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By Root 3032 0

to an enjoyable winter cruising the Nile and the Mediterranean. His lazy wife was quite content to recline on deck-chairs, as on sofas at home, or hammocks in the country. Bamie, already at seventeen the family’s surrogate mother, clumped about arranging everything with a certain grim enjoyment. The two youngest Roosevelts dreaded another year away from their friends, but for a while the excitement of an ocean voyage muted their complaints. Teedie, for his part, took a serious, almost professorial view of the trip. As proprietor of the Roosevelt Museum, he was determined to treat his visit to the Nile as a scientific expedition and had already printed a quantity of pink labels for the identification of specimens. His new spectacles had focused his general interest in animals to an almost total obsession with birds. Hitherto his near sight had forced him to confine his observations to large, slow creatures that inhabited terra firma. Now he was able to record the ascent of hawks to ecstatic heights and sit for hours watching flocks of ibises settling on a distant island, until “the tops of trees would be whitened with immense multitudes perching on them.”17

As Teedie turned fourteen, he blossomed into a grotesque flower of adolescence, offensive alike to eye, ear, and nostril. Mittie Roosevelt, fresh and crackling in her perpetual white silks and muslin, could hardly have contemplated him without despair. Apart from the owlish spectacles and snarling teeth, there was the over-long hair, its childish yellow darkening now to dirty blond; the bony wrists and ankles, which protruded every day a little farther from his carefully tailored suit; the fingers stained with ink and chemicals, the clumsy movements and too-quick reflexes. His voice had not so much broken as taken on a new undertone of harshness, while its shrill upper frequencies remained. Mittie described his laugh as a “sharp, ungreased squeak” which almost crushed her eardrums.18 For much of the time he reeked of the laboratory: on days when he had been disemboweling as well as skinning his specimens, it was best to stand upwind of him.

Teedie alone seemed to be unaware of his eccentric appearance. “Pestered fearfully” by street-boys in Liverpool, he assumed it was because he was a Yankee, and was puzzled by a shopkeeper’s refusal to sell him, on sight, a full pound of arsenic. “I was informed that I must bring a witness to prove that I was not going to commit murder, suicide or any such dreadfull thing, before I could have it!” he wrote in his new travel diary.19 Presumably a witness was found, for within a couple of days he was skinning some snipe and partridge. All the way south, through England and Europe, Teedie continued his scientific labors.

Although he had a few words of praise for Continental scenery—the mossy roofs and distant windmills of Belgium, the “wild and picturesque” hills of Switzerland—his viewpoint was on the whole chauvinistic. Railroads, museums, even sanitation systems were unfavorably compared with those of America. Not until Egypt hove over the Mediterranean horizon, on 28 November 1872, did Teedie respond emotionally to his surroundings.

How I gazed upon it! It was Egypt, the land of my dreams; Egypt the most ancient of all countries! A land that was old when Rome was bright, was old when Troy was taken! It was a sight to awaken a thousand thoughts, and it did.

His diary entries immediately become lengthy and enthusiastic. The descriptions of street life in Alexandria are as dense with visual detail and sound effects as film scenarios. Only in front of Pompey’s Pillar did words fail him. “On seeing this stately remain of former glory, I felt a great deal but I said nothing. You can not express yourself on such an occasion.”

Passing through the Nile Delta en route to Cairo, Teedie munched sugarcane and gazed in rapture at a multitude of exotic species: humped, long-haired zebus, delicate waders, great flapping, shrieking zic-zacs, kites and vultures floating on spirals of hot air, water buffaloes wallowing in the chocolate mud. As soon