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FOUR

Signs of Egypt Everywhere

“We were – King Sety and I – on the verge of startingan odyssey of some sort.” OS

London, 1920. Ever since Sety’s appearance to her two years earlier, Dorothy had been having a recurring dream. It excited her and disturbed her deeply, and she knew it was true. She was an Egyptian girl and she was lying on a woven mat in a very large room with other women and girls. It was night. Then the dream would shift to another room, this one underground, with a channel of water flowing around the perimeter. It was a very sacred place, she knew, but she had not been brought here to take part in a ritual. She was being confronted by an austere man in high priest’s garb, and there were others in the room too, looking at her as if in judgment. The man was beating her because she would not tell him what he demanded. Nothing could make her say what he wanted her to say, and the beating continued. When she woke she would be drenched in sweat and screaming, and the family would know that Dorothy had had another of “those dreams.”

Dorothy was now 16, pursuing her independent studies and living at home. England was not where she wanted to be, but for the time being it would have to do.

The war had taken an awful toll on the country in every way. For Dorothy’s father, a master tailor, it meant a drastic falling-off of his previously well-heeled clientele. But Reuben Eady saw it as a chance to re-invent himself and do something he had always dreamed of. Off and on through the years he had performed on stage as a juggler and magician; not that he had been able to make a living at it, but he knew a thing or two about music halls and theaters, and he loved them. His wife, Caroline, had already put up with a lot from her eccentric little family, so when Reuben came home one day and announced that he had just closed his shop for good she could only look at him and sigh, “What next?”

He didn’t really know, exactly. He had ideas in his head, something to do with the newly emerging cinema industry. He could imagine having his own theater. But before he decided on anything he had to give himself some breathing space, take the family on a trip, look around the British Isles to see where the opportunities lay. If Caroline initially resisted the plan, Dorothy didn’t; she didn’t need convincing to set off on an adventure into the unknown.

Early in the Eady family’s exploratory tour, as they were driving west through the Wiltshire countryside, they stopped at Stonehenge. Of course Dorothy had seen pictures of it before, but to be standing right there, with the morning light casting eerie shadows over the great towering stones – there was something so Egyptian about it all, she thought. To her eyes the roughly shaped obelisks had been arranged into a temple for worshipping the sun, like the obelisks of Egypt. She was sure there must have been an “Egyptian intervention” here.

While her parents strolled, Dorothy’s curiosity led her to a nearby group of Bronze Age barrows and graves. Catching a glint of color at her feet, she bent down and picked up a handful of earth that contained a number of blue and green particles, and she shouted for her mother and father to come quickly to see what she had found. When the Eadys looked at her discovery they were not impressed, but Dorothy knew what she had: Egyptian mummy beads, and she was right. She was not the first person to have found mummy beads in the area of Stonehenge, or even scarabs. At the very least they were proof of ancient trade between the Mediterranean and the British Isles, not to mention even more intriguing possibilities.

She carefully placed her finds in a small box, intending to add this new treasure to her tiny collection of Egyptian artifacts that had made their way into her hands. Egypt seemed to be constantly reminding her that sooner or later she would board a ship heading for the Black Land. She felt stranded in the British Isles. There was so much yet to know, so much she couldn’t truly understand until she had kissed the precious soil of Egypt and begun to unravel the mystery of herself.

The family tour did not interrupt her study of Egyptology; there were modest museums and libraries all along the way. The science of Egyptology was still in its infancy, but a prodigious quantity of publications about Egyptian history and archaeology were streaming onto the book market, written by world famous pioneers such as J. H. Breasted, Hermann Junker and Dr. Budge. As much as Dorothy appreciated their work – and Dr. Budge’s especial kindness to her – there was one Egyptologist who warranted her highest esteem: W. Flinders Petrie (he would be knighted in 1923 for his work). On this giant of archaeology she bestowed her silent adoration for his meticulous attention to the protocols of excavation. In fact, he created many of the modern protocols, including systematic surveying methods and the use of seriation* to date sites and the artifacts found with them. Dorothy was interested in Flinders Petrie for another reason as well: He was the first archaeologist to dig in the early dynasty tombs in the ancient burial fields of Abydos.

I once asked Omm Sety what school of archaeology she belonged to, and she promptly replied, “First of all, I belong to the school of life, but if you are asking me specifically about excavating technique, my answer would be, I belong to the Flinders Petrie school.”

More and more, Abydos haunted her thoughts and dreams, and not because Abydos was famous; it wasn’t. Few people outside the Egyptological fraternity cared very much about Professor Petrie’s excavations at Abydos. His discoveries in Thebes and Memphis, Dendera and Giza were far more glamorous to the average Briton in the 1920s. At that time there weren’t even many Egyptians who had heard of Abydos. But thousands of years ago every Egyptian dreamed of making a pilgrimage to Abydos to witness the ancient passion play and see the blessed Lady Isis and Lord Osiris.

Isis in Plymouth

Reuben Eady’s instincts told him he could make a go of it as a movie house impresario, and the port city of Plymouth seemed just the place. With his head fairly bursting with original ideas for such a venture he found the financing to set himself up in business.

His New Palladium Theatre was popular from the day it opened. He showed silent films and staged theatrical events that he wrote and directed. Often he featured his daughter, who would come out in costume and sing popular songs of the day in her high soprano voice. She was not always an enthusiastic participant in these musical interludes at the New Palladium; she was drawn to another kind of performance entirely.

Dorothy was part of a little theater group that once put on a play based on the story of Isis and Osiris. To anyone who knew of her obsession with Egypt it was no surprise that she took the role of Isis. When it came time for her to sing the words of the ancient Lament for the death of Osiris, she didn’t use the music from the prepared score, but instead set the words to a melody she had sung over and over to herself when she was a child in London. The crooning melody had been in her head for as long as she could recall, and now she applied it to the rhyming lines that the writer Andrew Lang had adapted from a translation of the old hieroglyphic text. It begins with these words:

Sing we Osiris dead, lament the fallen head;

The light has left the world, the world is grey.

Athwart the starry skies the web of darkness lies;

Sing we Osiris, passed away.

Ye tears, ye stars, ye fires, ye rivers shed;

Weep, children of the Nile, weep – for your Lord is dead.

Throughout Dorothy’s youth there were foreshadowings of Egypt, but it seemed unlikely that anything in Plymouth would take her in that direction. And the years were passing. As she approached her mid-20s there was no discernable plan for her life, at least not in the practical sense.

About those years in Plymouth, I have always believed that she was simply waiting. I think she had a fatalistic trust that the way would be shown to her. In the meantime she took classes at the local art school, which would serve her well later, and when she was about 26 she became involved in politics – in particular, the independence movements of Eamon de Valera in Ireland and Saad Zaghlul in Egypt. She was a natural-born partisan, always ready to jump into a fray if she thought there was a cause that needed defending. It was certainly that way with the growing Egyptian nationalist movement. In a roundabout way it was politics that brought her at last to Egypt.

Imam

In the early 1930s, Egypt had been in a state of prolonged unrest and turmoil under British occupation. The decades before had brought great wealth to some and reduced much of the populace to a grinding poverty. While on the surface the richly cosmopolitan society of Cairo seemed glamorous and optimistic, there was increasing desperation among Egyptians in general, and certainly among the young intellectuals, who resented the foreign economic manipulation and what they saw as the arrogant superiority of the occupiers. Egyptian nationalism was the inevitable result.

By 1920, the British had their backs to the wall trying to suppress the spreading movement for self-rule, and in 1922 they finally capitulated, giving Egypt its nominal independence.

But Britain did not go quietly back to her shores; she kept a large military presence in the Suez and elsewhere and she made sure that the new Egyptian government was attentive to British interests. Full independence was what the Egyptians yearned for, not this veiled colonialism. By the early ’30s, acts of civil disobedience had led to suppression of dissent, which had led to riots and imprisonment of the leaders of the nationalists.

At that time there were a number of Egyptian students in the British universities. Two of them, George Wissa and Imam Abdel Meguid, had been best friends since they were boys, and had come to London to pursue advanced degrees. Imam was studying education and planned to be a teacher back home. But he was first of all a patriot; he spent long hours distributing handbills in the halls of Parliament and arguing eloquently for Egyptian self-rule.

By then, Dorothy had returned to London on her own, without her parents’ blessing. They would have preferred to have her near them, but she was of age, and they knew very well that she would always do exactly what she had it in her head to do. A dear old friend of mine, Prof. Dr. Ali Fani, who was pursuing his doctorate at London University at the time, knew her then. He told me that she was really a very beautiful girl. This surprised me, because I had met her when she was already middle-aged and looking quite weathered. To prove his statement, he showed me a picture of her when he had known her. I saw an extremely beautiful young woman, and I was annoyed at myself that I didn’t ask him to lend me the picture so that I could make a copy of it and show it to her. She didn’t seem to have pictures of herself at a young age.

In London, Dorothy found work with an Egyptian journal devoted to educating the British public about Egypt and its right to self-rule. Here at last was a forum that gave her free rein to write her views on Egyptian independence. She could even put her artistic talents to work drawing pithy political cartoons. The work suited Dorothy’s temperament perfectly. Now she was surrounded by people as passionate about Egypt as she was.

In such a charged political atmosphere every fighter for the cause becomes a comrade. And so it happened that Dorothy Eady found herself starting to fall in love, not with some pink-faced young English fellow, but, almost predictably, with an Egyptian – Imam Abdel Meguid.

The true man of her dreams, Sety, was impossibly separated from her by chasms of time, and she had all but lost hope that she would ever make contact with him again. Imam, however, was flesh and blood and he was right here, companionable, intelligent and attentive in a charmingly old-fashioned way. Imam’s friends, especially George Wissa, weren’t sure that this budding romance was a good thing, yet they could not bring themselves to tell him all that was on their minds. As good and amusing and forthright as Dorothy was, Imam’s friends couldn’t see how such a non-traditional woman, even by the rather laissez-faire British standards, would fit in with the refined Egyptian family of the Abdel Meguids. They tried to speak gently of these issues, but could not penetrate Imam’s haze of love. He would leave it to Fate, kesma, to work it out.

The couple became engaged in the spring of 1933, just before Imam returned to Egypt. They could easily have had a civil marriage at the Egyptian Embassy in London, but they agreed that it would be more politic to have a traditional Islamic ceremony with his family in Cairo. They went together to the Egyptian Embassy in London to apply for Dorothy’s entrance visa. It would be a matter of only a few weeks, they were told. And so Imam departed for home to prepare for his bride’s arrival.

Speaking of those romantic days, Omm Sety later said, “The poor man did not realize he was marrying more of a Gypsy than a nice young Englishwoman. For my part, I honestly never suspected that King Sety would be part of my life. But I was quite wrong. We were – King Sety and I – on the verge of starting an odyssey of some sort. To be more precise, we were taking over from the point at which we ended 3300 years ago.”

Summer dragged on, and into autumn, and Dorothy still didn’t have her entrance visa. Just as troubling, she was having difficulty finding a vacancy on a ship going to Egypt. The routes to India and Australia took the ships through the Suez Canal with a stop at Egypt’s Port Said. A British liner sailed once every two months to Sydney, Australia, and there was another that went to India, but the passenger lists on both of them were always full. Travel among the countries of the British Commonwealth was brisk at this time, because the turmoil of the world economic depression had caused waves of hopeful refugees to flee their homelands for opportunities they saw elsewhere in the Commonwealth. At last, after an almost unbearable delay, Dorothy finally had her visa in hand and she managed to secure a berth on a ship that was about to leave for Bombay. She sent a telegram to Imam saying she was on her way to Port Said. When she informed her parents of her plans they were not at all pleased to be the last to know. They had not even met the young man.

In her haste to prepare for departure, Dorothy neglected to pay a final visit to her dear Dr. Budge, who wondered for years afterward what had become of his remarkable young student – though he suspected that she had found her way to Egypt.

*a dating technique based on establishing a chronological ordering of artifacts