Audiobook · read by volunteers
Spell of Egypt
Robert Smythe Hichens (1864–1950)
Read by Sibella Denton · 23 chapters · 4 h 03
About the book
Robert Hichens was a British journalist and novelist who travelled to Egypt and wrote down not just what he saw, but how it felt. Spell of Egypt takes the listener from the Pyramids and the Sphinx to Sakkara and the temples and tombs of the Nile, always seeking the mood and atmosphere of the place. He dwells on the weight of ancient monuments, the stillness of the great temples and the strangeness of standing before a civilisation that lasted thousands of years. His response is emotional rather than scholarly, and it gives the book a personal, almost dreamy tone. Over eighteen chapters, the author invites you on a journey into a land that has always inspired awe, with the eloquence of an early twentieth-century traveller. It is a leisurely tour for armchair travellers.
Introduction
Robert Smythe Hichens (1864–1950) was an English author who wrote novels, short stories and travel books, and spent much time in Egypt and North Africa. Spell of Egypt, published in 1911, belongs to the genre of the impressionistic travel narrative, popular in the years before the First World War when Egypt attracted many European visitors. The author is more interested in the feeling a place creates than in a catalogue of facts.
The eighteen chapters are named after places, beginning with the Pyramids, the Sphinx and Sakkara, then moving up the Nile through Abydos, Denderah, Karnak, Luxor and Philae before ending in Old Cairo. Readers should remember that this is a record of a visit made more than a century ago, with the attitudes of a European tourist of the period, which can strike a modern ear as patronising. Even so, the descriptions have a vivid, painterly quality, and the book captures something of the romance with which travellers of that era approached the Nile.
Hichens had a novelist’s eye for scene and atmosphere, and he lingers over mood and setting as much as over the grand monuments. The result is a book that is as much about the experience of travelling as about the places themselves, and it invites the listener to share in the traveller’s sense of wonder.
The 23 recordings, about 4.1 hours in all, are read by a LibriVox volunteer; the longer chapters, such as Karnak, Edfu and Old Cairo, are split over two or three of them. It is a book to hear slowly, one temple at a time, ideally with a map or a few photographs of Egypt within reach.
Public domain
Robert Smythe Hichens died in 1950: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text