Many of the lady visitors to Cairo are pretty hot and one wonders sometimes whether they are attracted most by the antiquities or by the iniquities of Egypt. On Christmas night we saw in the moonlight in the sand a colossal bedouin and from beneath him appeared a little feminine attire, so little that it would not have betrayed its wearer, but that a little voice said in English, “Mind tomorrow night?”
-The Man Who Loved Egypt, J.W. McPherson
(In Cairo) Boris Karloff, as the heavily disfigured Egyptian gentleman Ardath Bey, the reincarnated Pharaonic scribe Imhotep- Have we not met before, Miss Grosvenor? Miss Grosvenor (daughter of the Governor General of Sudan, recognized by Ardath as the reincarnated Princess Anck-es-en-Amun whom he loved 4,000 years before)- No, I don’t think so. I don’t think one would forget meeting you. Boris Karloff- Then I am mistaken… (Later as Imhotep, having put Miss Grosvenor in a trance and dressed her as a belly dancer) You will not remember what I show you now yet I will awaken memories of love…and death.
-The Mummy (1932)
Western women going East. Lesley Blanche wrote about four of them in The Wilder Shores of Love. Rosita Forbes was married back home but went there solo. Lady Anne Blunt travelled there with her husband to buy stud horses. Dorothy Eady, Omm Sety, went after bumping her head when a girl and came to thinking herself the reincarnation of Bentreshyt, a consecrated virgin in the Temple of Seti at Abydos where she lived the rest of her life. When I visited Abydos in 1978 I must have seen her lurking about in Egyptian mufti but she wasn’t easy to recognize.
Some of my classmates that year wanted to study more than the language, I remember one who returned from Christmas vacation far up the Sudanese Nile with stories of dancing naked around a Nuer fire by moonlight. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist of Nilotic people and McPherson’s good friend, would have called her a participant-observer in little feminine attire.