Shem el Nessim: An inspiration in perfume
PART THREE
It was several days before I ascertained that Stan Tooprig had booked himself a cabin on a steamer at the Port of London. From my later research I found out it had been on a French-registered vessel named Cachous which, once she had left British coastal waters, sailed past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean and on to Alexandria, where Tooprig boarded a felucca — one of the small, lateen-rigged sailing boats that plied the Mahmoudieh Canal and the Nile — to Cairo. There was a train that transferred passengers from Alexandria but, strangely, Tooprig preferred the slower water route; it was as though he had been impeded by his sense of foreboding. By the time Tooprig arrived in Cairo, he was emaciated and his skin had the leathery appearance of the mummified corpse of Sethos I in the Cairo Museum. When I first set eyes on him, I wondered whether he was a morphine addict or was dying of some other terminal disease, but I didn’t like to ask.
Myself, I had been in Cairo for five years, working mainly as a reporter for the English language Cairo Gazette, ever since we declared Egypt a sovereign country with Fouad I of the Mohamed Ali Dynasty as its king. There was still plenty about which to report that was likely to be of interest to those at home, and so some of my stories were picked up via telegram by the news desk at The Times. To my mind, we were treating the Egyptians rather more as enemies than as friends, but I was well treated by the locals and found life in the city most pleasant. I had large, airy rooms off Al Geish Square and the pace of life was far slower than in Europe; one achieved in a week in Cairo what one might in a day in London. The boys were alluring if not always compliant, and there was an abundance of kif and majoun with which to help stave off the boredom and other ailments.
But Cairo brought Tooprig no luck whatsoever. Although he chose to live in the most luxurious hotel in all of Cairo, the hideously expensive Hotel Savoy, there was no trace whatsoever of the mysterious Shem-el-Nessim woman on either side of its daunting white façade. There was another reason he had chosen this hotel for his accommodation, apart from its magnificence, but Tooprig had yet to apprise me of this.
Meanwhile, the employees of The Savoy were open to all manner of bribes, but none even dared to feign an encounter with this woman. Again, she had expertly escaped him, and this time it seemed to have been with a degree of permanence. Tooprig enjoyed no special knowledge of Cairo’s geography, its businesses or its people to help him locate her. Since arriving, he had searched high and low; carrying out reconnaissance missions at all the other fine hotels where he bribed porters and doormen to no avail. He made a mischief of himself with the officials at the British Embassy on Ahmed Raghab Street and became a regular of the expatriate cocktail circuit, but there wasn’t a solitary sighting — and not a single case of mistaken identity. He soon realised his journey here had been in vain: if the woman had ever been in Cairo, she was no longer.
I put down my notebook, acceded to his request, and he rewarded me with his story. “It’s quite the most remarkable thing,” Tooprig claimed, and by the time I had heard the foregoing I must say I had to agree with him. When he tired from the exertion of his account, we lit cigarettes, ordered more coffee and sized one another up.
“There’s an Egyptian chap I’ve heard about from my contacts on the Gazette who entered the grave of a Pharaoh and his Queen and who now claims to have been possessed by her perfume,” I told him.
Tooprig pleaded with me energetically to take him to this man.
I knew of Ahmed Rezk quite by chance. One evening he had told me an implausible tale about his exploits as an erstwhile grave-robber. Since Rezk’s absurd adventure also involved the supposed supernatural effects of a particular perfume, I agreed to arrange a meeting between the two men, feeling sorry for Tooprig and foolishly thinking it might serve as some form of succour. By this time, Tooprig was eating practically nothing and was subsisting virtually entirely on coffee, in the hope that if he remained awake long enough he would eventually see the Shem-el-Nessim woman again and his previous life would somehow magically resume.
“Rezk broke into the as yet undiscovered tomb in the secluded western branch of the Valley of the Kings in Thebes,” I explained, as I walked Tooprig back in the direction of the Hotel Savoy that evening. “They sold most of their spoils around town to various foreigners, but Rezk still has a canopic jar that he claims reeks of the perfume from the tomb.”
*
It was early spring, a time when the Egyptians celebrate ‘smelling the breezes’, a holiday that dates back to the time of the Pharaohs, over 4000 years ago. I also took along an interpreter, a fellow in the employ of the Cairo Gazette. Tooprig himself was so frail that he could barely manage the short flight of stairs up to Rezk’s apartment in the old city.
We eventually found Rezk and his wife on their balcony, where he was eating fisikh: salted, almost rotting fish. The sulphurous stink of it was noticeable two floors below. There were many cases of food poisoning each year in Cairo because people purchased improperly preserved fisikh from disreputable shops and unlicensed salting factories. Rezk looked terrible. His skin was sallow and his breath came in wheezing gasps. His wife was clearly distraught, beseeching him to eat fruit and to drink water, but Rezk brushed aside her attempts to dab at his slick brows with a damp cloth.
Rezk and an unnamed accomplice, he purported, had tunnelled for days through the rock to the burial chamber of the tomb and eventually found the king and queen in their sarcophagi. “We opened their coffins and their coverings, where we found the mummy of this king,” our interpreter translated as Rezk guzzled down greasy mouthfuls of the stinking fisikh in the pauses in his confession. “There were amulets and ornaments of gold at its throat; its head had a mask of gold upon it. The mummy was overlaid with gold, its coverings wrought with silver and inlaid with lapis lazuli. We stripped off the gold and all the amulets and ornaments. We found the king’s wife and stripped off all that we found on her, likewise. We stole their furniture and vases of gold, silver and bronze. We divided the gold from the mummies, and the amulets, ornaments and coverings between us.”
Both Tooprig and I found Rezk’s explanation for consuming so much of the rotting fisikh extraordinary, and it was linked to his confession: “It’s the only way I can think of to be rid of this smell,” he told my interpreter, with a defeated expression on his face.
“What smell? All I can smell is rotten fish,” I said, disbelievingly.
“No, there is something else,” Tooprig countered. “I’m quite sure of it.”
Rezk went on to explain how, once the queen’s golden mask had been removed, the chamber had filled with a heady perfume. By a process of elimination, the thieves narrowed down the source of the fragrance to an alabaster canopic urn in one corner of the tomb. The thieves had begun to feel tired and, since it was shortly after midnight, decided to take a break from their plundering to rest for a while. When they came to, the chamber felt unnaturally cold, but the intense and sickly-sweet perfume was still there. They carefully packed the urn into one of their swag bags and took it with them. However, upon their return to Cairo they discovered that the urn contained nothing more than the foul and stinking viscera of the embalmed mummies, and no longer exuded any perfume whatsoever. Nevertheless, that same intoxicating scent had somehow pursued the grave-robbers ever since, and they simply couldn’t shake it; even rotting fisikh succeeded only in masking it slightly.
“Show me the urn!” Tooprig pleaded, but Rezk explained that his wife had forced him to abandon it in the desert, so foul had the smell in their small apartment become. At this point, I began to doubt a large part of Rezk’s story; in particular that such a large and elaborate tomb could have existed undiscovered for so long in the Valley of the Kings, which was famously crawling with “archaelogists” of the worst sort. Rezk stubbornly refused to return to the tomb and also proved incapable of describing its exact location, so we had him draw for us a map of the site.
Tooprig was so infirm by this stage that I offered him my own services and those of my interpreter to accompany him on an expedition to Thebes. It took us several days to get to the ruins of the ancient city; by train and by camel and finally on foot to the Valley of the Kings. En route, we passed the silk merchants offering bolts of cloth; then the local dyers, knee-deep in shades of ochre and blue; then the sound of goldsmiths hammering. Finally, there was just the desert and the valley receding into the dusk. The place Rezk had marked for us was close to a short cliff face, about nine feet high. In the distance, a pack of dogs was howling and seemed to be drawing closer to us. It made the atmosphere tense and my interpreter looked nervous; there were caves all about us, in which we knew further grave-robbers and bandits to be holed up. But there was no sign of an entrance to a tomb, concealed or otherwise. The wind was whipping up the dust and so, in spite of Tooprig’s pleas, after several hours of futile searching, we were forced to admit defeat as the sun began to rise.
I tried the museums and some Egyptologist contacts of mine, but none could confirm the presence of any excavations or even suspected tombs in the area Rezk had described to us.
When, at Tooprig’s insistence, we returned to Cairo and to Rezk’s dwellings less than a month later, we found his wife in mourning. Her beloved Ahmed, she said, had stopped eating altogether — even the stinking fisikh — and had simply wasted away. The identity of his accomplice thus went with him to his grave.
—END OF PART THREE—
If you missed Part One and Part Two of Shem-el-Nessim, you can find them here.
It was several days before I ascertained that Stan Tooprig had booked himself a cabin on a steamer at the Port of London. From my later research I found out it had been on a French-registered vessel named Cachous which, once she had left British coastal waters, sailed past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean and on to Alexandria, where Tooprig boarded a felucca — one of the small, lateen-rigged sailing boats that plied the Mahmoudieh Canal and the Nile — to Cairo. There was a train that transferred passengers from Alexandria but, strangely, Tooprig preferred the slower water route; it was as though he had been impeded by his sense of foreboding. By the time Tooprig arrived in Cairo, he was emaciated and his skin had the leathery appearance of the mummified corpse of Sethos I in the Cairo Museum. When I first set eyes on him, I wondered whether he was a morphine addict or was dying of some other terminal disease, but I didn’t like to ask.
Myself, I had been in Cairo for five years, working mainly as a reporter for the English language Cairo Gazette, ever since we declared Egypt a sovereign country with Fouad I of the Mohamed Ali Dynasty as its king. There was still plenty about which to report that was likely to be of interest to those at home, and so some of my stories were picked up via telegram by the news desk at The Times. To my mind, we were treating the Egyptians rather more as enemies than as friends, but I was well treated by the locals and found life in the city most pleasant. I had large, airy rooms off Al Geish Square and the pace of life was far slower than in Europe; one achieved in a week in Cairo what one might in a day in London. The boys were alluring if not always compliant, and there was an abundance of kif and majoun with which to help stave off the boredom and other ailments.
But Cairo brought Tooprig no luck whatsoever. Although he chose to live in the most luxurious hotel in all of Cairo, the hideously expensive Hotel Savoy, there was no trace whatsoever of the mysterious Shem-el-Nessim woman on either side of its daunting white façade. There was another reason he had chosen this hotel for his accommodation, apart from its magnificence, but Tooprig had yet to apprise me of this.
Meanwhile, the employees of The Savoy were open to all manner of bribes, but none even dared to feign an encounter with this woman. Again, she had expertly escaped him, and this time it seemed to have been with a degree of permanence. Tooprig enjoyed no special knowledge of Cairo’s geography, its businesses or its people to help him locate her. Since arriving, he had searched high and low; carrying out reconnaissance missions at all the other fine hotels where he bribed porters and doormen to no avail. He made a mischief of himself with the officials at the British Embassy on Ahmed Raghab Street and became a regular of the expatriate cocktail circuit, but there wasn’t a solitary sighting — and not a single case of mistaken identity. He soon realised his journey here had been in vain: if the woman had ever been in Cairo, she was no longer.
*
At the time I first set eyes on Stan Tooprig I was working on a story about the Thomas Alcock Collection; antiquities including the head of a statue of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III and a bronze statue of the falcon-headed deity Horus, that were due to be shipped out of Egypt illegally to the British Museum. I took Tooprig to be yet another shameless sponger. One morning he simply toadied up to me in the coffeehouse and, from somewhere behind the taut and semi-transparent skin of his face, a refined English accent said, “Nobody else will buy me a drink. Will you?”I put down my notebook, acceded to his request, and he rewarded me with his story. “It’s quite the most remarkable thing,” Tooprig claimed, and by the time I had heard the foregoing I must say I had to agree with him. When he tired from the exertion of his account, we lit cigarettes, ordered more coffee and sized one another up.
“There’s an Egyptian chap I’ve heard about from my contacts on the Gazette who entered the grave of a Pharaoh and his Queen and who now claims to have been possessed by her perfume,” I told him.
Tooprig pleaded with me energetically to take him to this man.
I knew of Ahmed Rezk quite by chance. One evening he had told me an implausible tale about his exploits as an erstwhile grave-robber. Since Rezk’s absurd adventure also involved the supposed supernatural effects of a particular perfume, I agreed to arrange a meeting between the two men, feeling sorry for Tooprig and foolishly thinking it might serve as some form of succour. By this time, Tooprig was eating practically nothing and was subsisting virtually entirely on coffee, in the hope that if he remained awake long enough he would eventually see the Shem-el-Nessim woman again and his previous life would somehow magically resume.
“Rezk broke into the as yet undiscovered tomb in the secluded western branch of the Valley of the Kings in Thebes,” I explained, as I walked Tooprig back in the direction of the Hotel Savoy that evening. “They sold most of their spoils around town to various foreigners, but Rezk still has a canopic jar that he claims reeks of the perfume from the tomb.”
*
It was early spring, a time when the Egyptians celebrate ‘smelling the breezes’, a holiday that dates back to the time of the Pharaohs, over 4000 years ago. I also took along an interpreter, a fellow in the employ of the Cairo Gazette. Tooprig himself was so frail that he could barely manage the short flight of stairs up to Rezk’s apartment in the old city.
We eventually found Rezk and his wife on their balcony, where he was eating fisikh: salted, almost rotting fish. The sulphurous stink of it was noticeable two floors below. There were many cases of food poisoning each year in Cairo because people purchased improperly preserved fisikh from disreputable shops and unlicensed salting factories. Rezk looked terrible. His skin was sallow and his breath came in wheezing gasps. His wife was clearly distraught, beseeching him to eat fruit and to drink water, but Rezk brushed aside her attempts to dab at his slick brows with a damp cloth.
Rezk and an unnamed accomplice, he purported, had tunnelled for days through the rock to the burial chamber of the tomb and eventually found the king and queen in their sarcophagi. “We opened their coffins and their coverings, where we found the mummy of this king,” our interpreter translated as Rezk guzzled down greasy mouthfuls of the stinking fisikh in the pauses in his confession. “There were amulets and ornaments of gold at its throat; its head had a mask of gold upon it. The mummy was overlaid with gold, its coverings wrought with silver and inlaid with lapis lazuli. We stripped off the gold and all the amulets and ornaments. We found the king’s wife and stripped off all that we found on her, likewise. We stole their furniture and vases of gold, silver and bronze. We divided the gold from the mummies, and the amulets, ornaments and coverings between us.”
Both Tooprig and I found Rezk’s explanation for consuming so much of the rotting fisikh extraordinary, and it was linked to his confession: “It’s the only way I can think of to be rid of this smell,” he told my interpreter, with a defeated expression on his face.
“What smell? All I can smell is rotten fish,” I said, disbelievingly.
“No, there is something else,” Tooprig countered. “I’m quite sure of it.”
Rezk went on to explain how, once the queen’s golden mask had been removed, the chamber had filled with a heady perfume. By a process of elimination, the thieves narrowed down the source of the fragrance to an alabaster canopic urn in one corner of the tomb. The thieves had begun to feel tired and, since it was shortly after midnight, decided to take a break from their plundering to rest for a while. When they came to, the chamber felt unnaturally cold, but the intense and sickly-sweet perfume was still there. They carefully packed the urn into one of their swag bags and took it with them. However, upon their return to Cairo they discovered that the urn contained nothing more than the foul and stinking viscera of the embalmed mummies, and no longer exuded any perfume whatsoever. Nevertheless, that same intoxicating scent had somehow pursued the grave-robbers ever since, and they simply couldn’t shake it; even rotting fisikh succeeded only in masking it slightly.
“Show me the urn!” Tooprig pleaded, but Rezk explained that his wife had forced him to abandon it in the desert, so foul had the smell in their small apartment become. At this point, I began to doubt a large part of Rezk’s story; in particular that such a large and elaborate tomb could have existed undiscovered for so long in the Valley of the Kings, which was famously crawling with “archaelogists” of the worst sort. Rezk stubbornly refused to return to the tomb and also proved incapable of describing its exact location, so we had him draw for us a map of the site.
Tooprig was so infirm by this stage that I offered him my own services and those of my interpreter to accompany him on an expedition to Thebes. It took us several days to get to the ruins of the ancient city; by train and by camel and finally on foot to the Valley of the Kings. En route, we passed the silk merchants offering bolts of cloth; then the local dyers, knee-deep in shades of ochre and blue; then the sound of goldsmiths hammering. Finally, there was just the desert and the valley receding into the dusk. The place Rezk had marked for us was close to a short cliff face, about nine feet high. In the distance, a pack of dogs was howling and seemed to be drawing closer to us. It made the atmosphere tense and my interpreter looked nervous; there were caves all about us, in which we knew further grave-robbers and bandits to be holed up. But there was no sign of an entrance to a tomb, concealed or otherwise. The wind was whipping up the dust and so, in spite of Tooprig’s pleas, after several hours of futile searching, we were forced to admit defeat as the sun began to rise.
I tried the museums and some Egyptologist contacts of mine, but none could confirm the presence of any excavations or even suspected tombs in the area Rezk had described to us.
When, at Tooprig’s insistence, we returned to Cairo and to Rezk’s dwellings less than a month later, we found his wife in mourning. Her beloved Ahmed, she said, had stopped eating altogether — even the stinking fisikh — and had simply wasted away. The identity of his accomplice thus went with him to his grave.
—END OF PART THREE—
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