I'll echo what I wrote in the Reading Rec thread when I first finished it earlier this month:
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It has a lot of very interesting parts - her small party discovered a room and ruins buried under sand for thousands of years, in one town they were led through back rooms trying to buy illegal antiques and ended up trying to be forced to buy an actual mummy in front of them, boat racing up the Nile, at one point an angry mob (almost justifiably) attacking a member of her party, and seeing Egyptian life from the poorest "fellah" to the well-off "sheyk" with "hareems" full of women. I also really liked the writer's zest for adventure, and there's plenty of illustrations of various places made by the writer herself throughout the book.
However, I felt the book had many dry spots, as the writer was extremely interested in all the ruins and described many in almost too much detail. Even sometimes she'd say she'd "only give a brief description" of a particular ruin and then that would last 2 pages, so imagine the less brief ones! It becomes a bit monotonous when the descriptions occur because so many are so similar. I usually abhor abridged editions of fiction books, but for this old non-fiction book, I think it would do to have an abridged version with much of the ruin descriptions cut down.
Aside from over-description, it is interesting reading about ruins which quite a few of are now gone or inaccessible (especially near the end of her journey in "Nubia"; there is now a dam on the Nile that flooded many of the towns and ruins she visited and made a lake), and all the rest of the book is fascinating. Overall, I'd give it 3 out of 5 stars as a very interesting book of real-life adventure and a culture already so changed, but that one needs to put up with recurrent dry spells of overlong ruin descriptions to savour the sweet parts of the rest.
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And onto this thread:
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Originally Posted by HarryT
One episode I thought was interesting was when one of the gentlemen in her party, while out shooting, accidentally shoots a local woman. When the local villagers (not unnaturally) get a little upset about this, and threaten the man, it is they who get severely punished, while the man who did the shooting gets off scott free. A sign of the times, indeed! If an English gentleman shoots you, it's your fault for getting in the way of the bullet, perhaps.
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Yes, I mentioned that as well in the earlier post above because it really took me aback. Not that it happened; I have to say I wasn't so surprised by that, but by the way the author described it. I want to like the writer, but I find her reaction to it all questionable. Of course why should we assume the author would be any different than the average upper-class Brit of the time period, but still, it's a bit jarring when you start to see the ugly side, first-hand from the ugly side.
That she would decide to include it is one matter, as even if she had found the whole situation very unjust to the villagers, it was an interesting cultural incident from a viewpoint of the villagers' reactions and the lawmakers' reactions. But that she would decide to include it, and then describe it as she did, is another.
I find no fault in her first instinct with the rest of the boat of fending off the angry villagers and wanting their friend's safety at that moment. But everything after that is questionable. That she had no negative feelings about her friend reporting the villagers, knowing that they'd probably get into deep trouble for it, and treating a baby almost dying as a "cute" little story about how her friend bandaged it up filled with benevolent condescension. And that she had no negative feelings about her friend's actions in being "shocked" at the first suggestion of punishment by the lawmakers yet just fine with the lesser punishment of so many strikes. It just seemed all in bad taste and though I must remember the times it still surprised me after getting to know the author through the first part of the book.
ETA - But nevertheless very interesting anthropologically from the point of view of an incident that really happened between the peoples of two different cultures some 150 years ago.