more Egypt Tourism Authority (www.egypt.travel)
