A letter from the Nile, by Louisa Jowett
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1874, a young Englishwoman travelling up the River Nile in Egypt by sailing boat writes to her younger sister at home.
Dearest Kitty, You asked me to tell you the truth about the Nile and not the version in Mamma’s books, and so I shall, though I fear it will lower the river in your esteem. We have now been three weeks upon the water in the Isis, a long, low boat with a great slanting sail, and in that time we have advanced rather less than two hundred miles. When the north wind blows we fly; when it drops, as it has done for five days together, the crew go ashore with a rope over their shoulders and haul us against the current like a barge upon the Regent’s Canal. I watch them from beneath an awning and feel ashamed of my idleness and of my parasol.
Nor is the river itself quite what the pictures promised. The water is the colour of milky coffee, the banks are mud, and the famous palms stand in rows as dull as a hedge in Hertfordshire. The flies are beyond description. They settle upon the corners of one’s eyes and upon the edge of every spoon, and Mr Copley, a retired schoolmaster who joined our party at Cairo, declares that he has killed eleven hundred since Tuesday and that their nation has not noticed the loss. The bread is gritty with sand. I have not been properly cool for nineteen days.
There, my dear, is the worst of it, and you may read that paragraph aloud to Aunt Harriet, who said I should be home within a month. Now I shall tell you the rest.
On Thursday evening we moored below a temple whose name I cannot spell and will not attempt. The reis, our captain, a grave old man with a white beard who has made this voyage forty times, led us up through the sand by lantern light. I had seen engravings of such places and thought them exaggerated. They are not. The columns rose above us like the trunks of a stone forest, so thick that six of us joining hands could not have circled one, and every inch of them was cut with birds and boats and men walking in procession, as fresh as if the carver had laid down his chisel at sunset. Nobody spoke. Even Mr Copley forgot the flies.
When we came back to the boat we found the crew sitting round a fire on the bank, singing. One man beat a small drum and the rest answered him in a chorus that rose and fell like the river itself. They had hauled us through the heat of the day, and yet they sang as though the work had been a holiday. I sat on the deck in the dark and listened until the fire was ashes, and I thought that I had never heard anything so contented in my life.
So you see I cannot give you the plain answer you wanted. I am hot, bitten, slow and frequently cross, and I would not be anywhere else in the world. Tell Mamma the flies are nothing. Your loving and very sunburnt sister, Louisa
“The writer finds her journey on the Nile a disappointment.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.