The Mystery of Egypt’s Colossi

Grove Koger

The enormous stone statues known as the Colossi of Memnon lie west of Luxor in Upper (that is, southern) Egypt. Carved from sandstone and erected in 1350 BCE, they face south-southeast, toward the Nile River, and stand, or, rather, sit on pedestals that raise them to a height of nearly 60 feet above the surrounding plain. They were once thought to represent a mythological Greek king known as Memnon, but in fact they depict Pharaoh Amenhotep III.

Both statues have suffered serious damage over time, with the worst resulting from the effects of an earthquake in 27 BCE. It was more than two centuries later, in about 199 CE, that the upper portions of the northern statue were reconstructed with five layers of sandstone by artisans working for Roman emperor Septimius Severus.

If you’re curious, you’ll find more information about the Colossi on the Internet, but my interest is specifically in a curious sound, or “cry,” that the northern statue was occasionally heard to make in the years following the earthquake. The cries generally occurred at sunrise or shortly afterward, with the first recorded instance reported in 20 BCE by Greek geographer Strabo, who described the sound as resembling a slight blow and noted that others had heard it as well.

Subsequent earwitnesses include three Roman figures—general Germanicus in 19 CE, poet Juvenal in 90 CE, and emperor Hadrian (who was accompanied by his wife Sabina and a large retinue)—and a second Greek geographer, Pausanias, who wrote that the sound reminded him of the snapping of a harp-string. The last known occasion in which the mysterious sound was heard was in 196 CE. After the reconstruction of 199, the mysterious cries apparently ceased. Or, as Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, put it in his 1923 account Tales of Travel (London: Hodder and Stoughton): “From the beginning of the third century A.D. a cloud of impenetrable darkness settles down upon [the statue’s] fame and fortunes.”  

I first read about this curious phenomenon in “The Cry of Memnon,” one of the highlights of Rupert T. Gould’s collection Enigmas, originally published in London by Philip Allanin 1929. After a consideration of all the accounts he could find, Gould concluded that the sounds had their origin in the sun’s “warming the cleft and truncated lower half of the statue; that it was produced by the unequal expansion of the two portions of this fractured monolith—causing them to move, fractionally, one against the other; and that they no longer had free scope for this interplay when they were compelled to support the great weight of the rebuilt upper portion.”

Subtitled Another Book of Unexplained Facts, Gould’s collection follows upon his similar volume Oddities of 1928. Gould (1890-1948) was a recognized authority on marine chronometers, and although I don’t believe he had any interest in the so-called supernatural, he was intrigued by anomalies, including such cryptids as the Loch Ness Monster. He was also an elegant writer, and his works reveal the workings of a sharp and unfettered mind.

The image you see at the top of today’s post is a nineteenth-century albumen silver photograph taken by Antonio Beato, while the second is an 1846 lithograph by Louis Haghe after a drawing by Scottish artist David Roberts. The third image is my 1969 Paperback Library edition of Enigmas, with a cover by Tom Adams.

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Sax Rohmer, Egyptomania & the Imperial Gothic

1927 Pearson edition

Grove Koger

June 1 is the anniversary of the death of Arthur Henry Ward (1883-1959), who wrote a number of once-popular novels and stories under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer. His most famous series involved Fu Manchu, a Chinese doctor engaged in a never-ending struggle against Western imperialism. But Rohmer also wrote several works set in Egypt or dealing with devious (and sometimes supernatural) Egyptian designs on England and its institutions.

Rohmer can be seen as a late entry in a category that literary critics have identified as Imperial Gothic. In the words of Suzanne Daly, the category involves “late 19th-century fiction set in the British Empire that employs and adapts elements drawn from Gothic novels such as a gloomy, forbidding atmosphere; brutal, tyrannical men; spectacular forms of violence or punishment; and the presence of the occult or the supernatural.” Among other examples, Daly refers to H. Rider Haggard’s famous 1887 novel She and Bram Stoker’s influential 1897 horror classic Dracula.

Daly also mentions an astonishingly bad 1897 novel set in London and Egypt that few will have heard of—The Beetle, by Richard Marsh. I once tried to read it but abandoned the effort halfway through, as it’s written in a breathless, hysterical style that suggests that its author would have profited from the attentions of a psychologist. Slightly better are several other examples of Imperial Gothic with an Egyptian flavor, including Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899). Here an “undead” Egyptian priest intones an ominous warning: “Ah, my nineteenth-century friend, your father stole me from the land of my birth, and from the resting-place the gods decreed for me; but beware, for retribution is pursuing you, and is even now close upon your heels.” That’s pretty good, but on the whole, Boothby writes suffocatingly padded prose. Another little-known novel that belongs here is Stoker’s own Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), which I actually finished a few months ago, scarcely believing that the author of the intensely dramatic Dracula could have produced such a static narrative.

These three deservedly forgotten novels capitalize on a recurring fascination with things Egyptian on the part of Britons. This Egyptomania, as it’s been called, washed ashore in several substantial waves. One followed the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869—an event that established a lifeline between Britain and the “jewel” in its imperial crown, India. Paradoxically enough, however, the event led in turn to a wave of anxiety over the very vulnerability of that lifeline, one centered on the “mysterious” land through which the Canal passed. Another wave of Egyptomania followed the 1922 discovery of Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Lantern slide of Meidum from the Brooklyn Museum Archive, in the public domain in the United States

Having surveyed the obvious contenders, I think I’m safe in saying that Rohmer’s works involving Egypt constitute the late high point of Egyptomanial Imperial Gothic. His characterization was seldom more than facile and his actual knowledge of the country seems to have been haphazard, but he was fascinated by Egypt and visited it several times, on the first occasion with his bride in 1913. The couple made the acquaintance of Egyptologist Rex Engelbach, who in turn helped them inspect the burial chamber of the step pyramid of Meidum. The Rohmers also visited a number of better-known sites, including Luxor and the Great Pyramid.

My 1966 Pyramid edition with a cover by J. Lombardero

The best of Rohmer’s Egyptian works is the 1918 novel Brood of the Witch Queen. Here a reincarnation of an immortal being, the Witch Queen of the title, has taken up residence in the heart of London. Thwarting him are “tall, thin Scotsman” Robert Cairn, who undergoes what his father, a learned doctor, refers to as a “saturnalia of horror” involving a clutch of carrion-eating Dermestes beetles (Dermestidae spp.) taken from the skull of a mummy. The ordeal results in Robert’s heading to—wouldn’t you know it!—Cairo for a “rest-cure.” As it turns out, however, a “thing very evil,” as a fortune teller puts it, has entered the city before him. In Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Paladin, 1977), Les Daniels praised Brood, noting that “Rohmer’s occult lore was never as well employed as in this tale … and he never equalled the claustrophobic chills of the scenes in the bowels of a pyramid.” David Huckvale described the novel as “gloriously lurid” in his study Ancient Egypt in the Popular Imagination (McFarland, 2012).

Other works by Rohmer that can be considered in this category include the collection Tales of Secret Egypt (1918); The Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931), which deals with the apparent death of a distinguished archaeologist at the Tomb of the Black Ape in the Valley of the Kings; and The Bat Flies Low (1935), which involves an ancient Egyptian lamp that functions without any obvious source of energy—an artifact based on “knowledge for which the world is not yet ready.” How Rohmer must have grinned when he wrote that phrase!

The only substantial biography of Rohmer is Master of Villainy, by Cay Van Ash and Rohmer’s widow, Elizabeth Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972). Although not reliable, it has a personal significance for me, as my first wife and I had stopped over in Bowling Green to visit an aunt and uncle of mine on our way to Europe. Thus I was able to buy a copy in the university bookstore shortly after it was published. More authoritative but less fun is Lord of Strange Deaths (Strange Attractor, 2015) a collection of essays edited by Phil Baker and Antony Clayton.

Painting of “Fu Manchu” orchid (Phragmipedium) by Jo Fisher Roberts

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Thinking about the Suez Canal

Grove Koger

November 17, 1869, marked the official opening of the Suez Canal. Running for slightly more than one hundred miles through the Egyptian sands, the waterway linked the Mediterranean and Red seas and shortened voyages between Europe and southern Asia by thousands of miles.

On the one hand, the canal was a signal achievement, one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. But on the other hand, it involved the backbreaking toil of over one million Egyptians, workers who lived in unthinkably appalling conditions and seldom had even enough water to drink. There are estimates that some ten percent of them died over the course of the decade that the canal was under construction—a somber fact that we need to keep in mind when we order goods manufactured on the other side of the world.

The canal began as a joint-stock venture established by French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps. The British were initially skeptical of the project’s chances of success, but in 1875, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli bought a substantial number of shares when Egyptian Khedive Isma’il Pasha was forced to sell his. Their purchase gave Britain 44 percent of the shares, and the country went on to occupy Egypt itself a few years later during an anti-European uprising.

Whatever doubts Britain may once have felt over the Suez Canal, it quickly became the British Empire’s lifeline, linking the mother country to its colonies in East Africa and especially to its “Jewel in the Crown”—India. And, with the establishment of that lifeline, came a renewed popular fascination with Egypt, particularly its past, which was widely regarded as being “mysterious.”

What’s known as Egyptomania had initially been fueled by Napoleon’s ill-fated military campaign in Egypt (1798-1800), but Britain’s later activities in the same country only added to the phenomenon, as did the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922.

The Suez Canal has been shut down several times, most recently, of course, in March of this year, when the enormous container ship Ever Given ran aground during a sandstorm. By the time the ship was refloated, the passage of nearly 400 other vessels through the waterway had been delayed, leading to the suspension of nearly $10 billion worth of trade. In the months since the obstruction, Egypt has announced plans to widen and deepen the section in which the Ever Given was trapped. The move is understandable enough, but it’s easy to imagine that it will lead in turn to the construction of even larger container ships. And so on, I’m afraid …

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The image at the top of today’s post depicts the procession of ships opening the Suez Canal, reproduced from The Illustrated London News for December 18, 1869. The second image is a cropped NASA photograph of the canal taken by the multi-angle imaging spectroradiometer (MISR) instrument on the Terra satellite, Jan. 30, 2001, while the third, an image of the Ever Given trapped in the Suez Canal, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data as processed by Pierre Markuse. Copernicus is an observation and imaging program run by the European Union to produce data from Sentinel satellites and other observation points.

To learn more about the Suez Canal, see the Suez Canal Authority website at https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/English/Pages/default.aspx.

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The Red Sea Renegade

Grove Koger

Today’s post is an updated entry from my book When the Going Was Good about a remarkable French adventurer who died on December 13, 1974.

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Henri de Monfreid: Secrets of the Red Sea (Les secrets de la mer Rouge. Paris: Grasset, 1931); Sea Adventures (Aventures de mer) Paris: Grasset, 1932); and Hashish: Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler (La croisière du hachich. Paris: Grasset, 1933)

Son of an artist who had settled in the south of France, Henri de Monfreid fell in love with the sea as a child, refitting a beached boat and sailing during his summer vacations with the region’s fishing fleet. Despite a forced apprenticeship in business, he was drawn to the bohemian lifestyle of his father, and in 1910 he attempted to bridge the gulf between these two worlds by taking a position with a trading firm operating in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia and Eritrea) and the tiny colony of French Somaliland (Djibouti) at the southern end of the Red Sea.

Yet even in the Horn of Africa, de Monfreid felt stifled by the “terrible yoke” of conventional trading and the bourgeois atmosphere of the European settlements. Buying his own boat, he began dealing in pearls, eventually branching out into firearms and hashish, goods legal or illegal depending on the year, the country, and (seemingly) the direction of the wind. At one point he spied on the Turks for the French, soon to be official enemies with the onset of World War I, but the latter eventually grew tired of his independent ways and imprisoned him for smuggling arms. The British, who admired him no more than did the French, called him the Sea Wolf. As one observer put it, he was “the most remarkable figure from Suez to Bombay.”

De Monfreid was approached in the late 1920s by admiring writer Ida Treat, who took down his life story and published it in 1930 as Pearls, Arms and Hashish. Soon afterward, de Monfreid began writing his own books, eventually turning out dozens of vivid volumes of memoirs and fiction and attaining cult status in his native country. Three of the first of these—Secrets of the Red Sea, Sea Adventures, and Hashish—form a natural unit describing his exploits up and down the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. As he explained near the end of his life, de Monfreid had “isolated” himself among “primitive people—or, more accurately, men joined with Nature in an immutable and perfect equilibrium—in order that [he] could consciously remain her creature.” The man who emerges from these event-charged pages is impulsive and in love with freedom and the sea, a renegade who excites the envy of some and the hatred of others but who cares little for the opinion of either.

There’s no biography of de Monfreid in English, but the 1974 Hillstone edition of Hashish  published as Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler includes a preface by philosopher/novelist Colin Wilson. You’ll find quite a bit of information online, including several book reviews from the Journal of the British-Yemeni Society at https://al-bab.com/albab-orig/albab/bys/journal.htm. A small museum has been opened at de Monfreid’s final home in Ingrandes, France, and Le Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales in Sana’a, Yemen, changed its name a few years ago to Le Centre Culturel Henry de Monfreid in honor of the adventurer, although its current status in that war-torn country is unclear. A video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyCKJmyZ_VI&t=1s shows de Monfreid’s crew apparently stealing a pile of mangrove timber, although no context for the escapade is provided.

The top image is the cover of my 1973 Stonehill edition of Hashish and features an illustration by Ted Bernstein and a design by Nancy Greenberg. The photograph of de Monfreid and an unidentified crewman aboard ship is reproduced from the site of the British-Yemeni Society. The covers of the 1930 Coward-McCann edition of Pearls, Arms and Hashish(with de Monfreid’s name misspelled) and the 1946 Penguin edition of Sea Adventures are scanned from my own collection, while the fourth cover image is a photograph of a later Grasset printing of Les secrets de la mer Rouge. The map of the Red Sea is by H.W. Mardon and was printed by George Philip & Son for the London Geographical Institute about 1903.

I mention de Monfreid along with several other louche characters in my story “That Burton MS,” which appeared in La Piccioletta Barca in 2019. See https://www.picciolettabarca.com/posts/burton-ms.

Those Storied Coasts

Grove Koger

Storied Coasts of the Mediterranean: Two Mediterranean Cruises. Montreal: Canadian Pacific: 1929

Cruises are nothing new. The world’s first may have taken place in the summer of 1833 and involved the Francesco I, which flew the flag of (that is, was registered in) the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (since absorbed into the nation of Italy). The voyage took in Taormina, Catania, Syracuse, Malta, Corfu, Patras, Delphi (presumably in an excursion inland), Zante, Athens, Smyrna and Constantinople. This was clearly an event designed for the aristocracy, but changes were on the way.

Commercial cruises available to the public were first offered by the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O) in 1844. The voyages carried passengers from the British port of Southampton to Gibraltar, Athens, and Malta. In a canny move, the company offered novelist William Makepeace Thackeray free bookings in return for good copy. A few decades later, the first expressly built cruise ship—the Prinzessin Victoria Luise—was launched by the Hamburg-American Line.

In other words, cruises were a luxury familiar to the wealthy and near-wealthy by the time Canadian Pacific Steamships (CP) printed a hardbound, alluringly illustrated 116-page prospectus advertising two luxury cruises scheduled for early 1930, each of them running to 73 days. And, as the publication made clear on its title page, the ships offered “first class only—no other class carried.” Exceptions were made, of course, for servants, who would be “berthed and served with meals in special accommodation set apart for their use.” Besides Staterooms, the Empress of Scotland offered a Dining Saloon (“particularly large and delightful”), Lounges, Writing Rooms, a Ball Room, a combination Card-Smoking  Room (“pleasantly decorated in Dutch style” whatever that was), a Winter Garden, a Palm Garden, Promenade Space, and a Gymnasium.

It was the line’s seventh season of cruises, and the ships in question were the Empress of Scotland and the somewhat smaller Empress of France. The catalog explained that its “arrangements for sightseeing in high-class motor cars are ideal and you are not at the mercy of unscrupulous drivers. Furthermore, you see everything that is worth seeing and no time is wasted on unimportant places.” While they might be traveling first-class, tourists were fearful even then that, without proper guidance, they might end up admiring something not quite first-rate.

Passengers aboard the Empress of Scotland would visit an impressive array of ports of call, beginning with Funchal and Terreiro da Luta in Madeira, Cadiz and Seville in Spain, Gibraltar, and so on, all the way to several in Italy, Monaco and France. In between came Algeria, Jugo-Slavia (as it was then named and spelled), Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. A number of optional excursions were also available, including, for example, a busy little tour involving “Cairo Luxor River Nile Assuan Luxor Thebes Karnak Cairo.”

Canadian Pacific was founded, by the way, in 1883 and was sold to a subsidiary of the German firm of Hapag-Lloyd as recently as 2005. The Empress of Scotland began life as a German ship, the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, in 1906 and passed through American and British hands before purchased by CP in 1921 and renamed. It was sold for scrap in late 1930. The Empress of France was launched by the Allan Line as the SS Alsatian in 1913, purchased by CP sometime later that decade (sources differ as to the exact year), and was eventually scrapped in 1934.  

Today’s images, all taken from my copy of CP’s prospectus, include its cover; its title page; a photograph of one of the cruises’ first stops, Gibraltar; a map showing the route of one of Empress of Scotland; a photograph of the Library-Writing Room aboard the Empress of France; and a photograph of a sight featured on one of the shore excursions, the Colossi of Memnon in Egypt, which date to 1350 BCE. (The wavy lines on the map do not appear on the original, but are a moiré pattern produced by the action of my scanner.)

Flying with Beryl Markham

Grove Koger

As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a memoir by Beryl Markham, who was born on October 26, 1902.

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West with the Night (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942)

Born in England but raised from the age of four in the colony (later nation) of Kenya, Beryl Markham grew up a member of the privileged British ruling class of East Africa. Like her father, who taught her to ride, she became a noted breeder and trainer of racehorses, but actually seems to have excelled at everything she turned her hand to. After being introduced to flying by big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton in 1931, she went on to become the first woman in Kenya to earn a commercial pilot’s license. Among her many other friends in Kenya were planter and writer Isak Dinesen and Dinesen’s husband, Bror Blixen.

Markham wrote West with the Night in California, where she had moved in 1939. A bestseller upon publication in 1942, it earned the rare praise of Ernest Hemingway, who had known Markham in Africa. “She has written so well, and marvelously well,” he admits, “that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.” The book was reprinted in 1983 to even greater acclaim, by which time Markham had returned to Kenya—to raise horses once again.

West with the Night opens with a series of chapters recalling Markham’s experiences as a bush pilot.  Others deal with her younger years, when, unlike the Masai girls she knew, she was allowed to take part in hunting warthogs. She writes of course with particular insight of horses, “as much a part of my life as past birthdays.” Soon after she began taking flying lessons, her lover Finch Hatton was killed in a crash—a wrenching event that Isak Dinesen, similarly involved with the man, would also describe in Out of Africa. Yet Markham was undeterred, and went on to become first to cross the Atlantic nonstop from east to west, the accomplishment that gives her graceful, effortlessly evocative memoir its title.

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The Virago edition (London, 1984) includes an introduction by Martha Gellhorn. A later Virago edition (London, 1989) published as The Illustrated West with the Night is abridged and contains an introduction by Elizabeth Claridge, but the Welcome Enterprises edition (New York, 1994) published as The Illustrated West with the Night contains the complete text.

If you’d like to know more about Markahm, see Ulf Aschan, The Man Whom Women Loved: The Life of Bror Blixen (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Mary S. Lovell, Straight on till Morning: The Biography of Beryl Markham (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); and The Lives of Beryl Markham: Out of Africa’s Free Spirit and Denys Finch Hatton’s Last Great Love (New York: Norton, 1993).