lacrimae rerum
IDear friend,
I’ve been spending time in archives again. It is an early-spring morning and there is that barely suppressed immanence in the trees in the park. Few leaves yet but next week will be different. Too cold and wet to sit for long on one of the benches, but I do. Even the dogs aren’t hanging about. It’s been raining. There is a word for the smell of the world after rain: petrichor. It sounds a little French.
Everyone seems to be off and away at this hour. All this forward energy, propulsive.
I get up and walk along the damp gravelled path, out of the great gilded gates into the avenue Ruysdaël and turn left up the rue de Monceau. I ring the buzzer outside number 63 and wait for a response.
I’m going back to archives. That strong pull up to those rooms high in the attics, the servants’ quarters, going back a hundred years.
II
Dear friend,
I am making an archive of your archive.
I find inventories, carbon copies, auction catalogues, receipts and invoices, memoranda, wills and testaments, telegrams, newspaper announcements, cards of condolence, seating plans and menus, scores, opera programmes, sketches, bank records, hunting notebooks, photographs of artworks, photographs of the family, photographs of gravestones, account books, notebooks of acquisitions.
Each document is on a different kind of paper. Each has a different weight and texture and scent. Some have been stamped to show when a letter has been received and when answered. Archives are a way of showing how conscientious you are and it is clear that this is a place of discreet and powerful concentration.
Why is so much copied? Why carbon copies, almost weightless?
Here on the fifth floor of 63 rue de Monceau amongst the servants’ rooms is a room lined with deep oak-panelled cupboards. It used to be l’ancien garde-meubles, the old storage room, according to the architect’s plans from 1910. Each cupboard is full of ledgers and volumes of letters and boxes of photographs. Some ledgers are double-stacked. It is a whole world. It is a family, a bank, a dynasty.
I want to ask if you ever threw anything away.
I find the letters about excursions to restaurants with gastronomic friends. I find instructions to the gardeners for the annual replanting of the parterre, instructions to your wine merchant, to the
bookbinder to keep your copies of the Gazette des beaux-arts in perfect red morocco, instructions for the storage of furs, instructions for the vet, the cooper, the florist. I find your responses to the dealers who write, daily.
Here are your notebooks of purchases. The first inscribed ‘Before 1907 – 22 Novembre 1926’. Second one ‘3 Janvier 1927 – 2 Août 1935’. They are meticulous.
I find manifests for cargo, manifests for people as cargo.
I find the manifests for your daughter. For your son-in-law. For their children.
I find this difficult.
Dear friend,
As I am mostly English I want to ask you about the weather.
I want to enquire about the weather in Constantinople and out in the Halatte Forest where you hunt with the Lyons-Halatte in blue livery at the weekends and at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and out at sea. Gusty. I know that you had a rather splendid yacht but I’m not sure if that was a plutocratic purchase of obligation or pleasure. In fact, I want to know more about your obsession with speed. All that bowling along in the newest motor car with the wind buffeting you, the Paris to Berlin race, everything flying past as France disappears into the dust made by your Renault Landaulet. In 1895 you sit high up in a cap and goggles and a leather motoring coat, a blanket over your knees, and you are ready to take on the world. It is a sunny day. The shadows of the car are long. The road is empty.
I wonder about the weather in the paintings by Guardi that you have bought for le petit bureau, the small study. The gondoliers are straining against the wind past the Piazza San Marco. The pennants are flying. The lagoon is an empyrean jade.
I want to know about the porcelain room where your Sèvres services, les services aux oiseaux Buffon, are displayed in cabinets, on six shelves, and where you eat your lunch alone – do you look out of the window and see the branches of the trees swaying gently in your garden and beyond it in the Parc Monceau? In 1913, you planted acer, Chinese privet and deep-red-leaved Prunus cerasifera ‘Pissardii’, cherry plum trees. You were thinking ahead, of course.
This is how the English ask how you are. We talk about the weather. And trees.
I’ll ask again.
Dear
I realise that I’m not entirely sure about how to address you, Monsieur le Comte.
As I shuffle through the letters from the dealers and the tradesmen soliciting your attention, your patronage in the matter of the anniversary exposition, your kindness in allowing us to remit this bill, you are addressed in various orotund ways. I like the collegiate greeting I found this morning from a friend from the Club des Cent inviting you to join him on a gastronomic adventure in a private restaurant car: ‘Mon cher Camarade’.
In these things I am caught between not wanting to offend and not wanting to waste time. Monsieur is possible and dignified and might lead to Cher Monsieur.
So I am not going to call you Moïse. And to call you Camondo sounds stentorian, a barked greeting across a library or dinner table. I know we are related in complicated ways but that can wait. So I am writing to you as friend.
We shall see how we get on.
I feel strange about signing off too –
Dear friend,
I’d like to ask you about the carpet of the winds. It is in le grand salon, the large drawing room, overlooking the park.
It is one of ninety-three carpets woven at the Savonnerie manufactory between 1671 and 1688 for the Galerie du Bord de l’Eau in the Louvre. This is the fiftieth. The four winds puff their cheeks and blow their long horns and the air is knotted and ravelled with gusts of ribbons and Juno and Aeolus. There are crowns and more trumpets and cascades of flowers deliquescing and stiff acanthus framing it all and it is gold and blue; the colour of the wind along the wharfs of Galata, out at sea. This is early-morning stuff, bracing.
It used to be a longer carpet when you first walked on it in the house of the Heimendahls – fellow financiers – in the rue de Constantine, and when they were in some financial embarrassment you bought it from them. I’m pleased to find that Charles Ephrussi helped you buy it as he knew you and them, knew everyone, could deal with this sort of thing, charmingly, and made things happen. Charles is important to me, the cousin who set me off on my adventures.
And I suppose I want to know that you notice it. Notice that you are walking on air.
On exhalation.
Dear friend,
Because it is a Parisian spring out there I want to open all the windows of your gorgeous, golden house.
And there are a lot of them. The facade to the rue de Monceau is seven windows wide, modelled by your architect on the spare elegance of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, but rather brilliantly there are fifteen windows on the park side where the straight facade becomes two wings framing a grand semicircular bay supported by Corinthian pilasters. This is a house that you cannot understand without a plan. And forgive me this conceit but just imagine the air moving, reaching round these rooms and up that sinuous staircase, reuniting the winds in these paintings and tapestries and the carpet of the winds. And maybe starting with this golden carpet wasn’t quite right but I’m feeling rather cheerful being here and I suppose I wanted to write to you about what is under your feet: if I could work this out then I could get a fuller feeling for where you start.
I’ve spent quite a few years in your company and it seems only sensible to talk about beginnings.
You were born in a ‘stone house’ at 6 Camondo Street in Galata in Constantinople and spent the first nine years of your life looking out over the Bosphorus. There was ‘an adjoining pavilion in which there is an oratory and baths, opposite the winter garden’. That is a pretty telling genesis. Not many people begin in a street with a familial name. Or indeed a palais or hôtel or palazzo, or a house with an oratory, but we will get to that in time. It’s a bit of an issue. But
stone suggests distinction. Then I find out a little more, that the whole of Galata seems to have been owned by your family, and that your grandfather was responsible for my favourite staircases in the world, those sinuous intertwined runs of steps, breathing in and out down a hillside. I had a photograph of this staircase by CartierBresson above my potter’s wheel for years. I’d look up, hands covered in clay, and think elsewhere.
If I’m obsessing about working from the ground up we could start with dust; I know that dust matters to you.
On 20 January 1924, in the ‘Instructions and advice for the curators of the Musée Nissim de Camondo’, you write:
I wish my museum to be admirably maintained and kept meticulously clean. The task is not an easy one, even with the first-class staff, of whom there must be a sufficient number for this job; but the work is made easier by a complete vacuum cleaning system which works cheaply and marvellously well. Due to its powerful operation, this method of cleaning should not be used for antique carpets, tapestries and silks but is of great benefit.
Your house is so clean, so charged in its defences against dust. You don’t want time to change anything, light to fade the tapestries, heat to warp the veneered furniture, the panelling, the parquet floors, dust to damage the collection. You also worry about damp.
On rainy days, the public should enter via the wrought-iron doors from the covered motor car entrance linking the courtyard to the mews that leads to boulevard Malesherbes. The door is approached via a wide paved area which could be covered with matting and where one could place umbrella stands.
The weather must be kept out, the windows kept closed. We need to talk about this again.
VII
Dear friend,
It is not that I don’t like being clean, it is just that I’m drawn to dust. Dust comes from something. It shows something has happened, shows what has been disturbed or changed in the world. It marks time.
A few years ago I was asked to be part of an exhibition about Giorgio Morandi. I went to Morandi’s apartment in the via Fondazza in Bologna where he lived for thirty years, with his mother and sister, his modest studio through a door off the dining room. Here he arranged and rearranged his votive jars and vases and painted tin cans into still lives, marking down their choreographic positions in pencil on the tables he had made. And over these objects, wrote John Rewald, a visiting art historian, was
a dense, grey, velvety dust, like a soft coat of felt, its colour and texture seemingly providing the unifying element for these tall bottles and deep bowls … It was a dust that was not the result of negligence and untidiness but of patience, a witness to complete peace … The dust that covered them was like a mantle of nobility …
You live without negligence or untidiness but I hope you might understand the ‘witness’ element of this. I am sure the ‘mantle of nobility’ will speak to you.
Without dust, Monsieur, it is harder to find the traces.
I look back at the traces of my own family and think of how they started out in a shtetl – dusty – and then moved to Odessa on the Primorsky Boulevard overlooking the Black Sea. And then on to the Ringstrasse in Vienna and to the rue de Monceau – ten houses up the hill from where you live, here in Paris – and think that they must have been living in one vast building site after another. Unpaved streets and the horses and carts and carriages and the stonemasons working outside the house and in, and then the carpenters and plasterers and painters and gilders, each producing their own clouds of particular dust, foul in winter and worse in the summer. With the fires in every room and the gas lamps that give off that sweaty sootiness and then the Second Empire soft furnishings – all those padded seats, all that operatic nonsense around curtains and blinds and pelmets and trailing swags – there must have been dust settling everywhere.
To keep dust-free you need to be rich and exacting and have servants to endlessly sweep away all those traces that might show where you have come from.
This is the parallel, dusty journey of our families.
I’ll give it a rest.
Monsieur,
‘Ash … the very last product of combustion, with no more resistance in it … [represents] the borderline between being and nothingness. Ash is a redeemed substance, like dust,’ wrote W. G. Sebald.
I don’t quite understand these words, but they haunt me. They feel close to the heart of what I need to ask you.
So, Monsieur, I need to look for the traces.
I’ve read as many books as I can find and catalogues and scholarly articles, some of which make sense. I’ve found myself returning to all my old habits, moving my Paris books down from the top shelves to be near at hand, searching notebooks from twenty years ago. The Goncourt journals are back. Proust is back, and some Balzac, and Huysmans, though I’m not sure I can face him again. And I can promise you that I really have done the legwork on the way that the taste for japonisme changes in Paris, the salons and the salonnières, the Dreyfus Affair of course, Edouard Drumont and the antisemitic press, duelling, Bizet, beards, moustaches, flâneurs. I can walk with you through the Jewish mansions of the Plaine Monceau. I know far too much about who my cousins slept with a century ago.
The archives in the attics help but now I need to look for those things that have not been catalogued and filed and photographed. You were pretty definitive in your wishes for this gift of the house and collections, decisive in the planning about where you want visitors to go and what they can see.
And what is off limits.
I haven’t written to say that there are a few things that I just don’t like in the house, Monsieur, as that seems a little graceless. But the bacchante stuff doesn’t age well. And then there is that really ghastly nude above your bed. It is an allegory of sleep apparently but it is pretty charmless, to be honest. This isn’t really about taste.
It is more that these suites of great rooms are so carefully calibrated that there is a consequential gravitational pull up and down, to the attics and to the cellars, the stuff you didn’t want us to find, the stuff that survived your editing, your prohibitions. I’m in search of that.
When I was tracing my own family I only truly understood the Vienna house when I stood in the cellars and looked up into the dizzying spiral of the service stairs, the hidden circulation of people that made it work, kept it afloat.
So I start in the kitchens and work my way through the house avoiding the public spaces. Your architect René Sergent had just finished refurbishing Claridge’s in London when he designed these spaces and they are the last word in efficiency. The ventilation and plumbing are just so, the scullery doorknobs grooved to fit the hand of a kitchen maid in a hurry. The white faience tiling gleams. The cast-iron range looks as sleek as one of your new motor cars in the vastness of your garages. All the windows have frosted glass. The light is subdued.
The door to the service stairs is discreet, barely noticeable. A feathery arrow under the escalier de service points the way to a metal staircase wrapped around a central lift. I go up. The first door takes me into the butler’s pantry with its zinc sinks for washing glasses and plates. A hidden door leads into the dining room. On the next floor is the butler’s suite of rooms, his second pantry and the silver room with its empty velvet-lined shelves for cutlery.
Pierre Godefin enters your service in 1882 as butler to your uncle and stays here till 1933. He gets clear glass in his windows and a view of the park through the trees. There is a board to hold all the keys. He sits here and orders turpentine and chamois leathers and tissue paper and horsehair brushes and crystals and Buhler paste and knife powder and Curémail and green soap and floor cloths and Goddard powder and alcohol and straw brooms. Monsieur Godefin orders jam from Fouquet’s and petits fours from Boissier. He knows you.
The next floor and the housekeeper’s room, a window looking out into the courtyard. And beyond it habillage de Mlle, the rooms for your daughter Béatrice, and in the shuttered light there is a marble
column with a luggage label tied to it and furniture under a dust sheet, an abandoned chair, something that needs repair. The wallpaper is delicate, green, entwined flowers: perfect for a young woman’s bedroom. Her bathroom is untouched. A frieze of delft landscape tiles between two yellow bands runs round the room. Her bath is in an arched alcove. Shadows hold it all. I close this door very carefully.
The fifth floor, the attics – room after room for linen, for washing, one for luggage, one for trunks. The servants’ bedrooms and bathrooms. The dressing rooms with the deep oak wardrobes where your clothes were stored and that connect your bedroom and your son Nissim’s with discreet spiral stairs, escalier du valet de chambre. This is where the archives are now.
The stone balustrades that hide the roofline from the park and the street mean that light only reaches in at head height. There is a cupboard with broken light fittings laid out. Some more broken chairs. I open a door and find Louis Vuitton luggage from the 1920s.
A bench in a corridor is labelled l’Art Nouveau Bing 22 rue de Provence Paris. A bent enamel label, Toilettes Fils domestiques, is nailed at floor level in an empty room, washed pink. A door handle with a label F1. Emptiness.
Remember this. Holding on to the thread, it passing through your hands, a skein, it twists back on itself. It seems to weigh nothing, disappear. Holding the story, your story, Monsieur, Ariadne’s thread.
Dear friend,
As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well.
Actually – if I can put aside that Englishness for a minute – I know it really well. It is just that I’m a little embarrassed by how much time I’ve spent in the rue de Monceau, how many days I’ve spent reading about it, haunting it.
It started twenty years ago on a morning not unlike this one. I’d walk slowly up one side of the road from the boulevard Haussmann up to the rue de Courcelles, to the stretch where it starts to get interesting, and then past the small turning into the Parc Monceau, a green glimpse at the end of the avenue Ruysdaël. Then past your uncle Abraham’s vast ‘monstrosity’ at 61 and your elegant gates at 63, up to the boulevard Malesherbes, and over into the golden hill of mansions to stand – or loiter, you might say – outside number 81, the Hôtel Ephrussi, ten houses up from the Hôtel Camondo.
I had inherited a collection of Japanese netsuke – 264 small, intricate and seductively touchable ivory and wood carvings – from my beloved Jewish great-uncle Iggie Ephrussi and the compulsion to understand where they had been in my family history had taken me over. This collection started here. It was bought by your friend Charles Ephrussi, and kept in a vitrine in the suite of rooms that he occupied, alongside paintings by his Impressionist friends. The story started in the rue de Monceau. It took me on a journey across
Europe and back two hundred years. Now when I return I stand outside and lay a hand on this house affectionately.
And what makes this street so special is that this is a street of conversations, a street of beginnings. No one is here by chance. It is part of a new development in an undistinguished part of Paris when it is laid out in the 1860s by the Pereire brothers. There is a park already here that they remodel in the English manner with a little lake and bridge and smart flower beds full of annual flowers that need to be tended and renewed and weeded so that there are always gardeners head down and meandering paths where ‘the great dames of the noble Faubourg … the female “illustrations” of “La Haute Finance” and “La Haute Colonie Israélite” promenade’. There are benches, useful for assignations. But over time the park becomes a little cluttered with fountains and monuments: Maupassant is here with a reclining devotee; Gounod has three of them looking tragic; Ambroise Thomas and Alfred de Musset make do with one apiece. Chopin wins by getting a piano too.
The park keepers unlock the black-and-gold gates at six. They are splendid gates.
The Jewish families who move to this district come from elsewhere. This place offers a chance to bring your family to secular, republican, tolerant, civilised Paris and build something with selfconfidence, something with appropriate scale, something public. Both our families, the Ephrussi and the Camondo arrive in 1869 –mine from Odessa, yours from Constantinople – and both our families buy plots of land in the rue de Monceau that same year. At number 55 is the Hôtel Cattaui, home to Jewish bankers who have moved from Egypt. There are a couple of Rothschilds over the road and two of the three plutocratic and scholarly Reinach brothers live right next to the park. Henri Cernuschi, who lives diagonally across from you, isn’t Jewish but is in exile from Italy for his political views. And there are artists and writers here. At number 31 Madame Lemaire holds a salon on Thursdays where the throngs can admire both her watercolours of flowers and themselves. Proust grows up round the corner and plays in the Parc Monceau, baked potatoes in
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Expedition to discover the sources of the White Nile, in the years 1840, 1841, Vol. 1 (of 2)
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Expedition to discover the sources of the White Nile, in the years 1840, 1841, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Author: Ferdinand Werne
Translator: Charles William O'Reilly
Release date: April 25, 2024 [eBook #73465]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Richard Bentley, 1849
Credits: Galo Flordelis (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/University of Pretoria)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPEDITION TO DISCOVER THE SOURCES OF THE WHITE NILE, IN THE YEARS 1840, 1841, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***
M A P OF THE WHITE NILE, laid down from the Diary of FERD WERNE by H Mahlmann 1848
Hillmandel & Walton Lithographers. Richard Bentley New Burlington Street, 1849. (Large-size)
E X P E D I T I O N
TO DISCOVER THE SOURCES OF
T H E W H I T E N I L E,
IN THE YEARS 1840, 1841
BY FERDINAND WERNE.
From the German, BY CHARLES
WILLIAM O’REILLY.
IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I.
LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET, Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty. 1849.
PREFACE.
T rich contents and originality of the work before us will escape no one who casts a glance at it, however hasty that may be. It presents the liveliest views of the Natural Productions and People of regions hitherto entirely unvisited. The surprising novelty of the phenomena is described by a writer of much experience, bold energy, and intense devotion to the land of the South. We welcome it, therefore, as a pleasing contribution to our literature of travel, often so insipid. The discoverer of the Source of the White Nile, under the vertical rays of the sun in Equatorial Inner Africa, will share the same fate as his illustrious predecessor, James Bruce, the discoverer of the Sources of the Blue Nile, if many of his statements should be doubted, criticised, and misunderstood.
We have, however, no pretensions to be defenders of them. Some ten years later, perhaps, their justification, with the exception of a few errors, may follow our Herodotean wanderer into a terra incognita. Such was the case with a Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, James Bruce, and Mungo Park.
Two French accounts have preceded the present narrative of a German fellow-traveller, in one of the three vast expeditions by water, undertaken by Mohammed Ali in 1840 and the succeeding years, with unequal success, for the discovery of the Sources of the Bahr el Abiad. We welcomed the French accounts on their first appearance, notwithstanding their meagreness and doubtfulness, in consequence of their main results. At the same time we expressed our hope that we should be better informed of these events by their fellow-traveller, for we were already aware of the exertions of the author of the present narrative. Everything, therefore, introductory to this Work will be found in the undermentioned pamphlet, to which it is only necessary here to refer to avoid repetition in a preface:—
“A Glance at the Country of the Source of the Nile, by C. Ritter, with a Map, Berlin, 1844, and three Supplements—1st, by F. Werne, the Second Expedition to discover the Sources of the White Nile, from November 1840 to April 1841, pages 42-50. 2nd—On Carl Zimmermann’s annexed Chart, to shew the Upper Country of the Nile. 3d—Dr. Girard on the Nature of the Soil of Central Africa on both banks of the Upper Bahr el Abiad, to the foot of the Mountains of the Moon, pages 68-72., principally from the mountain specimens brought home by Mr. Werne.”
We have the pleasure of possessing, in the present more accurate statement, many new data and remarks on earlier accounts, though, doubtless, these will bring on a controversy, for the acrimony of which the Author has himself to blame. When, however, such sarcasm is directed in an instructive and legitimate manner, as that against D’Abbadie, in the convincing Appendix, (to which we must here draw attention, in order to understand the whole,) we cannot blame the Author, who has gained by toil and labour positive facts, for rendering them secure, as far as possible, against malicious presumptions and arrogant hypotheses. Science, moreover, is always the gainer by these discussions.
The annexed Map has been newly constructed, by Mr. H. Mahlmann, with his usual scrupulous accuracy, from the manuscript of the Journal, and the notes of the Traveller. Though, under the present circumstances, it leaves much here and there to be desired, yet by comparing it with that of Bimbashi D’Arnaud’s, executed and published at Paris in 1843, it makes a very useful addition to the Work. Still much instructive elucidation and enlargement of knowledge might be gained by a complete description and pictorial representation of the wonderful collection of Natural Productions, Works of Art, Weapons, Household Utensils, and other objects, hitherto the only one we possess. In the annexed engraving we give a specimen of these curiosities, collected by Mr. Werne’s care, on his journey to Bari, and afterwards incorporated by him, in addition to his Collection of Natural History, with the Royal Museum of this city,
where they are to be viewed, to the number of one hundred and twenty-six different articles.
C. R .
B , July 27, 1848.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER II.
COMPOSITION OF THE EXPEDITION AHMED BASHA; HIS CHARACTER SCENE BETWEEN MOHAMMED ALI AND SHEIKH SULIMAN OF ROSSIÈRES SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVE HUNTS SULIMAN EFFENDI, THE SICILIAN POISONER DEATH OF MUSTAPHA BEY VAISSIÈRE AND THE EUROPEANS IN EGYPT PUCKLER MUSCAU. AHMED BASHA’S WIFE. DESCRIPTION OF KHARTÙM. — BLUE AND WHITE NILE. — DEPARTURE OF THE EXPEDITION. 29
CHAPTER III
VILLAGE OF OMDURMAN. — MOHAMMED EL NIMR, THE BURNER OF ISMAIL, MOHAMMED ALI’S SON. MEROE AND THE PYRAMIDS. SENNAAR WANT OF DISCIPLINE ON BOARD THE VESSELS SCENERY OF THE RIVER TOMB OF MOHA-BEY DIFFERENT ARAB TRIBES HILLS OF AULI MANDERA AND BRAME SULIMAN KASHEF REMARKS ON HIS GOVERNMENT AQUATIC PLANTS THE SHILLUKS AND BARÀBRAS LITTLE FEAST OF BAIRAM. CHARACTERS OF THIBAUT, THE FRENCH COLLECTOR, AND OF ARNAUD AND SABATIER, THE ENGINEERS. HONEY. MANDJERA OR DUCKS. FEÏZULLA CAPITAN’S EPILEPTIC FITS. WOODED ISLANDS. THE HEDJAZI. 67
CHAPTER IV.
MONOTONOUS SCENERY. CULTIVATION OF DATE-PALMS. EL AES. BOUNDARY OF THE TURKISH DOMINIONS. REPUBLIC OF APES. — HUSSEIN AGU’S FAVOURITE MONKEY. — CRUELTY OF EMIR BEY. ADVENTURE WITH A CROCODILE. BELIEF OF THE TURKS IN THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS LIEUT ABD ELLIAB, THE DEVOTEE THE TAILORING PROPENSITIES OF FEÏZULLA CAPITAN A “FANTASIE ” FEÏZULLA’S INTEMPERANCE GUINEA-FOWLS ABU SEID DESCRIPTION OF WATER PLANTS, AND GRAPES PECULIAR TO THE WHITE NILE THE AMBAK-TREE. GEBL DINKU. ABDURIECKMAN, CHIEF OF THE SHILLUKS, AND SULIMAN KASHEF’S BARBARITY. HIPPOPOTAMIA, AND CURIOUS SUPERSTITION OF THE SAILORS. THE DINKAS AND THE SHILLUKS. THE LOTUS. MOUNT DEFAFAUNGH TAMARIND TREES THE TAILOR-CAPTAIN, AND INSUBORDINATION OF HIS CREW FIRST APPEARANCE OF GNATS
CHAPTER V.
A STORM TOKULS OR HUTS OF THE SHILLUKS THE TALLE, A SPECIES OF MIMOSA THE GEÏLID THE BAMIE UEKA WILD RICE OMMOS THE SHILLUKS A LARGER NATION THAN THE FRENCH! IMMENSE POPULATION ON THE BANKS OF THE WHITE ARM OF THE NILE. THE HABAS OR FORESTS. A TURKISH JEST! — LEECHES. — DISEMBARKATION ON THE LAND OF THE SHILLUKS. DESCRIPTION OF THE TOKULS. CONDUCT OF THE BEDOUINS TOWARDS THE PILGRIMS TO MECCA THE MURHAKA MANNER OF CATCHING GAZELLES SÜRTUKS OR CANOES OF THE SHILLUKS REFUSAL OF THE KING OF THIS NATION TO VISIT THE VESSELS TREATMENT OF HIS AMBASSADORS AT KHARTÙM THE BAOBÀB TREE DHELLÈB PALMS. WINDINGS OF THE RIVER. OSTRICHES. HILLS OF ASHES OF THE DINKAS. RIVER SOBÀB. 131
CHAPTER VI
ANT-HILLS. TRIBE OF THE NUÈHRS. THE JENGÄHS. KAWASS OR SERJEANT MÀRIAN FROM MOUNT HABILA. DESCRIPTION OF HIM. TOKULS OF THE JENGÄHS. FIRST APPEARANCE OF GAZELLES. THE RIVER N’JIN-N’JIN. 153
WORSHIP OF TREES. THE GALLAS OR STEPPES. BLACK COLOUR OF THE RIVER. NEW SPECIES OF PLANTS. THE BITTERN AND IBIS “BAUDA” OR GNATS: THEIR DREADFUL STING LIEUT ABD-ELLIÀB’S CRUELTY TO HIS FEMALE SLAVE THE TOKRURI OR PILGRIM CURIOUS SUPERSTITION WITH REGARD TO THESE MEN MOUNTAIN CHAIN OF NUBA PAPYRUS ANTIQUUS OR GIGANTIC RUSH. GAZELLE RIVER. DEAD FISH. DIFFERENT SPECIES OF SNAKES. ARABIC SONGS AND FESTIVITY ON BOARD. — JENGÄHS SUPPOSED TO BE WORSHIPPERS OF THE MOON: THEIR MANNER OF TATOOING. STRIFE BETWEEN THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS ANTIPATHY OF THE FRENCH ENGINEERS TO EACH OTHER LOCUSTS TORMENT OF THE GNATS: THEIR VARIOUS SPECIES BARBARITY OF THE TURKS ON THE FORMER EXPEDITION MARVELLOUS STORIES OF THE ARABS HATRED OF THE NATIVES TO THE TURKS.
CHAPTER VII.
QUESTION OF THE NAVIGATION OF THE NILE KING OF THE SNAKES. OFFERINGS TO HIM BY THE ARABS. KURDISTAN. MÀRIAN’S AUTHORITY OVER THE NEGROES. THE TAILOR CAPTAIN AGAIN. DHELLÈB-PALMS. WANTON DESTRUCTION BY THE CREW. ELEPHANTS: WHITE BIRDS ON THEIR BACKS. POISON-TREES THE NATION OF THE KÈKS: CUSTOMS AND DESCRIPTION OF THEM FLESH OF CAMELS AND GIRAFFES MERISSA PREPARED FROM ABRÈ THIBAUT DISCOVERED TO BE AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE RECOLLECTIONS OF GREECE WILD CUCUMBERS FEÏZULLA CAPITAN’S DRINKING PROPENSITIES 186
CHAPTER VIII.
ARNAUD’S IGNORANCE AND SELIM CAPITAN’S CUNNING HATRED OF THE THREE FRENCHMEN TO EACH OTHER. THE ENDERÀB TREE. THE POISON TREE HARMLESS. REMARKS ON THE LAKES IN CONNEXION WITH THE WHITE NILE. — THE WOOD OF THE AMBAK TREE. FONDNESS OF THE ARABS FOR NICK-NAMES THE AUTHOR DEFENDED FROM GNATS BY A CAT INTERVIEW WITH A KÈK HUSSEÏN AGA’S DRINKING BOUTS WITH FEÏZULLA CAPITAN DESCRIPTION OF A SUN-RISE VISIT OF THE KÈKS SULIMAN KASHEF AND THE LOOKINGGLASS
221
CHAPTER IX.
TURTLE-DOVES. DESERTION OF BLACK SOLDIERS AND PURSUIT OF THEM. INTERVIEW WITH NATIVE WOMEN. GIGANTIC STATURE OF THE KÈKS. — THEIR PASSION FOR GLASS BEADS. FEÏZULLA CAPITAN’S QUARREL WITH A SUBALTERN OFFICER SYLVESTER’S EVE A “HAPPY NEW YEAR ” VILLAGE OF BONN WANT OF SHADE IN THE FORESTS CURIOUS TATOOING AND CUSTOMS OF THE NATIVES A WOMAN’S VILLAGE MODESTY OF THE WOMEN MEAT BROTH REPORT OF HOSTILE INTENTIONS OF NEGROES FRENCH EXPEDITION TO EGYPT UNDER NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.
CHAPTER X.
250
SHEIKH DIM CLUBS OF THE KÈKS AND CAPS SIMILAR TO THOSE OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PRIESTS. RAPACITY OF THE CREW. TRIBUTARY LAKES. HEIGHT OF THE SHORES. THE TRIBE OF THE BUNDURIÀLS. DUSHÒÏL, THE KÈK, ON BOARD SELIM CAPITAN’S VESSEL. HIS SIMPLICITY. TOBACCO PLANTATIONS THE GREAT SHEIKH OF THE BUNDURIÀLS FISHING IMPLEMENTS OF THIS TRIBE THEIR TOKULS, AND GIGANTIC SIZE OF THE MEN ANTELOPES OF THE ARIEL SPECIES APATHY OF THE CREW, AND INDIFFERENCE AT THE LOSS OF THEIR COMPANIONS PHILOSOPHY OF A NATIVE SINGULAR CONTRAST BETWEEN THE FEATURES OF THE SHEIKHS AND THE OTHER NEGROES. — NATION OF THE BOHRS. — THIBAUT’S BARTER. REED-STRAW ON FIRE, AND DANGER TO THE VESSELS FATALISM OF THE TURKS GREETING OF THE NATIVES: THEIR SONG OF WELCOME 285
CHAPTER XI.
NARROW ESCAPE FROM CROCODILES ILLNESS OF THE AUTHOR DESCRIPTION OF THE ELEPHANT-TREE CUSTOM OF MAKING BEDS ON ASHES VERY ANCIENT SULIMAN KASHEF SHOOTS A CROCODILE STRONG SMELL OF MUSK FROM THESE ANIMALS THE TRIBE OF THE ELLIÀBS WAR DANCES CHARGE AGAINST ARNAUD. INJURY TO VESSELS BY HIPPOPOTAMI. SULIMAN KASHEF’S CIRCASSIAN SLAVE. CULTIVATED LAND. THE FELATI. APPEARANCE OF A
319
MOUNTAIN. TRIBE OF THE TSHISÈRRS. STRATA OF THE SHORE. RICINUS PLANTS. FOUR LOWER INCISORS WANTING TO THE NATIVES ON THE SHORES OF THE WHITE NILE AGILITY AND STRENGTH OF THE NEGROES MORE MOUNTAINS APPEAR
E X P E D I T I O N
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
D and conquests, which so frequently go hand in hand, are of the greatest importance to the history of mankind. Like a combination of streams, they break through natural boundaries and the rocky dams of ages, and open a way for the incessant progress of civilization through new and untrodden paths. Yet glorious enterprises, costly equipments, and hazardous exploits, may conceal a swelling kernel of material interest beneath a husk of fine reasons, as if these constituted the primitive motive. Thus Mohammed Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, has done very much for science, especially geography, without even thinking of it, whose comprehensive relations, with respect to the higher requirements of mankind, lie far beyond the limits of his ideas. Neither has he honoured with his study the hieroglyphics in the Biban el Moluk near Thebes, where the black Kushi bring golden rings as tribute to the Pharaohs. Yet he knows, and is so exceedingly fond of these rings (Okiën), which in Ethiopia even now serve instead of money, that, so far as the destroying arms of this much-famed satrap reach in Belled-Sudan, no more okiën are to be seen. Moreover, he is making exertions to follow and secure those that have retreated and eluded his grasp, which affords an excellent opportunity for extending our knowledge of the countries and people of East and Central Africa. He sacrificed
his son Ismail, and, through the Defterdar, devastated and depopulated this beautiful country, merely to secure to himself the way to the gold regions; though he might have attained his object much better, had he sought to elevate the country in every possible way, and to re-establish mercantile confidence. For, from the earliest ages, a market has existed here, to which gold comes, first hand, in the leaf and grain form, by barter with the inhabitants of the interior, just as it has been separated from the sand of the torrents, and kept in quills or horns of the gazelle. In Sennaar or Kordofan it is found in rings of half and whole okiën and in gold wire, but it is frequently changed, by weighing and melting it down, into ingots or bars, which Mohammed Ali just as little contemns.
But “Turks:”—in this one word is included all and every answer to questions on the condition of the people. We shrug up our shoulders, and say “Turks.” Whoever has lived some time amongst them must, from the clearest conviction, confess the perfect incapacity of these Turks for advancing and civilizing the countries under their government, and their indifference to the interests, nay, even their premeditated murder of the nations infested by them. The complete depravity of the Asiatic world, even in the lifeless and powerless form of a mass dissolved in corrupt fermentation, always effervesces strongly into cruelty with the wide-spread barbarians of the East, and displays itself in bestial vices, to the disgrace of mankind and scorn of the sacred bond of nations. A truly savage nature is theirs, which, from Montenegro to the east and south, repels all western civilization, and would seek a kind of national fame by ridiculous reactions against it, as a hated and even despised foreign state of manners and life, in order to cover their nakedness and infamy, and to cloak their empty ostentation. But the Turk of Egypt is the outcast of his countryman in Turkey itself. Egypt, for example, is so decried in Albania, on account of its corruption, that the Arnaut returning from thence seldom obtains a wife, even if he have his girdle full of red gold.
The smallest portion of the white Mohammedan population, called Turks without distinction in Egypt and Ethiopia, belongs to the
Albanian nation, which, on the whole, provides the Egyptian army with its best if not also with its cleverest men. This army is a mixture of heterogeneous materials, having only their religion in common, and the same slavish treatment and prospect of booty for their bond of union. If the Turk has no remains left of his ancient aptitude for conquests but the thirst of power which has accompanied his victories; a haughty contempt of the rest of the world; the belief, spread throughout the East, that European princes hold their crowns from the Sultan by feudal tenure; and a boundless presumption, which of itself would seem sufficient to destroy his dominion for ever, yet the Sultan still remains the Padishah of God’s ancient grace to his people.
This arises from the prevailing conglomeration of ideas about absolute power, and a slavery denying the rights of subjects to form themselves into an union of freemen. Thus Mohammed Ali is looked upon as an intruder, an usurper, and a tyrant, not only by the people, for he is feared, hated, and cursed even by the Turks; a circumstance which makes his position so much the more difficult, and his administration more oppressive and destructive. The whole aim of his conquests, which he has pursued with such obstinacy, is immediate enrichment at any price; a dangerous and destructive principle which animates all his wild hordes and mercenaries, since it exercises the most pernicious influence over what has been gained with a devastating hand, and in addition prepares unutterable misery which will annihilate itself at last, for the Turks, shewing no pity here, have none to expect. Thus, in my presence in Taka, thirty-two Turkish horsemen with their servants were slain at a feast given them by the Haddendas, not to mention other examples, which shew the feeling prevalent amongst the people of Ethiopia against their conquerors. Yet, as we before said, evil spirits must often serve the good against their will; so, also, Mohammed Ali must be of use to our scientific researches, although an involuntary instrument in the hands of civilisation.
The treasures which Mohammed Ali had collected with Turkish cunning and cruelty combined, threatened to be engulfed. The army
and the fleet—Syria, Arabia, and Albania—in one place war, in the other military levies and plots against the Porte—disbursements in all kinds of ventures with their costly cheats and samples— manufactories and other establishments—travellers and agents to spread his fame, and give him a good European reputation— unprecedented embezzlements of the public funds, &c., and, lastly, Constantinople, that insatiable gulf and grave of the Eastern world— all these had completely exhausted his finances. There seemed but little more to be gained by him, excepting the temples and antiquities, the sale of which is not beyond the reach of possibility. Mohammed Ali was in this embarrassment, when he determined to realise the plan of immediately laying claim to the treasures of Fàzogl and Kordofàn. His Highness obtained, by paying dearly for their services, certain officers from the Austrian mining works, whose contract, however, (dated Jan. 15th, 1836, in Trieste,) was so cunningly drawn up, that it only agreed to an examination of the mountainous part of Syria, Tarsus, and Adana. In Egypt itself, however, a fresh negotiation took place, and the offers of the Viceroy, who, in his imagination, already perceived an Ethiopian gold fleet sailing down the Nile, were so tempting, that Russegger, the director of this mining expedition, accepted the invitation to go with a part of the company to Kordofàn and Fàzogl, in order to open those veins of gold from which the old Venetian ducats had been extracted.
Russegger ate, drank, and lorded it like a bey, the pay of which rank was granted to him, with a liberal board suitable to it. He made use of this profitable opportunity to ramble about Belled-Sudàn, and to write an expensive journal, which Mohammed Ali (though it must have been with a heavy heart, no treasure having been raised) honoured, like a worthy Mecænas, with his especial approbation, so that the curious world has procured a cheap work, and the author the acknowledgment due to him in his native country.
The issue, however, of the exploration for the precious metals had answered so little the expectations of the Basha, that he could not resolve to pay 30,000 Spanish dollars to the experienced Russegger to put the mine into operation in Fàzogl, as Boreani, the
founder of his great guns, whom the Basha, from pure mistrust, had added as an assistant to the before-mentioned expeditition, asked only 15,000 crown thalers (about 3,094l. English) as his eventual reward. Russegger had already, as being a German, many opponents in the Italian spirits of Alexandria and Káhira, and though Boreani had far more limited acquirements, yet he knew how to anticipate the fame of discoveries, by loud boasting, (having gone through a much more extensive routine of experiments and investigations,) and knew also how to make the best of them with Mohammed Ali. Nevertheless, the Basha at last trusted neither, and determined, as soon as possible, to examine the matter himself. Thus the Viceroy, in the autumn of 1838, undertook a journey of discovery into the country of the Blacks. There were also other circumstances which made it appear desirable to the crafty old man to avoid, for some time, the diplomatists in Alexandria, and certain pressing questions of theirs. Together with this bold journey to Fàzogl, Mohammed Ali, in the summer of 1838, had decided upon a navigation of the White branch of the Nile, with the same golden object. It was on Oct. 15th of this year, that I, who had been for some time an anchorite in the deserts near Tura, and had just returned from a hunt on the ruins of Memphis, saw, from the left bank of the Nile, Abu Dagn (father of the beard), as Mohammed Ali was designated by the Fellahs standing near me, and when closer, pointed out to me as Effendina (his Excellency) steam past in his yacht, hastening away to those regions I had just so wished to visit. I had already been informed in Alexandria, over a glass of wine, by the Frigate-Capitan, Ahmed, (Baumgärtner, from Switzerland,) of the secret plan of the expedition to the White Stream (Bah’r el abiàd). I had used every exertion, and strained every nerve, to be allowed to accompany the voyage of discovery, but my endeavours were in vain, as my silence could not be confided in, being a Nazrani,—the expression of the authority most nearly concerned, as Ahmed informed me, with a shrug of the shoulders.
The scientific researches were entrusted to this Ahmed-Capitan, who had before accompanied Russegger to Belled-Sudàn, and had
just returned from thence. He set out in August, and, on his arrival in Sennaar, made, in the same year, an experimental journey up the White Stream, as far as the lower island of the Shilluks. He died, however, at Khartum, in the May of the following year—before I arrived there with my younger brother—deserted by the few Franks residing there; and even at the very moment of his death, according to the usual custom of the country, they were dividing his property among themselves without scruple, and handing over the gleanings to the Divan to be sold. But the enterprise to examine the Bah’r el abiàd was delayed only a short time by the death of Baumgärtner, because the other Frigate-Capitan, Selim, was exceedingly anxious to gain alone the Turkish laurels. But the prospect of joining ourselves to the expedition seemed lost to us brothers; for we had kept this constantly in our eye, and considered it as the extent of our wishes in Africa, since through Baumgärtner’s influence we might certainly hope for a procul a fulmine.
It was on November the 16th, 1839, that I saw in Khartùm the crimson streamers of the flotilla of discovery waving up the White Stream. My heart bled at not being able to accompany it on this occasion. I was so ill and weak that I was obliged to lean against the door-post, when my brother, who was equally unwell with myself, rose up slowly from the divan, and standing behind me, made me laugh again by shaking a large medicine-bottle, with a long label, and commanding me, as my physician, to retire with a Hell el Alle! Riff! Jalla! (“Spread sails! North! Forward!”); for we were looking with eager desire towards our northern forests. This first expedition got as far as the country of the Elliabs (6° 35″ N. lat.) on January the 27th, 1840. The statements and reports giving 3° 35″ N. lat. as the point reached, rest either on false astronomical calculations, or the adventurers wished to acquire the fame of having proceeded 3° further, not supposing that any other expedition would follow to check them.
Mohammed Ali, being dissatisfied with the result of this expedition, appointed in the very same year a second voyage of discovery. Various motives have been alleged for this glorious
