Not surprisingly, the most intense encounter was the military one. This began even before the French battered their way into Alexandria. The battle then reached full swing as they marched in the summer heat, the most powerful military force the world had yet known, across the desert and down the Nile. Never sure who was attacking, the French troops viewed all their assailants on horseback either as Arabs or Mamluks (not simply "slave-soldiers," as Cole calls them, but the members of an often wealthy military aristocracy based on imported Christian slaves), while those swarming at them on foot, brandishing clubs and swords and spears, were identified simply as peasants. Some Frenchmen drowned themselves in the Nile or blew out their own brains. Others, according to the grenadier Vigo-Roussillon, "were mutilated or carried away by crocodiles." One thing they could not do was go home: British Rear Adm. Horatio Nelson's destruction of Napoleon's fleet at the so-called Battle of the Nile of August 1-2, 1798 (witnessed dramatically through the flashes and the smoke by one of Cole's diarists, Prosper Jollois), had bottled them all up.

Since the French, like the Americans more recently in Iraq, never had enough troops to secure any one place for very long, little battles and skirmishes erupted everywhere: in villages that seemed secure, in tiny boats on the Nile, in even smaller skiffs on Manzala Lake, where local fishermen rose up, emitting what one Frenchman described as "a thousand barbaric cries in a furious tone." Meanwhile, both sides committed acts of brutality, the French burning villages, taking hostages and cutting off the heads of the men they had killed and then mounting them on poles as a warning. Soon Engineer Quartermaster François Bernoyer (in charge of the uniforms department) was writing that "what mortified us most was that Bonaparte used the same methods as the Mamluks."

Some attempts were made to keep count of the casualties: 1,500 Frenchmen died, according to Nicolas Desvernois, during the initial march to Cairo; 3,000 Egyptians were killed during the three-day Cairo uprising of October 1798, with another 300 beheaded. But there was no count of the blinded, the maimed, the soldiers and civilians incapacitated for life.

Then there was the theater of Napoleon's project to turn Egypt into a satellite middle-class republic with a Directoire composed of members of the Egyptian ulema (religious leaders), draped uncomfortably in tricolor sashes or, when they refused to wear them, having tricolor cockades attached to their robes. Incomprehensible proclamations were issued by the French with unknown words like "republic" and written in what Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, the famous late-eighteenth-century Egyptian chronicler, had much fun ridiculing for its broken Arabic and infelicitous style. Meanwhile Napoleon scrambled to establish himself as a legitimate Muslim ruler, assumed the name of Sultan El-Kebir (the Great Sultan), presided over religious festivals like the Prophet's birthday and appointed the man to be in charge of one year's pilgrimage caravan. But all to no avail. It was the same gray-bearded Al-Azhar sheiks whom he sought to woo who led the first great urban revolt against him.

Sex was, of course, central to the colonial encounter, given that the army of some 30,000 Frenchmen was accompanied by only 300 Frenchwomen. Cole describes Napoleon's own complicated and somewhat adolescent sex life in some detail. The great man even goes so far as to get his adjutant to spill coffee on the dress of an officer's wife he fancied in order to get her to retire to another room, where he could begin his efforts to seduce her in earnest. But more interesting is the attempt of many of the French letter writers and diarists to purchase pleasure for themselves by buying slave women or pretending to marry them or, in some cases, converting to Islam, as did Gen. Jacques Menou, who renamed himself Abdullah.

Here we get as close to hearing ordinary Egyptian voices as we probably can, subject to the usual male license. While it seems improbable that Bernoyer's pretend wife whispered her bedtime thanks in the form of "My friend, my sultan, my brother, my souk," the bargaining of some of the other women, like the Mamluk widow Zulayma, has more of the ring of truth, as she begs her French lover, Captain Moiret, to "pull me out of this detestable country and lead me to France, if ever destiny calls you there."

Cole, like his French informants, is less sure how to characterize the precise role of Egypt's female entertainers, the alimas, whom he describes variously as "dancing girls," geishas and belly dancers. He also mentions the plan of one Captain Say to employ them in some of the new civic performances he had been instructed to organize to promote revolutionary ideals among the inhabitants of Cairo, including, Cole writes, that of the liberation of Egyptian women--still a recurring motif in imperial expeditions in the Muslim world. The fact that the word alima comes from the Arabic root for "knowledge" does suggest some formal training in the arts. But in Egypt, as Flaubert records in his overheated description of his 1850 visit to one such lady, Kuchuk Hanem, her profession was often identified by the less complimentary title of "prostitute."

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