Amanda Adams (4 page)

Her friendship with Marianne North began shortly after the death of Edwards’s parents and in mutual admiration—both women were independent, adventurous, clever, and accomplished. Yet over the course of a decade the relationship grew somewhat tortured for Edwards. The extent of her affection for North was not mutual, and it came to be seen by North as too much, too intense. Letters between the two women gathered in emotion and heat, revealing Edwards’s desire to keep her friend close and the pullback from North as she gently dodged Edwards’s reach and made plans to travel the world in search of exotic flowers to paint. Although the two did remain friends for life, stoking each other’s fame and careers (almost politely), the intimacy of their friendship was diminished and Edwards was gutted by it. A phase of deep melancholy followed, and several illnesses slowed Edwards down. She entered a depression, one where in her darkest hours she lamented, “My heart no longer beats faster at the sight of a new or kindly & beautiful face. I hope nothing from it.”
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Melancholia haunted Edwards for much of her life. The arrival of her new friend “L” was, however, about to blow a giant new gale of happiness into things.

LUCY
RENSHAW
WAS
the famous “L” mentioned in Edwards’s travel accounts and books. Together, the two ladies embarked on some big adventures, beginning with Italy’s famous Dolomites, a section of steep peaks in the Alps, and culminating in Egyptian sands. Edwards describes how they had “done some difficult walking in their time, over ice and snow, on lave cold and hot, up cinder-slopes and beds of mountain torrents . . .”
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and they clearly shared an appetite for robust expeditions. Yet, in spite of all the frequent mention made of “L,” Miss Renshaw is an unknowable figure. Details of her story are scant, some photographs of her are uncertain (in one—if it is indeed her— she’s sporting short-cropped hair, a cravat, shadow-brushed sideburns, and a man’s jacket!
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), and the things that can be said about her add up to simple summations. We know, for example, that Lucy was two years younger than Edwards; she sometimes wore a crimson shawl and according to Edwards was “given to vanities in the way of dress”
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; she had a nurse’s instinct; and she was very practical, capable, and certainly up for an adventure or two. She also liked to pet and feed the caged rabbits on board the
dahabeeyah,
all of which were awaiting their day in the kitchen pot. The details are slight; there’s not much more to be had. Yet one thing does come into sharp focus thanks to Edwards’s literary flair: Lucy and Amelia were the two women who had arrived fresh from Alexandria in
1873
, after forty-eight hours of quarantine, to Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo:

Where every fresh arrival has the honour of contributing, for at least a few minutes, to the general entertainment, the first appearance of L. and the Writer [Amelia Edwards], tired, dusty, and considerably sun-burned, may well have given rise to some comments in usual circulation at those crowded tables. People asked each other, most likely, where these two wandering Englishwomen had come from; why they had not dressed for dinner; what brought them to Egypt; and if they were going up the Nile . . .
¹³

The two disheveled ladies caused a stir, especially with sunburned faces in the age of creamy complexions. Famously, these lady travelers were in Egypt simply to find fair weather and cloudless skies. Edwards, however, was smart and knew how to shape her own tale. She was out to explore matters of archaeological interest too.

Under pale, hot skies, with a sketch pad in one hand, a parasol in the other, Edwards directed her crew and boat-bound companions to tour every archaeological site situated on the banks of the Nile. True to her Victorian sensibilities, she kept house in her
dahabeeyah,
the
Philae
—flowers always on the table, fresh brown bread to eat, tea in the afternoon, and a chaise longue on the deck; she rarely roughed it. Camelback rides were a thing designed, in her opinion, to kill a person; she had identified the four paces of a camel as: “a short walk, like the rolling of a small boat in a chopping sea; a long walk which dislocates every bone in your body; a trot that reduces you to imbecility; and a gallop that is sudden death.”
¹⁴

Edwards’s appreciation of the Egyptian landscape is woven throughout the book that resulted from her travels up and down that glorious river,
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile.
Her account was a wild bestseller in the nineteenth century, and it’s still in print today. She knew it was her best. In it she chronicles her days on the floating
dahabeeyah,
the open markets that smelled of cardamom and clove where a stall of bright red shoes was tucked beside withered old ladies in black robes. The women could tell you your fortune and sell you dates and oranges or perhaps sell you an entirely different fruit born of Egyptian soil: artifacts like fragments of pottery or pieces of bone.

Edwards portrays the pyramids in every shift of awe, wonder, and appreciation: “. . . the Great Pyramid in all its unexpected bulk and majesty towers close above one’s head, the effect is as sudden as it is overwhelming. It shuts out the sky and the horizon.”
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Her words are painterly, luxuriant, sensuous, exemplified here by a description of sand wherein “the beauty of sand more than repays the fatigue of climbing it. Smooth, sheeny, satiny; fine as diamond-dust; supple, undulating, luminous, it lies in the most exquisite curves and wreaths, like a snowdrift turned to gold.”
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Elsewhere, “the towers we had first seen as we sailed by in the morning rose straight before us, magnificent in ruin, glittering to the sun, and relieved in creamy light against blue depths of sky. One was nearly perfect; the other shattered as if by the shock of an earthquake, was still so lofty that an Arab clambering from block to block midway of its vast height looked no bigger than a squirrel.”
¹⁷

Enchanted by the silks and spices of the bazaars, Edwards was equally repelled by the poorer villages and their “filthy, sickly, stunted and stolid”
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residents, for whom she had genuine sympathy (comparing their circumstances to a situation “not worse . . . than in many an Irish village”) but from whom she also wished to keep a “pleasant distance.” As a British traveler she was more interested in Egypt’s magnificent past (and the glorified imagination of it) than its relatively bedraggled present, where poverty was often extreme. Her observations of people and places were in accord with the times: Britain was civilized; other places, not so much. But unlike many who judged human civilization from the comfort of their armchairs, she was at least there to have a look. To form her own opinions. To see for herself. To learn and gauge what she could.

Edwards’s comparison of a local man to a small “squirrel” reveals not just the size of the ruins, but also her attitude toward the locals, whom she was quick to dismiss and held in low esteem. They were not as “civilized” as she thought herself to be. Edwards’s attitude wasn’t confined to the local people, though. Throughout her tour, Edwards condescends to pretty much everyone on board the houseboat. Lucy is never referred to as more than “L.” Edwards calls one of her fellow travelers the Little Lady, her new husband is the Idle Man, and another is known as the Painter. She never acknowledges the others’ names or quite grants them status as real people in her book. At the same time, she refers to herself as the Writer and in crafting the travelogue was out to entertain as well as educate her reader.

All of the unnamed passengers have hobbies. One plans to hunt crocodiles for a parlor trophy, another to paint a “Great picture.” Edwards’s aim was to cultivate a keen knowledge of the ancient landscape around her. She became an expert on local archaeology while striding across lost ruins and crushing unseen potsherds underfoot. Starting in the North, the journey encompassed a remarkable one thousand miles of sailing. Edwards and her travel companions ventured to the very edge of
terra incognita.
They turned their giant riverboat around—a vessel approximately one hundred feet long by thirty feet wide—only upon reaching a vast section of unmapped country. Although Edwards was set on making new discoveries underfoot, she was less eager to get lost.

To start any Nile journey by heading south was an unusual choice. Because it was winter, most sailing would have to be done without the benefit of a strong tailwind or favorable currents. But traveling south gave Edwards more time to devour the books in her library, to become well versed in the landscape’s antiquity, and to stop at each archaeological site on her northern return.

She carried Murray’s
Handbook to Lower and Upper Egypt
like a Bible, and she meditated on how we look at the past. “It must be understood that we did not go to
see
the Pyramids,“ she muses. “We only went to
look
at them.”
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One involves active understanding, the other a more passive gaze, and Edwards ensured that she was knowledgeable about all historical relics that came before her. She would always “see” what was before her.

Much to the chagrin of her crew and companions, her wish for this voyage, based on historical sequence and personal preference, created long delays and extra sweat for everyone.

As they drifted south, Edwards drew the sites she saw. With a parasol in her gloved hand she even ventured into dark vaulted chambers and tombs to explore, following her local guide, who was carrying a lantern to light the way:

So we went on, going every moment deeper into the solid rock, and farther from the open air and sunshine. Thinking it would be cold underground, we brought warm wraps in plenty; but the heat, on the contrary, was intense, and the atmosphere stifling . . . here for incalculable ages—for thousands of years probably before the Nile had even cut its path through Silsilis—a cloudless African sun had been pouring its daily floods of light and heat upon the dewless desert over head. The place might well be unendurable. It was like a great oven stored with the slowly accumulated heat of cycles so remote and so many that the earliest periods of Egyptian history seem, when compared with them, to belong to yesterday.
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For a lady of Victorian times, Edwards had no qualms about dark places and the unknown; it is not surprising that she wrote ghost stories for a living early in her career. Even dangerous river crossings held a thrill for her. The upper stretches of the Nile were, at that time, difficult to access because of the Aswan Cataract. Only the most skilled and brazen river captains would give it a go, and only the best of boats could hope to make it. A series of whirlpools and fast rapids, the cataract could take anywhere between twelve hours and four days to cross, and that was if the boat didn’t smash into splinters. Although
Murray’s Handbook
recommended that ladies watch the proceedings from the safety of the shore, Edwards took the helm. She wanted a front row seat and would have stayed there if she hadn’t been lurched around so ferociously that she was obliged to move to the back. Because most tourists did not attempt the crossing, Edwards and group had the Nile more or less to themselves from there on out.

The silence they gained cast a new spell on Edwards. For her, the weight of history could now be felt more palpably in the sultry air. The imagination could fly a little more freely, soaring, as Edwards would often record, like the falcons of old did overhead. They were also moving toward the most anticipated archaeological site of all: Abu Simbel. Consisting of two massive stone temples built in the thirteenth century
BC
by the Pharaoh Rameses
II
as a monument to both his military might and his love for his wife, the queen Nefertari, the site was originally situated on the shores of Lake Nasser.
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It was also physically elusive. Giant sand drifts would sometimes bury the site, leaving it only partially visible to those who had trekked so far to see it. At other times, the sands would blow away to reveal majestic rock carvings and hallowed entrances to painted rooms. Not knowing whether they would encounter the ancient monument exposed or hidden, Edwards was in appreciable suspense.
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