14 APRIL 2007, Page 55

Tomb raider

Lee Langley follows in the footsteps of a famous French Egyptologist ANile cruise is not for wimps — not if you do it seriously: up before dawn, a quick breakfast, then off on the boat to the first tomb of the day. Deep underground, painted walls glowed with Pharaonic profiles, sinister bird-headed priests, rituals from the Book of the Dead. We shivered in our anoraks till the sun god showed his face as we headed for the temples. Some people cheated, retreating to deck recliners, basking in winter sun. But I was following in the footsteps of a hyper-energetic Frenchman.

If you fed the name Vivant Denon to a University Challenge team, most bright young things probably wouldn’t have a clue, despite the fact that this 18th-century courtier, artist, traveller, collector and libertine virtually created the Louvre as we know it today, filling the museum with treasures, mostly looted from the enemies of France. His name is carved on its façade.

Denon — short, curly-haired and snubnosed — was a charmer adored by women, who found his wit and dimpled grin captivating. When I began to research his life I too fell under his spell; I wanted to go where he went, see what he had seen. I tracked him from Paris to Venice (the scene of his greatest love affair), to Naples and Sicily, and back to Paris, where a chilling midnight encounter with Robespierre saved him from the guillotine. But it was Egypt that changed his life and brought him fame. (In the British Museum there’s a delightful Denon drawing that shows him sketching in the desert, camels nearby.) He was one of 200 savants — geologists, archaeologists, mathematicians, artists and writers — the 28-year-old General Bonaparte took with him to Egypt, ‘embedded’ with the army, to study, measure, analyse and record everything they saw — animal, vegetable, mineral — on a military campaign which some historians have rated as worse than the retreat from Moscow. Without water, the men marched through hostile desert. Close to starvation, they lived off what they could scavenge, and fought valiantly. But their real enemy was Egypt itself — its heat, sandstorms and plagues of locusts.

The scholars suffered alongside the troops: Denon describes sleeping without cover in the sand, sword in hand, eaten alive by mosquitoes. Just over 200 years later, I gave thanks for my air-conditioned cabin, en-suite loo and shower, tempting menus and splash pool for cooling off.

Across the web of time, Denon and I explored the great temples: Karnak, Dendera, Abydos, Luxor, Edfu. The French approached them with caution: pillars could conceal Arab snipers. Bedouins attacked as Denon, sketchpad on knees, hurriedly attempted to snatch a drawing or copy hieroglyphs. I explored the splendours at leisure. All I risked was being ambushed by carpet salesmen or accosted by youths armed with Nubian beads, silver necklaces, kaftans.

Onboard lecturers filled in our historical blanks. But they couldn’t match the thrilling immediacy of Denon’s bestselling Voyage

Photo: John Reiss

dans la basse et la haute Egypte, which was how I first encountered him. The book triggered an Egyptomania that swept through Europe. Reading his vivid account, you feel his excitement as he groped his way to a pyramid’s dark heart, or stared with wonder as his flickering lamp lit up an underground chamber heaped with treasure, gilded furniture, skeletons of the sacred ibis.

When Bonaparte’s troops reached the tiny island of Philae they were met by showers of spears hurled by natives. Philae in Greek (Pilak in ancient Egyptian) meant The End: the southernmost limit of Egypt, where the Nubian desert lay like a sea solidified. Philae was sacred. But 1960 brought Nasser’s High Dam, and the island with its precious temple complex vanished beneath swirling waters — doomed — until Unesco came up with a brilliant bit of lateral thinking. Nearby, another island, Agilqiyyah, stood above water level. The drowned island was surrounded by a retaining wall, its interior pumped dry. Individually numbered, each massive stone block was lifted and floated by barge 500 metres north. The tiny, Ptolemaic Temple of Isis which Denon declared the most perfect in all Egypt; the decorated pylon; the pavilion of Trajan, with its colonnade of 31 columns, all were moved to safety on a new outcrop of rock — Agilqiyyah — renamed, carefully chipped away and reshaped to match the original.

The island is, of course, counterfeit. But, framed by a grove of frail, slender trees whose branches flutter bright yellow, Philae lives again. I think Denon would have approved.