The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt Read online

  But not this day. Nor even the day before. The gentleman had had enough of this view. The ship had docked two days earlier, only to be slapped with a quarantine when the captain revealed that someone belowdecks in third class had a disease he suspected was cholera. Under police guard, the cargo had been unloaded—huge sacks of sugar from Hungary, bags of apples, crates of wine—but the passengers had remained on board. As the hours crawled by, a doctor of uncertain qualification moved slowly among the passengers, checking their pulses and making them stick out their tongues. Trained in medicine himself, the gentleman in first class was not impressed. He was not the sort of fellow who suffered fools easily, and now he seemed beset by them. He was sick of the delays, of the contradictory assurances and apologies of the captain, of the simultaneous officiousness and inefficiency of the port police, and of the endless, pointless waiting. He had important work to do and a limited time within which to accomplish it.

  The impatient gentleman’s name was Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach. Any fellow German on the boat would immediately have taken note of the “Freiherr,” a word that translates roughly as “baron” in English and signaled instantly the gentleman’s aristocratic standing. In fact, members of his family had been pillars of his home city of Nuremberg, in what was then the kingdom of Bavaria, since the fifteenth century. His ancestors had been courtiers, lawyers, judges, architects, scientists, and political leaders. The gentleman’s own father had been the city’s mayor. Stromer himself was a scientist, an associate professor at the highly respected University of Munich and a man with a rising reputation in his field. Though he had originally studied medicine and science, his field now was geology and paleontology. His specialty was the paleontology of the Western Desert of Egypt. He was just past his fortieth birthday, and this was his third expedition to that remote and inhospitable part of Africa.

  Notwithstanding the present unpleasantness, the voyage so far had been less than salubrious. The suitably, if somewhat unimaginatively, named Cleopatra had sailed from Trieste at noon on the previous Thursday. Stromer had arrived the night before, having traveled by train from Germany along a route that had taken him from Munich through Mühldorf and Salzburg, then south through spectacular mountain scenery bright with the colors of autumn, before finally arriving at the port on Wednesday evening. To save money, he had taken a third-class train ticket and, for the single evening he was to spend in Trieste, booked himself into an inexpensive hotel, only to find the bed verminous. Though it pained him to spend the money, that night’s experience had caused him to book a first-class cabin (though one he shared with another passenger) for the voyage to Egypt.

  For a few hours the Cleopatra steamed southeast along the Istrian coast of what is now Slovenia, then through the coastal islands of Croatia before heading out across the Adriatic toward the heel of Italy’s boot. The sail through the islands had been splendid, the low slant of the November sun coating the islands with gold. But later that afternoon the sea turned rough, and Stromer spent the time on a deck chair trying, with typical German determination, to control his unruly stomach. Unsuccessful, he skipped dinner altogether, retired to his cabin, and spent the night seasick. To make matters worse, at one-thirty A.M. Stromer discovered that his first-class stateroom, which he had assumed would guarantee him a modicum of comfort and peace, was directly below the galley, from which there arose a clattering that would awaken him in the wee hours of each morning throughout the trip.

  Still, the second day dawned warm and sunny, with a calm sea, and Stromer regained his stomach and his good humor as the ship sailed south under a crisp blue sky. The ship docked briefly at Brindisi at three P.M., then turned away from Italy and made for the southwestern coast of Greece. Having once again slept miserably because of the noise, Stromer rose early on Saturday morning to see first the sunbaked Io-nian island of Kefallinia and, later, Zakinthos, passing just off the starboard bow as the boat steamed south along the inside passage toward the rugged Peloponnesian coast. By sunset the ship had reached the Gulf of Messini, and under the light of the moon, it slipped past Crete and headed out into the Mediterranean. The next day, as the steamer crossed the sea toward Africa, Stromer lounged on the deck in the sun, passing time with the other first-class passengers. That night, in what would turn out to be the vain hope of a restful sleep, he turned in early. The next morning, Monday, November 7, he was up at dawn to scan the horizon for the approaching North African coast and the port of Alexandria. It was as the Cleopatra was easing into its berth on Tuesday afternoon that the captain revealed news of the quarantine.

  In some respects, the dockside delay was the least of Stromer’s problems. On this expedition, he was to be accompanied by another scientist whom he identifies in his meticulously kept field journals only as “Dr. Leuchs.”1 However, the relationship between them began badly and continued to deteriorate. For one thing, Stromer (at this time still a bachelor) was astonished to find, when he boarded the Cleopatra, that Leuchs had arrived on the expedition with his wife. Furious at the extent to which this would hamper what would certainly be a physically difficult journey—therefore compromising his scientific objectives—Stromer nonetheless swallowed his irritation, remained cordial, and even attempted to teach Leuchs the rudiments of Arabic only to find him a thoroughly uninterested student. To make matters worse, as Stromer details in his journal in the spidery Sütterlin handwriting that was even then falling from favor in Germany, both Dr. and Frau Leuchs treated him rudely when they considered him at all. It was, in sum, an intolerable situation. For Stromer, being kept prisoner aboard the Cleopatra was made doubly trying because it forced him to remain in close proximity with the doctor and his distant, unfriendly wife.2 Indeed, it would be hard to know which prospect he found more troubling that morning: spending more time on board the ship or spending more time in Egypt with “Dr. Leuchs und Frau.” Neither alternative was even remotely attractive.

  At last, on the ninth, the captain announced that the passengers would be released. After a night ashore at a hotel of dubious quality arranged through a local hired by Leuchs, Stromer and his companions finally boarded a train at noon the next day, rattled along the western edge of the lush Nile Delta, and arrived in Cairo at three P.M.

  The Cairo they entered as they disembarked from the train that afternoon was a city that seemed in the grip of chaos. Not that there was any crisis afoot; chaos was simply endemic in Cairo in 1910. It had been thus for twenty-five centuries, as Egypt had been under some form of constantly shifting foreign control since 525 B.C.3

  Europe’s influence in Egypt began in 1798, when Napoléon Bonaparte, with an eye to cutting off the British from their growing holdings in India and the Far East, landed an invasion force at Alexandria, advanced up the Nile to Cairo, and crushed the local chieftains, the Mameluke beys, at the Battle of the Pyramids. He declared himself an admirer of the Muslim faith and a disciple of Muhammad, and claimed his goal was to return Egypt to the Ottoman sultan’s control. Egypt was nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire, but the sultan had never been able to win the full support of the Mamelukes. But neither side trusted Napoléon,4 and France abandoned its claim to Egypt in 1801, to be replaced immediately by a joint Anglo-Ottoman expeditionary force.

  Napoléon’s invasion and the subsequent French occupation did have three immediate and lasting effects. First, it awakened his enemies, the British, to the strategic importance of Egypt and the Ottoman Middle East to their colonial aspirations. Second, somewhat ironically, it turned many leading Egyptians into avid Francophiles. Forward-looking Egyptians and representatives of the Ottoman sultanate in Egypt adopted French customs, sent their children to school in France, and built homes and official buildings in the French style of the era. (Many of these elegant buildings remained when Stromer arrived in Cairo on his first expedition in 1901.5) Third, a corps of French intellectuals was dispatched to study Egyptian culture and history. They brought back detailed accounts of the monuments and wonders of Egypt,
sparking an obsession in Europe with all things Egyptian.

  But there was another, even more lasting effect. An Albanian Muslim, nominally in the service of the sultan but a man of dubious loyalty to anyone but himself, arrived in Egypt with the Anglo-Ottoman force. In 1805 he stepped into the void left by Napoléon and the weakened Mameluke beys and seized power. His name was Muhammad Ali. He and his heirs would rule Egypt for a century and a half.

  Muhammad Ali was succeeded in 1849 by his grandson Abbas,6 who was an admirer of the British and granted to Britain the concession to build a railroad—the first in Africa or Asia—from Alexandria to Cairo. Completed in 1851, the railroad dramatically strengthened Britain’s foothold in the region and simultaneously eased its imperial passage to India. Abbas’s successor, his uncle Said, was a French loyalist and had long been friends with the French engineer Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps, to whom, in 1856, he awarded the right to build a canal from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez—the Suez Canal.

  It was Said and his successor, Ismail, one of Muhammad Ali’s younger sons, who moved Egypt into the modern era and, ultimately, bankruptcy. The two put Egypt into a rapid campaign of modernization, building new railways, roads, telegraph lines, canals, dams, bridges, and municipal infrastructure at a pace that prompted a correspondent of The Times of London to write, “Egypt is a marvelous instance of progress. She has advanced as much in seventy years as many other countries have done in five hundred.”7 Much of this progress, however, was funded by European loans carrying ruinously high interest rates. And because the Ottoman sultanate, which still ruled Egypt, had leased out much of the country’s economic activity to European commercial concessionaires at very low rates, the Egyptian leaders were strapped for funds with which to cover the state’s debts.

  In a desperate attempt to reduce the debt load and stave off bankruptcy, in 1875 Ismail sold Britain his 44 percent interest in the Suez Canal for a mere £4 million, making Britain the principal stockholder (thus infuriating the French). But even this could not stem the cresting tide of debt; Egypt formally declared bankruptcy a year later.8 Thus, what Britain and France had failed to do militarily or politically, they achieved instead financially: Egypt was ruled now by its creditors, through a joint Anglo-French debt commission.

  When, a few years later, a nationalist uprising threatened to upset the European control of Egypt through its puppet—Ismail’s successor, Tewfik—most of the European powers were surprisingly unwilling to undertake a military action against the uprising. Britain, with perhaps the most at stake, acted on its own in crushing the rebel forces. From that point on, Britain ruled Egypt as a protectorate. Six years before Stromer and his companions arrived in Cairo, the 1904 Entente Cordiale between France and Britain solemnized the arrangement.9 In the agreement, France received Morocco as its protectorate in return for ceding Egypt to Britain. It was to these British authorities that Stromer would have to appeal for the permits he needed to enter the Western Desert.

  Despite its crowds, hawkers, hustlers, noise, and furious activity, Cairo in 1910 was still only Egypt’s second city, after Alexandria. But change was in the air. Some roads had been macadamized. Formal government buildings were well established, and construction activity was everywhere. Though horses, donkeys, and camels filled the streets and pedestrians picked their way around them and their droppings, there were also some five hundred automobiles that tried, with limited success, to squeeze their way through the narrow streets and milling throngs—a harbinger of the vehicular anarchy that rules the city’s streets today.10

  British domination of Egypt notwithstanding, Stromer’s social calendar in Cairo during November 1910 demonstrates a substantial German presence there in the years before World War I. The Germans played a significant role in exploring and mapping the Western Desert. Georg Schweinfurth, for example, founded the Royal Geographical Society of Egypt in the late 1800s. Schweinfurth, also president of the Institute of Egypt, was an archaeologist, geologist, and botanist who worked in Egypt, and particularly in the Fayoum Oasis southwest of Cairo, for more than thirty years.11 Schweinfurth’s discoveries of mammal and other fossils in the Fayoum had led Stromer to Egypt on his first expedition.

  Although other Europeans had explored portions of North Africa, it was the German geographer Gerhard Rohlfs who mounted the most comprehensive expeditions, crisscrossing the northern portion of the continent six times in the latter half of the nineteenth century and amassing an immense amount of information on the region. In 1873 Rohlfs secured Ismail’s sponsorship for an expedition to explore and document the “unknown territories of Egypt” in the Western Desert. While Rohlfs’s objectives were scientific, Ismail’s were fundamentally economic: He asked Rohlfs to search for the rumored old riverbed of the Nile and to determine whether agriculture was possible in the Western Desert.12

  A massive undertaking that required months to plan and equip, the Rohlfs expedition was, among other firsts, the first to produce a reliable though still incomplete geological map of the Western Desert. It was compiled and ultimately published by one of the scientists who accompanied Rohlfs, the famous German geologist Karl Alfred von Zittel. A few years later von Zittel, based at the University of Munich, would serve as mentor and thesis adviser to a promising young student of geology and paleontology. The student’s name was Ernst Stromer.

  After checking in to his Cairo hotel, Stromer went directly to the post office and found a letter of welcome waiting for him from the director of the Geological Survey of Egypt. While the older Royal Geological Society had been created by a German, the Geological Survey was founded in 1896 by the British, primarily to map Egypt’s boundaries in order to defend them from increasingly troublesome attacks from Sudan, in the south. Both institutions had a history of cooperation by the time Stromer arrived, and he had established good working relationships with each during his earlier expeditions to the Fayoum Oasis and Wadi el Natrun, the Natrun Valley, during the winters of 1901–1902 and 1903–1904.

  Stromer was, by all accounts, a man who observed the formalities, and the second thing he did that first afternoon in Cairo was pay a visit to the office of Georg Steindorff, a noted German Egyptologist. The visit would have been both a matter of courtesy to the senior scientist and part of planning the current expedition. In 1901 Steindorff had visited several of the oases of the Western Desert,13 including the one that would occupy much of Stromer’s time on this expedition and much of the rest of his life—Bahariya—and he needed Steindorff’s counsel.

  Meanwhile, in between meetings, and whenever Leuchs and his wife were not out sight-seeing somewhere on their own, Stromer introduced them to his German and British associates and acquaintances, including the great Schweinfurth, with whom he remained close friends. He also invited the couple to dine with him at the German tennis club and attempted to expose them to the range of artistic and cultural attractions in Cairo. To Stromer’s growing annoyance, the couple showed neither interest nor gratitude.

  It was with what one senses must have been relief that, on November 14, Stromer went off to meet with John Ball, founder of the Desert Survey Department of the Geological Survey of Egypt. Much of what is known about the Western Desert today is due in large part to the work of Ball and his early colleagues at the survey: H. G. Lyons, its first director, Hugh Beadnell, William Fraser Hume, and Thomas Barron. Once again, Stromer’s visit was both formal and practical, for just that year the Survey had published the first topographic map of Egypt, in six large sheets, and was even then finishing up a geological map that would be published in 1911. Both resources would have been invaluable to Stromer for his upcoming expedition to Bahariya, one of the less well known areas of the Western Desert.

  On the morning of November 15, after yet another unpleasant evening with the Leuchses, Stromer was worried about two matters. The first, and in many respects the most important, was a missing person, one Richard Markgraf. Markgraf, a somewhat mysterious figure about whom little is known, was one of th
ose people of European descent, common even today, who fall in love with the deserts of North Africa and will do anything, often living hand-to-mouth, to stay there. Originally from Bohemia, Markgraf lived in the village of Sinnuris in the Fayoum Oasis, just south and slightly west of Cairo. He was a commercial collector of fossils and other natural curiosities who sold the items he found to paleontologists and museums, principally in Europe. Markgraf had worked with earlier fossil hunters in the Fayoum, among them the German paleontologist Eberhard Fraas (who would later make remarkable discoveries of Late Jurassic dinosaurs in East Africa) and Henry Fairfield Osborn, from the American Museum of Natural History.14 There is no record of how Markgraf came to Stromer’s attention, although several of Stromer’s friends in Egypt, including Schwein-furth and the English geologist Hugh Beadnell, would both certainly have known Markgraf and could well have recommended him to Stromer. What is known is that they met during Stromer’s first visit to the Fayoum in the winter of 1901–1902, and they got along well: Markgraf served as Stromer’s sammler, or fossil collector, for a decade and a half, and became his friend. By all accounts Markgraf had a remarkable ability to recognize and carefully excavate significant fossils. At least three fossil animals are known to have been named in his honor, the early primates Moeripithecus markgrafi15 and Libypithecus markgrafi, and a fish, Markgrafia libica.