Written by Julia Schulz

Biography

The British author Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for his novels about the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, was born on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland.¹
In fall of 1895, Doyle and his wife stayed for several months in Egypt where he reported as war correspondent for the “Westminster Gazette”. He describes his journey through Egypt in his autobiographical publication “Memories and Adventures” (1924).²
A passage is dedicated to how he accompanied officers who travelled by boat from Assiut to Aswan and on to Wadi Halfa. Complications prevented them from journeying further up the stream so that they stayed at the general headquarters in Aswan for a week.³
His observations are described in a short paragraph before they continued their journey: “at the foot of the Cataract, which extends for some 30 miles, and everything has to be transhipped [sic] and taken on a narrow toy railway to be reloaded on the fresh steamers at Shellal.⁴ It was a huge task […]”.⁵

They carried on with their journey by road, mounted on camels:

“As it was clear that nothing important could take place instantly, we determined to do part of the journey by road. A force of cavalry was going up, and we were ordered to join them and use them as an escort, but we thought we would be happier on our own, and so we managed to lose the Egyptians. There was some risk in our lonely journey along the right bank of the river with our left flank quite unprotected, but on the other hand the dust of a great body of horsemen would be insufferable. Therefore we set forth one evening, mounted upon our camels, with baggage camels in attendance, and quite a retinue of servants. In four or five days we reached Korosko, where we got boats which took us to the frontier in Wady Halfa, while the camels and servants came on by land.” (Doyle 1924, 135)

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His Account in The Tragedy of the Korosko

This experience, traveling from Aswan to the frontier at Wadi Halfa, also inspired his novel The Tragedy of the Korosko (1897), which describes the journey of the S. W. Korosko and its passengers traveling up the Nubian Nile for 200 miles between the First and Second Cataract.⁶ In this book he briefly describes their voyage through Egypt until their arrival at Wadi Halfa.⁷

“The little Korosko puffed and spluttered her way up the river, kicking up the white water behind her, and making more noise and fuss over her five knots an hour than an Atlantic liner on a record voyage. On deck, under the thick awning, sat her little family of passengers, and every few hours she eased down and sidled up to the bank to allow them to visit one more of that innumerable succession of temples. The remains, however, grow more modern as one ascends from Cairo, and travellers who have sated themselves at Gizeh and Sakara with the contemplation of the very oldest buildings which the hands of man have constructed, become impatient of temples which are hardly older than the Christian era.

Ruins which would be gazed upon with wonder and veneration in any other country are hardly noticed in Egypt. The tourists viewed with languid interest the half-Greek art of the Nubian bas-reliefs; they climbed the hill of Korosko to see the sun rise over the savage Eastern desert; they were moved to wonder by the great shrine of Abou-Simbel, where some old race has hollowed out a mountain as if it were a cheese; and, finally, upon the evening of the fourth day of their travels they arrived at Wady Halfa, the frontier garrison town, some few hours after they were due, on account of a small mishap in the engine-room. The next morning was to be devoted to an expedition to the famous rock of Abousir, from which a great view may be obtained of the second cataract.” (Doyle 1897, 485-86)

Sources

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