When I lived in Luxor I made friends with a really interesting and polite old man called Mr. Mohammed, who had a beautiful traditional house with a small courtyard and a tree in the middle and was sat at the bottom of the little alley next to my friends Edward and Freeda. who own 'Our Luxor' a beautiful Self catering Flat with a flavour of The Arabian Nights
Mr. Mohammed was one of the first registered tour guides in Luxor, sadly Mr. Mohamed has died now, but I often think about our talks over a drink of tea, as we both had the same passion for the history of Egypt.
One day he told me the story of a remarkable woman called Lady Duff Gordon who had actually lived inside the first courtyard of Luxor Temple that over the centuries had been filled with sand, she lived in a small ruined house for seven years that was built in the sand filled temple, her home had cavernous gaps between the floorboards. but she set up a hospital from her home and welcoming the people of Luxor, regardless of their station in life, they could be officials, rich, poor or even slaves. Lucie's attention to the sick, her charm, and her sympathy with the oppressed, endeared her to all the Egyptian people, to whom she was known as Sitt el Kebeer (Great Lady), who 'was just, and had a heart that loved the Arabs'. Lucie created a makeshift hospital in her home for the local Egyptians, and mostly she gave them her miracle for all cure, a cup of English tea !
Lucie had to leave her home in England, her husband Alexander, and her three children because she had contracted Tuberculosis, and so she travelled to Egypt because the weather was considered to be better for her health than the English climate.
Lucie is best known for her two books ' Letters from Egypt,' 1863–1865 and ' Last Letters from Egypt, (1875), most of which are addressed to her husband, Alexander Duff-Gordon, and her mother, that she referred to as ' Mutter', Sarah Austin.
Whilst living in London Lucie had led a Bohemian, eccentric and highly unconventional life with her husband Alexander, they had socialized with with such luminaries as Tennyson, Dickens and Thackeray. Alexander and Lucie had married for love, and when she had to leave him she wrote many letters to encourage him to travel to Egypt about the Egyptian culture, religion and customs, she shunned the English community in Luxor and later when she moved to Cairo, and immersed herself in the Egyptian way of life. The local Egyptians gave her the Egyptian name Noor ala Noor which means 'light from the source of all light'
Lucie learnt Arabic, and wrote many letters about Egyptian culture, religion, and customs. Her letters expressed her outrage at the ruling Ottomans, and many personal stories from the Egyptians living around her. This photo shows the Festival Hall of Amenohotep 111 in Luxor temple with a group of Victorian tourists. As you can see the huge columns are half covered by sand, and the Mosque of Abu Hagag (Behind the tourists) that was built over 800 years ago, was originally built on the extended floor of the temple. In the mid victorian period Gaston Maspero of the Antiquities Service ordered the temples to be cleared of local inhabitants who had made their homes inside the temples and on their rooftops, and so if you enter the first courtyard of Ramses 11 today the door to the mosque is high up off the existing floor, and a new entrance to the mosque had to be created on the opposite side of the temple.
I have taken clippings from Lucie's books where she describes the life of the Egyptians around her to her husband and her mother Sarah:
'I heard a boy singing a Zikr (the ninety-nine attributes of God) to a set of dervishes in a mosque, and I think I never heard anything more beautiful and affecting. Ordinary Arab singing is harsh and nasal, but it can be wonderfully moving'
'have a black slave—a real one. I looked at her little ears wondering they had not been bored for rings. She fancied I wished them bored (she was sitting on the floor close at my side), and in a minute she stood up and showed me her ear with a great pin through it: ‘Is that well, lady?’ the creature is eight years old. The shock nearly made me faint. What extremities of terror had reduced that little mind to such a state. She is very good and gentle, and sews quite nicely already. When she first came, she tells me, she thought I should eat her; now her one dread is that I should leave her behind. She sings a wild song of joy to Maurice’s picture and about the little Sitt. She was sent from Khartoum as a present to Mr. Thayer, who has no woman-servant at all. He fetched me to look at her, and when I saw the terror-stricken creature being coarsely pulled about by his cook and groom, I said I would take her for the present. She is very good; but now she has set her whole little black soul upon me.'
Amelia wrote about the West Bank : 'It's deserted palaces, and crowded hovels scarce good enough for pig styes. ‘One day man see his dinner, and one other day none at all, and the children are shocking from bad food, dirt and overwork, but the little pot-bellied, blear-eyed wretches grow up into noble young men and women under all their difficulties. Their faces are all sad and rather what the Scotch call ‘dour,’ not méchant at all, but harsh, like their voices. All the melody is in walk and gesture; they are as graceful as cats, and the women have exactly the ‘breasts like pomegranates’
A tall Bedaween woman came up to us in the field yesterday to shake hands and look at us. She wore a white sackcloth shift and veil, and asked Mrs. Hekekian a good many questions about me, looked at my face and hands, but took no notice of my rather smart gown which the village women admired so much, shook hands again with the air of a princess, wished me health and happiness, and strode off across the graveyard like a stately ghost. She was on a journey all alone, and somehow it looked very solemn and affecting to see her walking away towards the desert in the setting sun like Hagar.'
'Nothing seemed to have changed in the past 500, 1,000, 6,000 years. There was the life-giving river, its banks lined with papyrus and reeds and the bulrushes where Moses had been secreted. Just beyond the river banks lay intensely green fields of beans, clover, maize and sugar-cane. In the distance, farmers followed the tracks of their ploughs; closer at hand, stolid brown oxen trudged round and round, turning the wheels which carried the Nile's water to the fields. Tall, barefoot women in black walked to the river banks, with huge clay water-jars gracefully balanced on their heads. Broad-winged egrets - so large that they looked like children's parchment kites - swooped and flew off, or stood poised, absolutely still, like birds on a Chinese screen, amidst the water reeds on the river's edge.'
Lady Duff Gordon died in Cairo on 13th July 1869, she was 48, and was buried in the English cemetery there. Her husband died in London on 27 October 1872 he was 61
If you would like to read more of Lucie's Letters from Egypt click onto this link - It is a free publication about Lady Duff Gorden's Letters from Egypt:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17816/17816-h/17816-h.htm
Hiring a dahabyeha Florence went all the way up the River Nile to Abu Simbel, here she wrote in her diary 'Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering … not a feature is correct—but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man.' Florence loved her journey up the Nile, to see all the wondrous temples, and in comparison her heart went out to the poorest Egyptians who she noticed lived in poverty and awful conditions in the villages at the side of the Nile.
