Sing we Osiris dead, lament the fallen head;
The light has left the world, the world is grey.
Athwart the starry skies the web of darkness lies;
Sing we Osiris, passed away.
Ye tears, ye stars, ye fires, ye rivers shed;
Weep, children of the Nile, weep – for your Lord is dead.
Throughout Dorothy’s youth there were foreshadowings of Egypt, but it seemed unlikely that anything in Plymouth would take her in that direction. And the years were passing. As she approached her mid-20s there was no discernable plan for her life, at least not in the practical sense.
About those years in Plymouth, I have always believed that she was simply waiting. I think she had a fatalistic trust that the way would be shown to her. In the meantime she took classes at the local art school, which would serve her well later, and when she was about 26 she became involved in politics – in particular, the independence movements of Eamon de Valera in Ireland and Saad Zaghlul in Egypt. She was a natural-born partisan, always ready to jump into a fray if she thought there was a cause that needed defending. It was certainly that way with the growing Egyptian nationalist movement. In a roundabout way it was politics that brought her at last to Egypt.
Imam
In the early 1930s, Egypt had been in a state of prolonged unrest and turmoil under British occupation. The decades before had brought great wealth to some and reduced much of the populace to a grinding poverty. While on the surface the richly cosmopolitan society of Cairo seemed glamorous and optimistic, there was increasing desperation among Egyptians in general, and certainly among the young intellectuals, who resented the foreign economic manipulation and what they saw as the arrogant superiority of the occupiers. Egyptian nationalism was the inevitable result.
By 1920, the British had their backs to the wall trying to suppress the spreading movement for self-rule, and in 1922 they finally capitulated, giving Egypt its nominal independence.
But Britain did not go quietly back to her shores; she kept a large military presence in the Suez and elsewhere and she made sure that the new Egyptian government was attentive to British interests. Full independence was what the Egyptians yearned for, not this veiled colonialism. By the early ’30s, acts of civil disobedience had led to suppression of dissent, which had led to riots and imprisonment of the leaders of the nationalists.
At that time there were a number of Egyptian students in the British universities. Two of them, George Wissa and Imam Abdel Meguid, had been best friends since they were boys, and had come to London to pursue advanced degrees. Imam was studying education and planned to be a teacher back home. But he was first of all a patriot; he spent long hours distributing handbills in the halls of Parliament and arguing eloquently for Egyptian self-rule.
By then, Dorothy had returned to London on her own, without her parents’ blessing. They would have preferred to have her near them, but she was of age, and they knew very well that she would always do exactly what she had it in her head to do. A dear old friend of mine, Prof. Dr. Ali Fani, who was pursuing his doctorate at London University at the time, knew her then. He told me that she was really a very beautiful girl. This surprised me, because I had met her when she was already middle-aged and looking quite weathered. To prove his statement, he showed me a picture of her when he had known her. I saw an extremely beautiful young woman, and I was annoyed at myself that I didn’t ask him to lend me the picture so that I could make a copy of it and show it to her. She didn’t seem to have pictures of herself at a young age.
In London, Dorothy found work with an Egyptian journal devoted to educating the British public about Egypt and its right to self-rule. Here at last was a forum that gave her free rein to write her views on Egyptian independence. She could even put her artistic talents to work drawing pithy political cartoons. The work suited Dorothy’s temperament perfectly. Now she was surrounded by people as passionate about Egypt as she was.
In such a charged political atmosphere every fighter for the cause becomes a comrade. And so it happened that Dorothy Eady found herself starting to fall in love, not with some pink-faced young English fellow, but, almost predictably, with an Egyptian – Imam Abdel Meguid.
The true man of her dreams, Sety, was impossibly separated from her by chasms of time, and she had all but lost hope that she would ever make contact with him again. Imam, however, was flesh and blood and he was right here, companionable, intelligent and attentive in a charmingly old-fashioned way. Imam’s friends, especially George Wissa, weren’t sure that this budding romance was a good thing, yet they could not bring themselves to tell him all that was on their minds. As good and amusing and forthright as Dorothy was, Imam’s friends couldn’t see how such a non-traditional woman, even by the rather laissez-faire British standards, would fit in with the refined Egyptian family of the Abdel Meguids. They tried to speak gently of these issues, but could not penetrate Imam’s haze of love. He would leave it to Fate, kesma, to work it out.
The couple became engaged in the spring of 1933, just before Imam returned to Egypt. They could easily have had a civil marriage at the Egyptian Embassy in London, but they agreed that it would be more politic to have a traditional Islamic ceremony with his family in Cairo. They went together to the Egyptian Embassy in London to apply for Dorothy’s entrance visa. It would be a matter of only a few weeks, they were told. And so Imam departed for home to prepare for his bride’s arrival.
Speaking of those romantic days, Omm Sety later said, “The poor man did not realize he was marrying more of a Gypsy than a nice young Englishwoman. For my part, I honestly never suspected that King Sety would be part of my life. But I was quite wrong. We were – King Sety and I – on the verge of starting an odyssey of some sort. To be more precise, we were taking over from the point at which we ended 3300 years ago.”
Summer dragged on, and into autumn, and Dorothy still didn’t have her entrance visa. Just as troubling, she was having difficulty finding a vacancy on a ship going to Egypt. The routes to India and Australia took the ships through the Suez Canal with a stop at Egypt’s Port Said. A British liner sailed once every two months to Sydney, Australia, and there was another that went to India, but the passenger lists on both of them were always full. Travel among the countries of the British Commonwealth was brisk at this time, because the turmoil of the world economic depression had caused waves of hopeful refugees to flee their homelands for opportunities they saw elsewhere in the Commonwealth. At last, after an almost unbearable delay, Dorothy finally had her visa in hand and she managed to secure a berth on a ship that was about to leave for Bombay. She sent a telegram to Imam saying she was on her way to Port Said. When she informed her parents of her plans they were not at all pleased to be the last to know. They had not even met the young man.
In her haste to prepare for departure, Dorothy neglected to pay a final visit to her dear Dr. Budge, who wondered for years afterward what had become of his remarkable young student – though he suspected that she had found her way to Egypt.
*a dating technique based on establishing a chronological ordering of artifacts
FIVE
The Journey Home
“Oh, my Lady Isis…I am glad you brought me home again,really I am!” OS
October, 1933. On a foggy October morning, a tearful mother and
