 Letter 41 of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, Luxor, May 15, 1864, Day Before Eid Al-Khabar, Bahram Dearest Alec, we return to Luxor the evening before last just after dark. The salute which Omar fired with your old horse-pistols brought down a lot of people, and there was a chorus of Alhamdulillah Salaimah Yassit, and such a kissing of hands, and welcome home to your place, and we have tasted your absence and found it bitter, etc., etc. Mustafa came with letters for me, and Yusuf beaming with smiles, and Muhammad with new bread made of new wheat, and Suleiman with flowers, and little Akhmet rushing in wildly to kiss hands. When the welcome had subsided, Yusuf, who stayed to tea, told me all the cattle were dead. Mustafa lost thirty-four and has three left, and poor Farmer Omar lost all, forty head. The distress in Upper Egypt will now be fearful. Within six weeks all our cattle are dead. They are threshing the corn with donkeys, and men are turning the Sakeas, waterwheels, and drawing the plows, and dying by scores of overwork and want of food in many places. The whole agriculture depended on the oxen, and they are all dead. At El-Montana and nine villages around Haleem Pasha's estate, twenty-four thousand head have died, four beasts were left when we were there three days ago. We spent two nights and days at Filay and Wahali it was hot. The basalt rocks which enclose the river all around the island were burning. Sally and I slept in the Osiris chamber on the roof of the temple on our air-beds. Omar lay across the doorway to guard us, and Arthur and his copped, with the well-bred sailor Ramadan, were sent to Bivouac on the Pylon. Ramadan took the Harim under his special and most respectful charge, and waited on us devotedly, but never raised his eyes to our faces, or spoke till spoken to. Filay is six or seven miles from Aswan, and we went on donkeys through the beautiful Shalaliya, the village of the cataract, and the noble place of tombs of Aswan. It was the amazement of everyone at seeing Europeans so out of season. We were like swallows in January to them. I could not sleep for the heat in the room, and threw on an abaya, cloak, and went and lay on the parapet of the temple. What a night! What a lovely view! The stars gave as much light as the moon in Europe, and all but the cataract was still as death and glowing hot, and the palm trees were more graceful and dreamy than ever. Then Omar woke, and came and sat at my feet, and rubbed them, and sang a song of a Turkish slave. I said, Do not rub my feet, O brother, that is not fit for thee, because it is below the dignity of a free Muslim altogether to touch shoes or feet. But he sang in his song, The slave of the Turk may be set free by money, but how shall one be ransomed, who has been paid for by kind actions and sweet words? Then the day broke deep crimson, and I went down and bathed in the Nile, and saw the girls on the island opposite in their summer fashions, consisting of a leathern fringe round their slender hips, divinely graceful, bearing huge, saucer-shaped baskets of corn on their stately young heads. And I went up and sat at the end of the colonnade, looking up into Ethiopia, and dreamed dreams of him who sleeps in filet, until the great Amunra kissed my northern face too hotly, and drove me into the temple to breakfast, and coffee, and pipes, and Kiev. And in the evening three little naked Nubians rode us about for two or three hours on the glorious river in a boat made of thousands of bits of wood, each a foot long, and between wiles they jumped overboard and disappeared, and came up on the other side of the boat. Aswan was full of Turkish soldiers who came and took away our donkeys and stared at our faces most irreligiously. I did not go on shore at Kom Ambus or Al-Khab, only at Edfu, where we spent the day in the temple, and at Ezna, where we tried to buy sugar, tobacco, etc., and found nothing at all, though Ezna is chef-lue with Amudar. It is only in winter that anything is to be got there for the travellers. We had to ask the Nazir in Edfu to order a man to sell his charcoal. People do without sugar, and smoke green tobacco, and eat beans, etc., etc. Soon we must do likewise, for our stores are nearly exhausted. She stopped at Al-Muntana and had a good dinner in the Mune's handsome house, and they gave me a loaf of sugar. Madame Mune described Rachel's stay with them for three months at Luxor, in my house, where they then lived. She hated it so that on embarking to leave she turned back and spat on the ground, and cursed the place inhabited by savages, where she had been ennui amor. Madame Mune fully sympathized with her, and thought no femme amyable could live with Arabs, who are not at all gallant. She is leventine, and I believe half Arab herself, but hates the life here, and hates the Muslims. As I write this I laugh to think of the gallanterie and Arab in one sentence, and glance at my brother Yusuf, who is sleeping on a mat, quite overcome with the simmum which is blowing, and the fast which he is keeping today, as the eve of the Eid al-Khabar great festival. This is the coolest place in the village. The glass is only ninety-two-and-a-half degrees now, eleven a.m., in the darkened divan. The Qadi and the Moun and Yusuf came together to visit me, and when the others left he lay down to sleep. Omar is sleeping in the passage, and sally in her room. I alone don't sleep, but the simmum is terrible. Arthur runs about all day, sightseeing and drawing, and does not suffer at all from the heat. I can't walk now, as the sand blisters my feet. Tuesday, May seventeenth. Yesterday the simmum was awful, and last night I slept on the terrace and was very hot. Today the north wind sprang up at noon and revived us, though it is still one hundred and two degrees in my divan. My old great-grandfather has come in for a pipe and coffee. He was Belzoni's guide, and his eldest child was born seven days before the French under Bonaparte marched into Luxor. He is superbly handsome and erect, and very talkative, but only remembers old times, and takes me for Madame Belzoni. He is grandfather to Mohammed, the guard of this house, and great-grandfather to my little Akmet. His grandsons have married him to a tidy old woman to take care of him. He calls me my lady-granddaughter, and Omar he calls Mustafa, and we salute him as grandfather. I wish I could paint him. He is so grand to look at. Mustafa had a son born yesterday, his tenth child. I must go and wish him joy, after which I will go to Arthur's boat and have a bath. The sailors rig me out a capital awning. We had a good boat and a capital crew. One man, Mohammed, called Alati, this singer, sang beautifully to my great delight, and all were excellent fellows, quiet and obliging, only his servant was a lazy beast, dirty and conceited, a cop, spoiled by an Italian education and Greek associates, thinking himself very grand because he was a Christian. I wondered at the patience and good nature with which Omar did all his work and endured all his insolence. There was one stupendous row at Aswan, however. The men had rigged out a sort of tent for me to bathe in over the side of the boat, and Ramadan caught the cop trying to peep in, and half strangled him. Omar called him dog, and asked him if he was an infidel, and Macarius told him I was a Christian woman and not his Harim. Omar lost his temper and appealed to the old Rais and all the sailors. O Muslims ought not I to cut his throat if he had defiled the noble person of the lady with his pig's eyes. God forgive me for mentioning her in such a manner. Then they all cursed him for a pig and an infidel, and threatened to put him ashore and leave him for his vile conduct towards noble Harim. Omar sobbed with passion, saying that I was to him like the back of his mother, and how dare Macarius take my name in his dirty mouth, etc. The cop tried to complain of being beaten afterwards, but I signified to him that he had better hold his tongue, for that I understood Arabic upon which he sneaked off. End of LETTER No. 41, read by Subella Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter 42 of LETTERS FROM EGYPT by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Mrs. Austen, Luxor, Monday, May 23, 1864. DEAREST MUTTER I meant to have written to you by Arthur Taylor, who left for Cairo yesterday morning, but the simoon made me so stupid that I could hardly finish a letter to Alec. So I begin one today to recount the wonders of the season here. I went over to Mustafa's Island to spend the day in a tent, or rather the hut, of durastocks and palm branches, which he has erected there for the threshing and winnowing. He had invited me and his worship the maoon to a picnic. Only imagine that it rained, all day, a gentle slight rain, but enough to wet all the desert. I laughed and said I had brought the English weather, but the maoon shook his head and opined that we were suffering the anger of God. Even in summertime was quite a terror. However, we consoled ourselves, and Mustafa called a nice little boy to recite the noble Qur'an for our amusement, and out of compliment to me he selected the chapter of the family of Amran, the history of Jesus, and recited it with marvelous readiness and accuracy. A very pleasant man or man of the Sharufa of Gurna came and joined us, and was delighted because I sent away a pipe which Abu Rahman brought me. It is highly improper to smoke while the Qur'an is being read or recited. He thanked me for the respect, and I told him I knew he would not smoke in a church, or while I prayed, why should I? It rather annoys me to find that they always expect from us irreverence to their religion, which they would on no account be guilty of to ours. The little boy was a fella, the child of my friend Omar, who has lost all his cattle, and who came as pleasant and smiling as ever to kiss my hand and wait upon me. After that the Ma'un read the second chapter, the cow, in a rather nasal, quavering chant. I perceived that no one present understood any of it, except just a few words here and there, not much more than I could follow myself from having read the translation. I think it is not any nearer spoken Arabic than Latin is to Italian. Through this Mustapha, the Ma'un, Omar, Sally, and I sat down around the dinner tray, and had a very good dinner of lamb, fowls, and vegetables, such as Bahamia's and Malukia, both of the Malo order, and both excellent cooked with meat, rice stewed apricots, mish-mish, with nuts and raisins in it, and cucumbers and watermelons strewn the ground. Ma'un eats all Dirkine andur with bread and fingers, and a spoon for the rice and green limes to squeeze over one's own bits for sauce. We were very merry, if not very witty, and the Ma'un declared, Wahali, the English are fortunate in their customs, and in the enjoyment of the society of learned and excellent Harimat, and Omar, lying on the rushes, said, This is the happiness of the Arab. Between trees, sweet water, and a kind face, make the garden, paradise, an Arab saying. The Ma'un joked him as to how a child of Cairo could endure fellow life. I was looking at the heaps of wheat and thinking of Ruth, when I started to hear the soft Egyptian lips under the very words which the Egyptian girl spake more than a thousand years ago. Behold my mother, where she stays I stay, and where she goes I will go. Her family is my family, and if it pleases God, nothing but the separator of friends, death shall divide me from her. I really could not speak, so I kissed the top of Omar's turban, Arab fashion, and the Ma'un blessed him quite solemnly, and said, God reward thee, my son, thou hast honored thy lady greatly before thy people, and she has honored thee, and ye are an example of masters and servants, and of kindness and fidelity. And the brown laborers who were lounging about said, verily it is true, and God be praised for people of excellent conduct. I never expected to feel like Naomi, and possibly many English people might only think Omar's unconscious repetition of Ruth's words rather absurd, but to me they sounded in perfect harmony with the life and ways of this country and these people, who are so full of tender and affectionate feelings, when they have not been crushed out of them. It is not humbug, I have seen their actions. Because they used grand compliments, Europeans think they are never sincere, but the compliments are not meant to deceive, they only profess to be forms. Why do the English talk of the beautiful sentiment of the Bible and pretend to feel it so much, and when they come and see the same life before them they ridicule it? Tuesday. We have a family quarrel going on, Muhammad's wife, a girl of eighteen or so, wanted to go home on Biram Day for her mother to wash her head and unplate her hair. Muhammad told her not to leave him on that day, and to send for a woman to do it for her, whereupon she cut off her hair, and Muhammad, in a passion, told her to cover her face, that is equivalent to a divorce, and take her baby and go home to her father's house. Ever since he has been mooning about the yard, and in and out of the kitchen very glum and silent. This morning I went into the kitchen and found Omar cooking with a little baby in his arms and giving it sugar. Why, what is that, say I? Oh, don't say anything. I sent Ahmed to fetch Muhammad's baby, and when he comes here he will see it, and then in talking I can say so and so, and how the man must be good to the harem, and what is this poor, small girl going to do when she is big enough to ask for her father? In short, Omar wants to exercise his diplomacy in making up the quarrel. After writing this I heard Muhammad's low, quiet voice, and Omar's boyish laugh and then silence, and went to see the baby and its father. My kitchen was a pretty scene. Muhammad and his ample brown robes and white turban lay asleep on the floor with the baby's tiny pale face and little eyelids stained with coal against his coffee-brown cheek, both fast asleep, baby in her father's arms. Omar leaned against the four nays in his house-dress, a white shirt open at the throat and white drawers reaching to the knees, with the red tarbouche and red and yellow kufya silk handkerchief rounded turban-wise, contemplating them with his great soft eyes. The two men made an excellent contrast between Upper and Lower Egypt. It is the true Arab type, coffee-brown, thin, spare, sharp-featured, elegant hands and feet, bright, glittering, small eyes and angular jaw, not a handsome Arab but bien caracturisé. Omar, the color of new boxwood or old ivory, pale with eyes like a cow, full lips, full chin and short nose, not the least negro but perfectly Egyptian, the eyes wide apart, unlike the Arab, mushed-ass like a woman's eyebrow, curly brown hair, bad hands and feet not well made, but graceful in movement and still more encountments, very inferior in beauty to the pure Arab blood which prevails here but most sweet in expression. He is a true Akul and Banat, brother of girls, and truly chivalrous to Harim. How astonished Europeans would be to hear Omar's real opinion of their conduct to women. He mentioned some Englishman who had divorced his wife and made her frailty public. You should have seen him spit on the floor in avorance. Here it is quite blackguard not to forfeit the money and take all the blame in a divorce. Friday. We have had better weather again, easterly wind and pretty cool, and am losing the cough and languor which the damp of the samoon brought me. Sheikh Yusuf has just come back from Kenna, whither he and the kadhi went on their donkeys for some law business. He took our saddlebags at Omar's request, and brought us back a few pounds of sugar and some rice and tobacco. Isn't it like Fielding's novels? It is two days' journey, so they slept in the mosque at Kous halfway. I told Yusuf how Suleiman's child has the smallpox, and how Muhammad only said it was Min Allah from God when I suggested that his baby should be vaccinated at once. Yusuf called him in and said, O man, when thou wouldst build a house, dost thou throw the bricks and heap on the ground and say the building thereof is from God, or dost thou use the brains and hands which God has given thee, and then pray to him to bless thy work? In all things do the best of thy understanding and means, and then say Min Allah, for the end is with him. There is not a pin to choose in fatalism here between Muslim and Christian. The lazy, like Muhammad and Suleiman, one Arab in the other copped, say Min Allah, or any form of du'adl you please, but the true Muslim doctrine is just what Yusuf laid down. Do all you can, and be resigned to whatever be the result. Faiz-sukh dois adhvien ki pura is good doctrine. In fact I am very much puzzled to discover the slightest difference between Christian and Muslim morality or belief, if you exclude certain dogmas, and in fact very little is felt here. No one attempts to apply different standards of morals or of piety to a Muslim and a copped. East and West is the difference, not Muslim and Christian. As to that difference I could tell volumes. Are they worse? Are they better? Both and neither. I am perhaps not quite impartial, because I am simpathik to the Arabs and they to me, and I am inclined to be kind to their virtues if not blind to their faults, which are visible to the most inexperienced traveler. You see all our own familiar bunkum, excuse the vulgarity, fall so flat on their ears, bravado about honor, veracity, etc., etc., they look blank and bored at. The schoolboy morality, as set forth by Maurice, is current here among grown men. Of course we tell lies to poshies and bays, why shouldn't we? But shall I call in that ragged sailor and give him an order to bring me up five hundred pounds in cash from Cairo when he happens to come? It would not be an unusual proceeding. I sleep every night in a macabre, sort of veranda, open to all Luxor, and haven't a door that has a lock. They bother me for Bakshish, but oh how poor they are, and how rich must be a woman whose very servants drink sugar to their coffee, and lives in the Khazar, palace, and is respectfully visited by Ali Bey. And come to that, Ali Bey would, like a present, even better than the poorest fellow, who also loves to give one. When I know, as I now do thoroughly, all Omar's complete integrity, without any sort of mention of it, his self-denial in going ragged and shabby to save his money for his wife and child, a very great trial to a good-looking young Arab, and the equally unobstentatious love he has shown to me, and the delicacy and real nobleness of feeling which come out so oddly in the midst of saying switch, to our ideas seem very shabby and time-serving, very often I wonder if there be anything as good in the civilized west. And as Sally most justly says, all their goodness is quite their own, God knows there is no one to teach anything but harm. Tuesday. Two poor fellows have just come home from the Suez canal-work with gastric fever, I think. I hope it won't spread. The wife of one said to me yesterday, are there more sitot, ladies, like you and your village? Voila! I said. There are many better and good doctors, Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah! said she. Then the poor people don't want you so much, and by God you must stay here for we can't do without you, so write to your family to say so, and don't go away and leave us. Thursday, June 2. A steamer has just arrived, which will take this letter so I can only say good-bye, my dearest mutter, and God bless you. I continue fairly well. The epidemic here is all but over, but my medical fame has spread so that the poor souls come twenty miles from Coose for physics. The constant phrase of, O our sister, God hath sent thee to look to us is so sad. Such a little help is a wonder to my poor fellow heen. It is not so hot as it was, I think, except at night, and I now sleep half the night outside the house. The cattle are all dead, perhaps five are left in all Luxor. Allah kareem, God is merciful, said fellow Omar, I have one left from fifty-four. The grain is unthreshed, and butter three shillings a pound. We get nothing here but by post, no papers, no nothing. I suppose the high Nile will bring up boats. Now the river is down at its lowest, and now I really know how Egyptians live. End of Letter forty-two, read by Subella Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information please visit LibriVox.org. Letter forty-three of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, Luxor, Sunday June twelve, eighteen sixty-four, dearest Alec. Three letters I have received from you within a few days, for the post of the Sa'id is not that of the Medis and Persians. I have had an abominable toothache which quite floored me and was aggravated by the Oriental custom, namely that all the Beaumond of Thebes would come and sit with me and suggest remedies and look into my mouth and make quite a business of my tooth. Sheikh Yusuf laid two fingers on my cheek and recited verses from the Koran, I regret to say with no effect, except that while his fingers touched me the pain ceased. I find he is celebrated for soothing headaches and other nervous pains, and I dare say is an unconscious mesmerizer. The other day our poor Ma'un was terrified by a communication from Ali Bey, mutur of Kenna, to the effect that he had heard from Alexandria that someone had reported that the dead cattle had lain about the streets of Luxor and that the place was pestilential. The British mind at once suggested a counterstatement to be signed by the most respectable inhabitants. So the Qadi drew it up and came to read it to me and took my desposition and witnessed my signature, and the Ma'un went his way rejoicing in that the words of the English woman would utterly defeat Ali Bey. The truth was that the worthy Ma'un worked really hard and superintended the horrible dead cattle business in person, which is some risk and very unpleasant. To dispose of three or four hundred dead oxen every day with a limited number of laborers is no trifle, and if a travelling Englishman smells one a mile off he calls us lazy Arabs. The beasts could not be buried deep enough, but all were carried a mile off from the village. I wish some of the Delatanti who stopped their noses at us in our trouble had to see or to do what I have seen and done. June seventeenth. We have had four or five days of such fearful heat with a simmum that I have been quite knocked up and literally could not write. Besides, I sit in the dark all day and am now writing so, and at night go out and sit in the veranda and can't have candles because of the insects. I sleep outside till about six a.m., then go indoors till dark again. This fortnight is the hottest time. Today the drop falls into the Nile at its source, and it will now rise fast and cool the country. It has risen one cubit and the water is green. Next month it will be blood-colour. My cough has been a little troublesome again, I suppose, from the simmum. The tooth does not ache now, alhamdulillah, for I rather dreaded than Mu'ezian, barber with his tongs, who is the sole dentist here. I was amused the other day by the entrance of my friend the Ma'un, attended by Osman Effendi and his Kawas and pipe-bearer, and bearing a saucer in his hand, wearing the look half sheepish, half cocky, with which elderly gentlemen in all countries announced what he did, i.e. that his black slave-girl was three months with child and longed for olives. So the respectable magistrate had trotted all over the bazaar and to the Greek corn-dealers to buy some, but for no money were they to be had, so he hoped I might have some and forgive the request, as I, of course, knew what a man must beg or even steal for a woman under those circumstances. I called Omar and said, I trust there are olives for the honourable harem of Salim Effendi. They are needed there. Omar instantly understood the case, and praised me to God if you were left, I was about to stuff the pigeons for dinner with them, how lucky I had not done it. And then we belaboured Salim with compliments. Please God the child will be fortunate to thee, says I. Omar says, sweeten my mouth, O Effendium, for did I not tell thee God would give thee good out of this affair when thou bodest her? While we were thus rejoicing over the possible little mulatto, I thought how shocked a white Christian gentleman of our colonies would be at our conduct to make all this fuss about a black girl. He gave her sixpence under the same circumstances, I mean. He'd see her damned first, and my heart warmed to the kind old Muslim sinner, as he took his saucer of olives and walked with them openly in his hand along the street. Now the black girl is free, and can only leave Salim's house by her own good will, and probably after a time she will marry and he will pay the expenses. A man can't sell his slave after he has made known that she is with child by him, and it would be considered unmanly to detain her if she should wish to go. The child will be added to the other eight, who fill the mounds, quiver and Cairo, and will be exactly as well looked on, and have equal rights if he is as black as coal. A most quaint little half-black boy a year-and-a-half old has taken a fancy to me, and comes and sits for hours gazing at me, and then dances to amuse me. He is Mohammed, our guard's son, by a jet-black slave of his, and is brown-black and very pretty. He wears a bit of iron wire in one ear, and iron rings around his ankles, and that is all, and when he comes up little Ahmed, who is his uncle, makes him fit to be seen by emptying a pitcher of water over his head to rinse off the dust, in which, of course, he has been rolling. That is equivalent to a clean pinafore. You would want to buy, little Saeed, I know. He is so pretty and so jolly. He dances and sings and jabbers baby Arabic, and then sits, like a quaint little idol, cross-legged, quite still for hours. I am now riding in the kitchen, which is the coolest place where there is any light at all. Omar is diligently spelling words of six letters, with the wooden spoon is his hand and a cigarette in his mouth, and Sally is lying on her back on the floor. I won't describe our costume. It is now two months since I have worn stockings, and I think you would wonder at the fellaha who owns you, so deep and brown are my face, hands, and feet. One of the sailors in Arthur's boat said, See how the son of the Arabs loves her, he has kissed her so hotly that she can't go home among English people. June 18. I went last night to look at Karnak by moonlight. The giant columns were overpowering. I never saw anything so solemn. On our way back we met the sheikh El-Beled, who ordered me an escort of ten men home. See me on my humble donkey, guarded most superfluously by ten tall fellows with, oh, such spears and venerable match-locks. At Mustafa's house we found a party seated before the door and joined it. There was a tremendous sheikh El Islam from Tunis, Amagrabi, seated on a carpet in state receiving homage. I don't think he liked the heretical woman at all. Even the Ma'un did not dare to be as politeful as usual to me, but took the seat above me, which I had respectfully left vacant next to the holy man. Mustafa was in a stew, afraid not to do the respectful to me and fussing after the sheikh. Then Yusuf came fresh from the river where he had bathed and prayed, and then you saw the real gentleman. He salomed the great sheikh, who motioned to him to sit before him, but Yusuf quietly came round and sat below me on the mat, and leaned his elbow on my cushion and made more demonstration of regard for me than ever, and when I went came and helped me on my donkey. The holy sheikh went away to pray, and Mustafa hinted to Yusuf to go with him, but he only smiled and did not stir. He had prayed an hour before down at the Nile. It was as if a pure curate had devoted himself to a rank-papest under the eye of a scowling Shaftesbury bishop. Then came Osman Effendi, a young Turk, with a poor devil accused in a distant village of stealing a letter with money in it addressed to a Greek moneylender. The discussion was quite general, the man, of course, denying it all. But the Nazir had sent word to beat him. Then Omar burst out, what a shame to beat a poor man on the mere word of a Greek moneylender who eats the people. The Nazir shouldn't help him. There was a Greek present who scowled at Omar, and the Turk gaped at him in horror. Yusuf said, with his quiet smile, My brother, thou art talking English, with a glance at me, and we all laughed, and I said, Many thanks for the compliment. All the village is in good spirits, the Nile is rising fast, and a star of most fortunate character has made its appearance, so Yusuf tells me, and pretends a good year and an end to our afflictions. I am much better today, and I think I too feel the rising Nile. It puts new life into all things. The last fortnight or three weeks have been very trying with the sumoom and intense heat. I suppose I look better for the people here are forever praising God about my amended looks. I am too hot, and it is too dark to write more. End of Letter forty-three Read by Cebella Denton All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org Letter forty-four of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon Luxor June twenty-sixth, eighteen-sixty-four Dearest Alec, I have just paid a singular visit to a political detenue or exile, rather. Last night Mustafa came in with a man in great grief, who said his boy was very ill on board a canjia, just come from Cairo and going to Aswan. The watchman on the river bank had told him that there was an English sit who would not turn her face from anyone in trouble and advised him to come to me for medicine, so he went to Mustafa and begged him to bring him to me, and to beg the Kawas, policemen, in charge of El Bedrawi, who was being sent to Fazoglo in banishment, to wait a few hours. The Kawas, may he not suffer for his humanity, consented. He described his boy's symptoms, and I gave him a dose of castor oil, and said I would go to the boat in the morning. The poor fellow was a Cairo merchant, but living at Khartoum. He poured out his sorrow in true Eastern style. Oh, my boy, and I have none but he, and how shall I come before his mother? Ahabashia! Oh, lady, and tell her thy son is dead! So I said, Allah Karim Yasseri, and Inshallah Tayyib, etc., etc., and went this morning early to the boat. It was a regular old Arab canjia lumbered up with corn, sacks of matting, alive sheep, etc., and there I found a sweet, graceful boy of fifteen or so in a high fever. His father said he had visited a certain Pasha on the way, and evidently meant that he had been poisoned or had the evil eye. I assured him it was only the epidemic, and asked why he had not sent for the doctor at Kenna. The old story, he was afraid, God knows what a government doctor might do to the boy. And Omar came in and stood before El Bedroi and said, Oh, my master, why do we see thee thus? Mashallah! I once ate of thy bread when I was of the soldiers of Said Pasha, and I saw thy riches and thy greatness. And what has God decreed against thee? So El Bedroi, who is or was one of the wealthiest men of lower Egypt and live at Tanta, related how Effendina, Ishmael Pasha, sent for him to go to Cairo to the citadel to transact some business, and how he rode his horse up to the citadel and went in, and there the Pasha at once ordered a Kawas to take him down to the Nile and on board a common cargo boat, and to go with him and take him to Fuzoglo. Letters were given to the Kawas to deliver to every mutter on the way, and another dispatched by hand to the governor of Fuzoglo with orders concerning El Bedroi. He begged leave to see his son once more before starting or any of his family. No, he must go at once and see no one. But luckily Ephela, one of his relations, had come after him to Cairo and had seven hundred pounds in his girdle. He followed El Bedroi to the citadel and saw him being walked off by the Kawas and followed him to the river and on board the boat, and gave him the seven hundred pounds which he had in his girdle. The various mutters had been civil to him, and friends in various places had given him clothes and food. He had not got a chain round his neck or fetters, and was allowed to go ashore with the Kawas, for he had just been to the tomb of Abul Hajjaj and had told that dead shake all his affliction and promised if he came back to come every year to his Malid festival and pay the whole expenses, i.e. feed all comers. Mustafa wanted him to dine with him and me, but the Kawas could not allow it, so Mustafa sent him a fine sheep and some bread, fruit, etc. I made him a present of some quinine, rhubarb pills, and sulfate of zinc for eye lotion. Here you will know we all go upon a more-than-English presumption, and I believe every prisoner to be innocent and a victim. As he gets no trial he can never be proved guilty, besides poor old El Bedroi declared he had not the faintest idea what he was accused of or how he had offended Effendina. I listened to all this in extreme amazement, and he said, ah, I know you English manage things very differently, I have heard all about your excellent justice. He was a stout, dignified-looking, fair man, like a Turk, but talking broad, lower Egypt fellow-talk, so that I could not understand him and had to get Mustafa and Omar to repeat his words. His father was an Arab and his mother a Circassian slave, which gave the fair skin and a British beard. He must be over fifty, fat and not healthy, of course he is meant to die up in Fazoglo, especially going at this season. He owns or owned, for God knows who owns it now, twelve thousand Fedens of fine land between Tanta and Samuhod, and was enormously rich. He consulted me a great deal about his health, and I gave him certainly very good advice. I cannot write in a letter which I know you will show what drugs the Turkish doctor had furnished him with, to strengthen him in the trying climate of Fazoglo. I wonder, was it intended to kill him, or only given an ignorance of the laws of health equal to his own. After a while the pretty boy became better in recovered consciousness, and his poor father, who had been helping me with trembling hands and swimming eyes, cried for joy, and said, by God the most high if I ever find any of the English, poor or sick or afflicted up in Fazoglo, I will make them know what I, Abu Muhammad, never saw a face like the pale face of the English lady bent over my sick boy. And then El Bedriwi and his fellow kinsmen and all the crew blessed me and the captain, and the Kawas said it was time to sail. So I gave directions and medicine to Abu Muhammad, and kissed the pretty boy and went out. El Bedriwi followed me up the bank, and said he had a request to make. Would I pray for him in his distress? I said, I am not of the Muslims. But both he and Mustafa said, Malish, never mind, for that it was quite certain I was not of the Mishkiran as they hate the Muslims and their deeds are evil, but blessed, by God, many of the English begin to repent of their evil, and to love the Muslims and abound in kind actions. So we parted in much kindness. It was a strange feeling to me to stand on the bank and see the queer, savage-looking boat glide away up the stream, bound to such far more savage lands, and to be exchanging kind farewells quite in a homely manner with such utter aliens and blood and faith. God keep thee, lady, God keep thee, Mustafa. Mustafa and I walked home very sad about poor El Bedriwi. Friday, July 7. It has been so awfully hot that I have not had pluck to go on with my letter, or indeed to do anything but lie on a mat in the passage with a minimum of clothes quite indescribable in English. Alhamdulillah, laughs Omar, that I see the clever English people do just like the lazy Arabs. The worst is not the positive heat, which has been above 104 degrees and as low as 96 degrees at night, but the horrible streams of hot wind and dust which are apt to come on at night and prevents one even lying down till twelve or one o'clock. Thebes is bad in the height of summer on account of its expanse of desert and sand and dust. The Nile is pouring down now gloriously and really red as blood, more crimson than a hair-fritcher lane, and in the distance the reflection of the pure blue sky makes it deep violet. It had risen five cubits a week ago. We shall soon have it all over the land here. It is a beautiful and inspiring sight to see the noble old stream as young and vigorous as ever. No wonder the Egyptians worshipped the Nile. There is nothing like it. We have had all the plagues of Egypt this year. Only the lice are commuted for bugs and frogs for mice. The former have eaten me and the latter have eaten my clothes. We are so ragged. Omar has one shirt left and has to sleep without it and wash it every night. The dust, the drenching perspiration, and the hard-fisted washing of Mohammed's slave-woman destroys everything. Mustafa intends to give you a grand fantasia if you come and to have the best dancing girls down from Esna for you, but I am consternated to hear that you can't come till December. I hoped you would have arrived in Cairo early in November and spent a month there with me and come up the river in the middle of December when Cairo gets very cold. I remain very well in general health, but my cough has been troublesome again. I do not feel at all like breathing cold, damp air again. This depresses me very much, as you may suppose. You will have to divorce me, and I must marry some respectable cutty. I have been too lazy Arab, as Omar calls it, to go on with my Arabic lessons, and Yusuf has been very busy with law business connected with the land and the crops. Every harvest brings a fresh settling of the land. It is settling at one pound the Ardeb here on the threshing floor, and barley at one hundred and sixteen piestrates. I saw some Nubians pay Mustafa that. He is in comic perplexity about saying, Alhamdulillah, about such enormous gains. You see, it is rather awkward for a Muslim to thank God for dear bread, so he compounds it by very lavishly almsgiving. He gave all his fellow heen clothes the other day, forty calico shirts and drawers. Do you remember my describing an Arab emanciprice frailine at Syute? Well, the other day I saw, as I thought, a nice-looking lad of sixteen selling corn to my opposite neighbor, a cot. It was a girl. Her father had no son, and is infirm, so she works in the field for him, and dresses, and does like a man. She looked very modest, and was quieter in her manner than the veiled women often are. I am glad to hear such good accounts of Myraini and Maurice. I can hardly bear to think of another year without seeing them. However, it is fortunate for me that my lines have fallen in pleasant places, so long a time that the Cape, or any colony, would have become intolerable. Best love to Janet, I really can't write, it's too hot and dusty. Omar desires his salam to his great master, and to that gazelle city Ross. End of letter forty-four. Read by Cibela Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter forty-five of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, Luxor, August 13, 1864. Dearest Alec. For the last month we have had a purgatory of hot wind and dust, such as I never saw, impossible to stir out of the house. So in despair I have just engaged a return-boat, a gelling height, and am off to Cairo in a day or two, where I shall stop till, inshallah, you come to me. Can't you get leave to come at the beginning of November? Do try, that is the pleasant time in Cairo. I am a stupid, lazy Arab now, as Omar says, having lain on a mat in a dark stone passage for six weeks or so, but my chest is no worse. Better, I think, and my health has not suffered at all. Only I am stupid and lazy. I had a pleasant visit lately from a great doctor from Mecca, a man so learned that he can read the Quran in seven different ways. He is also a physician of European Hekma learning. Fancy my wonder when a great aleem in gorgeous Hegazi dress walked in and said, Madame, tout ce qu'on m'a dit, de vous fait tellement le loge de votre coeur et de votre esprit que je me suis arrêté pour tâcher de me procureur le plaisir de votre connaissance. A lot of Luxor people came in to pay their respects to the great man, and he said to me that he hoped I had not been molested on account of religion, and if I had I must forgive it, as the people here were so very ignorant, and barbarians were bigots everywhere. I said, Wahali, the people of Luxor, are my brothers. And the Maoun said, true, the fellowheen are like oxen, but not such swine as to insult the religion of a lady who has served God among them like this one. She risked her life every day. And if she had died, said the great theologian, her place was made ready among the martyrs of God, because she showed more love to her brothers than to herself. Now if this was a humbug it was said in Arabic, before eight or ten people, by a man of great religious authority. Omar was osanj to hear his sit spoken of in such a grand way for the religion. I believe that a great change is taking place among the ulima that Islam is ceasing to be a mere party flag, just as occurred with Christianity, and that all the moral part is being more and more dwelt on. My great alim also said I had practiced the precepts of the Quran, and then laughed and added, I suppose I ought to say the gospel, but what matters is, El Haqq, the truth, is one, whether spoken by our Lord Jesus or by our Lord Muhammad. He asked me to go with him to Mecca next winter for my health, as it was so hot and dry there. I found he had fallen in with El Bedriwi and the cartoon merchant at Eswan. The little boy was well again, and I had been outrageously extolled by them. We are now sending off all the corn. I sat the other evening on Mostafa's doorstep, and saw Greeks piously and zealously attending to the Divine Command to spoil the Egyptians. Eight months ago a Greek bought up corn at sixty piosters the ardub. He follows the Coptic tax-gatherer like a vulture after a crow. Now wheat is one hundred and seventy piosters the ardub here, and the fella has paid three and a half percent a month besides. Even the profit. Two men I know are quite ruined and have sold all they had. The cattle disease forced them to borrow at these ruinous rates, and now, alas, the Nile is sadly lingering in its rise, and people are very anxious. Poor Egypt, or rather poor Egyptians. Of course I need not say that there is a great improvidence in those who can be fleeced as they are fleeced. Mostafa's household is a pattern of muddling hospitality, and Mostafa is generous and mean by turns. But what chance have people like these so utterly uncivilized and so isolated against Europeans of unscrupulous characters? I can't write more in the wind and dust. You shall hear again from Cairo. End of L. 45. Read by Cebella Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 46 of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, Cairo, October 9, 1864. Dearest Alec. I have not written for a long time because I have had a fever. Now I am all right again, only weak. If you can come, please bring the books in enclosed list for an American Egyptologist at Luxor, a friend of mine. My best love to Janet and my other chicks. I wish I could see my Maurice. Tell Janet that Hassan, donkey boy, has married a girl of eleven, and Phillips that Hassan remembers him quite tenderly, and is very proud of having had his face drawn by him. Certainly he was of the friends, if not a brother of the sit. He so loved the things of the Arabs. I went to the Harim Suare at Hassan's before the wedding. At that event I was ill. My good doctor was up the river, and Hekeke and Bay is in Italy, so I am very lonely here. The weather is bad, so very damp. I stream with perspiration more than in June at Luxor, and I don't like civilization so very much. It keeps me awake at night in the grog shops and rings horrid bells and fights and quarrels in the streets, and disturbs my Muslim nerves till I utter such epithets as kelb, dog, and concierge, pig, against the frangy, and I wish I were in a beastly Arab quarter. To Mrs. Austin, Cairo, October 21st, 1864, dearest mutter, I got your letter yesterday. I hope Alec got mine of two weeks ago before leaving, and told you I was better. I am still rather weak, however I ride my donkey, and the weather has suddenly become gloriously dry and cool. I rather shiver with a thermometer at seventy-nine degrees. Absurd, is it not, but I got so used to real heat. I never wrote about my leaving Luxor or my journey, for our voyage was quite tempestuous after the first three days, and I fell ill as soon as I was in my house here. I hired the boat for six purses, eighteen pounds, which had taken Greeks up to Aswan, selling groceries and strong drinks, but the raïs would not bring back their cargo of black slaves to dirty the boat, and picked us up at Luxor. We sailed at daybreak, having waited all one day because it was an unlucky day. As I sat in the boat, people kept coming to ask whether I was coming back, very anxiously, and bringing fresh bread, eggs, and things as presents. And all the quality came to take leave and hope, inshallah, I should soon come home to my village safe and bring the master, please God, to see them, and then to say the fatah for a safe journey in my health. In the morning the balconies of my house were filled with such a group to see a sail, a party of wild abada with their long Arab guns and flowing hair, a turk elegantly dressed, Muhammad in his decarous brown robes with snow-white turban, and several fellaheen. As the boat moved off the ababda blazed away with their guns and Osman Effendi with a sort of blunderbuss, and as we dropped down the river there was a general firing, even Todoros, Theodorth, the Coptic Malim, popped off his American revolver, Omar keeping up a return with Alex's old horse pistols, which are much admired here on account of the excessive noise they make. Our old Ishmael, who always thought I was Madame Balzoni and wanted to take me up to Abu Simbel to meet my husband, was in dire distress that he could not go with me to Cairo. He declared he was still shuddered, strong enough to take care of me and to fight. He is ninety-seven and only remembers fifty or sixty years ago and old wild times, a splendid old man, handsome and erect. I used to give him coffee and listen to his stories which had won his heart. His grandson, the quiet rather stately Mohammed, who is guard of the house I lived in, forgot all his Muslim dignity, broke down in the middle of his set speech, and flung himself down and kissed and hugged my knees and cried. He had got some notion of impending ill luck, I found, and was unhappy at our departure, and the Bakshish failed to console him. Sheikh Yusuf was to come with me, but a brother of his just wrote word that he was coming back from the Hajjahs, where he had been with the troops and where he is serving his time, I was very sorry to lose his company. Fancy how dreadfully irregular for one of the Ulima and a heretical woman to travel together. What would our bishops say to a parson who did such a thing? We had a lovely time on the river for three days, such moonlight nights, so soft and lovely, and we had a sailor who was as good as a professional singer, and who sang religious songs which I observe excite people here far more than love songs. One which began, remove my sins from before thy sight, O God, was really beautiful and touching, and I did not wonder at the tears which ran down Omar's face. A very pretty, profane song which was, Keep the wind from me, O Lord, I fear it will hurt me. Wind means love, which is like the Samoom. Alas, it has struck me, and I am sick. Why do you bring the physician, O physician, put back thy medicine in the canister, for only he who has hurt can cure me? The masculine pronoun is always used instead of she in poetry, out of decorum, sometimes even in conversation. October 23. Yesterday I met a saidi, a friend of the brother of the shake of the wild Ababda, and as we stood handshaking and kissing our fingers in the road, some of the Anglo-Indian travelers passed and gazed with fierce disgust. The handsome Hassan, being black, was such a flagrant case of a native. Mother dear, it is heart-breaking to see what we are sending to India now. The male days are dreaded, we never know when some outrage may not excite Musselman fanaticism. The English tradesmen here complain as much as any one, and I, who is the caddy of Luxor said, am not outside the family, of Ishmael, I presume, hear what the Arabs really think. There are also crowds like Lice, as one Mohammed said, of low Muslims, French, etc., and I find my stalwart Hassan's broad shoulders no superfluous port respect in the frangy quarter. Three times I have been followed and instantly stared at, am onage, and once Hassan had to speak. Fancy how dreadful to Muslims! I hate the sight of a hat here now. I can't write more now as my eyes are weak still. Omar begs me to give you his best salam and say, inshallah, he will take great care of your daughter, which he most zealously and tenderly does. End of Letter forty-seven, read by Subella Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter forty-eight of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Mrs. Austin. On the Nile. Friday, December twenty-third, eighteen-sixty-four. Dearest Mutter. Here I am again, between Benny Souf and Minia, and already better, for the clear air of the river and the twain-cool boat life. I will send you my Christmas salam from Siut. While Alec was with me I had as much to do as I was able and could not write, for there was much to see and talk about. I think he was amused, but I fear he felt the eastern life to be very poor and comfortless. I have got so used to having nothing that I had quite forgotten how it would seem to a stranger. I am quite sorry to find how many of my letters must have been lost from Luxor. In future I shall trust the Arab Post, which certainly is safer than English travelers. I send you my long plates by Alec, for I had cut my hair short as it took to falling out by handfuls after my fever, and moreover it is more convenient Turkish harem fashion. Please tell Dean Stanley how his old dregoman, Mohammed Ghazawi, cried with pleasure when he told me he had seen Sheikh Stanley's sister on her way to India, and the little ladies knew his name and shook hands with him, which evidently was worth far more than the Bakshish. I wondered who Sheikh Stanley could be, and Mohammed, who is a darwish and very pious, told me he was the Ghazis, priest, who was Imam, spiritual guide, to the son of our Queen, and in truth said he, he is really a shake and one who teaches the excellent things of religion, why he was kind even to his horse, and it is of the mercies of God to the English that such a one is the Imam of your Queen and Prince. I said, laughing, how dost thou, a darwish among Muslims, talk thus of a Nazarene priest? Truly, O lady, he answered, one who loveth all the creatures of God, him God loveth also, there is no doubt of that. Is any one bigot enough to deny that Stanley has done more for real religion in the mind of that Muslim darwish, than if he had baptized a hundred savages out of one fanatical faith into another? There is no hope of a good understanding with orientals until Western Christians can bring themselves to recognize the common faith contained in the two religions. The real difference consists in all the class of notions and feelings, very important ones, no doubt, which we derive not from the Gospels at all, but from Greece and Rome, and which, of course, are altogether wanting here. Alec will tell you how curiously Omar illustrated the patriarchal feelings of the East by entirely dethroning me in favor of the Master, that our Master we all eat bread from his hand and he worked for us. Omar and I were equal before our city. He can sit at ease at my feet, but when the Master comes in he must stand reverently and give me to understand that I, too, must be respectful. I have got the boat of the American mission at an outrageous price, sixty pounds, but I could get nothing under. The consolation is that the sailors profit, poor fellows, and get treble wages. My crew are all Nubians. Such a handsome raice and steersman, brothers, and there is a black boy, a fourteen or so, with legs and feet so sweetly beautiful as to be quite touching. At least I always feel those lovely round, young, innocent forms to be somehow affecting. Our old boat of last summer, Arthur Taylor's, is sailing in company with us, and stately old raice, Mubarak, hails me every morning with the blessings of God in the peace of the prophet. Ali Kupton, my steamboat captain, will announce our advent at Thebes. Asked us today. This boat is a fine sailor, but iron-built and therefore noisy, and not convenient. The crew here encourage her with get along, father of three, because she has three sails, whereas two is the usual number. They are active, good-humoured fellows, my men, but lack the Arab courtesy and sympathica ways. And then I don't understand their language, which is pretty and sounds a little like calfrey, rather bird-like and sing-song instead of the clattering, guttural Arabic. I now speak pretty tolerably for a stranger, i.e. I can keep up a conversation and understand all that is said to me much better than I can speak, and follow about half of what people say to each other. When I see you, inshallah, next summer I shall be a good scholar, I hope. End of Letter Forty-Eight, read by Subella Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter Forty-Nine of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Mrs. Austin, Luxor, January 2, 1865. Dearest Mutter, I posted a letter for you at Girga, as we passed Sioux with a good wind. I hope you will get it. My crew worked as I never saw men work. They were paid to get to Luxor, and for 18 days they never rested or slept day or night, and all the time were merry and pleasant. It shows what power of endurance these lazy Arabs have when there is good money at the end of a job, instead of the favorite panacea of stick. We arrived at midnight, and next morning my boat had the air of being pillaged. A crowd of laughing, chattering fellows ran off till the house, laden with loose articles snatched up at random, loaves of sugar, pots and pans, books, cushions, all helter-skelter. I feared breakages, but all was housed safe and sound. The small boys of an age licensed to penetrate into the cabin went off with the oddest cargos of dressing things and the like, of Bakshish not one word. Alhamdulillah, Salema. Thank God, thou art in peace, and ya seat, ya amera, till my head went round. Old Ishma'in fairly hugged me in little Ahmed, hung close to my side. I went up to Moustafa's house, while the unpacking took place, and breakfasted there, and found letters from all of you, from you to Darling Rainy, Sheikh Yusuf was charmed with her big riding, and he said he thought the news in that was the best of all. The weather was intensely hot the first two days. Now it is heavenly, a fresh breeze and gorgeous sunshine. I brought two common Arab lanterns for the tube of Abul Hajj, and his muleed is now going on. Omar took them and lighted them, and told me he found several people who called on the rest to say the fatah for me. I was sitting out yesterday with the people on the sand looking at the men doing afentasia on horseback for the shake, and the clever dregelman of the party was relating about the death of a young English girl whom he had served, and so de fia and aguia we talked about the strangers buried here, and how the bishop had extorted one hundred pounds. I said, Malesh, never mind, the people have been hospitable to me alive, and they will not cease if I die, but give me a tomb among the Arabs. One old man said, May I not see thy day, O lady, and indeed thou shouldest be buried as a daughter of the Arabs, but we should fear the anger of thy consul and thy family, but thou knowest that wherever thou art buried thou wilt assuredly lie in a Muslim grave. How so, said I, why, when a bad Muslim dies the angels take him out of his tomb and put one in of the good from among the Christians in his place. This is the popular expression of the doctrine that the good are sure of salvation. Omar chimed in at once. Certainly there is no doubt of it, and I know a story that happened in the days of Muhammad Ali Pasha which proves it. We demanded the story, and Omar began. There was once a very rich man of the Muslims so stingy that he grudged everybody even so much as a bit of the paper inside the date, Quran. When he was dying he said to his wife, Go out and buy me a lump of pressed dates, and when she had bought it he bad her leave him alone. Thereupon he took all his gold out of his sash and spread it before him and rolled it up in two or three pieces at a time in the dates, and swallowed it piece after piece until only three were left, when his wife came in and saw what he was doing and snatched them from his hand. Presently afterward he fell back and died and was carried out to the burial-place and laid in his tomb. When the Qadis men came to put the seal on his property and found no money they said, O woman, how is this? We know thy husband was a rich man, and behold we find no money for his children and slaves or for thee. So the women told what had happened, and the Qadis sent for three other of the Ulima, and they decided that after three days she should go herself into her husband's tomb and open it, and take the money from his stomach. While a guard was put over the tomb to keep away robbers. After three days, therefore, the woman went, and the men opened the tomb and said, Go in, O woman, and take thy money. So the woman went down into the tomb alone. When there, instead of her husband's body, she saw a box, coffin, of the boxes of the Christians, and when she opened it she saw the body of a young girl, adorned with many ornaments of gold necklaces and bracelets and a diamond curse on her head, and overall a veil of black muslin embroidered with gold. So the woman said within herself, Behold, I came for money, and here it is. I will take it and conceal this business for fear of the Qadi. So she wrapped the hole in her Malaya, a blue-checked cotton sheet worn as a cloak, and came out, and the men said, Has thou done thy business? And she answered, Yes, and returned home. In a few days she gave the veil she had taken from the dead girl to a broker to sell for her in the bazaar, and the broker went and showed it to the people, and was offered one hundred piastras. Now there sat in one of the shops of the merchant, a great ma'alim, copped a clerk, belonging to the pasha, and he saw the veil and said, How much asketh thou? And the broker said, O thine honor, the clerk, whatever thou wilt. Take for me, then, five hundred piastras, and bring the person that gave thee the veil to receive the money. So the broker fetched the woman in the copped, who was a great man, called the police, and said, Take this woman and fetch my ass, and we will go before the pasha. And he rode in haste to the palace, weeping and beating his breast, and went before the pasha, and said, Behold, this veil was buried a few days ago with my daughter, who died unmarried, and I had none but her, and I loved her like my eyes, and would not take from her her ornaments. And this veil she worked herself, and was very fond of it. And she was young and beautiful, and just of the age to be married. And, behold, the Muslims go and rob the tombs of the Christians, and if thou wilt suffer this, we Christians will leave Egypt and go and live in some other country, O effendina, for we cannot endure this abomination. Then the pasha turned to the woman, and said, Woe to thee, O woman, art thou a muslima, and doest such wickedness? And the woman spoke, and told all that it happened, and how she sought money, and finding gold had kept it. So the pasha said, Wait, O ma alima, and we will discover the truth of this matter. And he sent for the three ulima, who desired that the tomb should be opened at the end of three days, and told them the case, and they said, Open now the tomb of the Christian damsel. And the pasha sent his men to do so, and when they opened it, beheld it was full of fire, and within it lay the body of the wicked and avaricious musliman. Thus it was manifest to all that on the night of terror the angels of God had done this thing, and had laid the innocent girl of the Christians among those who had received direction, and the evil muslim among the rejected. Admire how rapidly legends arise here. This story, which everybody declared was quite true, is placed no longer ago than in Muhammad Ali Pasha's time. There are hardly any travelers this year, instead of a hundred and fifty or more boats, perhaps twenty. A son of one of the Rothschilds, a boy of fourteen, has just gone up like a royal prince in one of the pasha's steamers. All his expenses paid, and crowds of attendants. All that honour to the money of the Jew, said an old fella to me, with a tone of scorn, which I could not but echo in my heart. He has turned out his drageman, a respectable elderly man, very sick, and paid him as bare wages, and the munificent son of five pounds to take him back to Cairo. On board there was a doctor and plenty of servants, and yet he abandons the man here on Mustafa's hands. I have brought Err Rashidi here, the sick man, as poor Mustafa is already overloaded with strangers. I am sorry the name of Yahudi, Jew, should be made to stink yet more in the nostrils of the Arabs. I am very well indeed, my cough is almost gone, and I can walk quite briskly and enjoy it. I think, dear mother, I am really better. I never felt the cold so little as this winter since my illness. The chilly mornings and nights don't seem to signify at all now, and the climate feels more delicious than ever. Mr. Herbert, the painter, went back to Cairo from Farshut below Kenna, so I have no frangy society at all. But Sheikh Yusuf and the Qadi drop into tea very often, and as they are agreeable men I am quite content with my company. By the by I will tell you about the tenure of land in Egypt which the people are always disputing about, as the Qadi laid it down for me. The whole land belongs to the sultan of Turkey, the Pasha being his vaquil, representative, nominally of course as we know. Thus there are no owners, only tenants, paying from one hundred piastras tariff, one pound, down to thirty piastras yearly per fedon, about an acre, according to the quality of the land, or the favor of the Pasha when granting it. This tenancy is hereditary to children only, not to collateral or ascendance, and it may be sold, but in that case application must be made to the government. If the owner or tenant dies childless the land reverts to the sultan, i.e. to the Pasha, and if the Pasha chooses to have any man's land he can take it from him on payment, or without. Don't let anyone tell you that I exaggerate, I have known it to happen, I mean the without, and the man receiving fedon for fedon of desert in return for his good land which he had tilled and watered. Tomorrow night is the great night of Sheikh Abul Hajjaj's Muleed, and I am desired to go to the mosque for the benefit of my health, and that my friends may say a prayer for my children. The kind, hearty welcome I found here has been a real pleasure, and every one was pleased because I was glad to come home to my beled, town, and they all thought it so nice of my master to have come so far to see me because I was sick. All but one Turk, who clearly looked with pity and contempt on so much trouble taken about a sick old woman. I have left my letter for a long while. You will not wonder, for after some ten days' fever my poor guest Mohamed El Rashidi died to-day. Two Prussian doctors gave me help for the last four days, but left last night. He sank to sleep quietly at noon with his hand in mind, a good old Muslim sat at his head on one side and eye on the other. Omar stood at his head and his black boy Kair at his feet. He had laid his face to the Qibla, and I spoke to him to see if he knew anything, and when he nodded the three Muslims chanted, the islami la'alaha ilala, etc., while I closed his eyes. The respectable men came in by degrees, took an inventory of his property, which they delivered to me, and washed the body, and within an hour and a half we all went out to the burial-place, eye following among a troop of women who joined us to wail for the brother who had died far from his place. The scene as we turned in between the broken kalassi and the pylons of the temple to go to the mosque was overpowering. After the prayer in the mosque we went out to the graveyard, Muslims and cops helping to carry the dead, and my Frankish hat in the midst of the veiled and wailing women, all so familiar and yet so strange. After the burial the Imam Sheikh Abed El-Wares came and kissed me on the shoulders and the Sharif, a man of eighty, laid his hands on my shoulders and said, Fear not, my daughter, neither all the days of thy life nor at the hour of thy death, for God is with thee. I kissed the old man's hand and turned to go, but numberless men came and said, A thousand thanks, O our sister, for what thou hast done for one among us, and a great deal more. Now the solemn chanting of the Fikis, and the clear voice of the boy reciting the Quran in the room where the man died, are ringing through the house. They will pass the night in prayer, and to-morrow there will be the prayer of deliverance in the mosque. Our kair has just crept in to have a quiet cry, poor boy. He is in the inventory, and to-morrow I must deliver him up to l'es-e-toratize, to be forward to Cairo with the rest of the property. He is very ugly with his black face, wet and swollen, but he kisses my hand and calls me his mother quite natural-like. You see, color is no barrier here. The weather is glorious this year, and in spite of some fatigue I am extremely well and strong, and have hardly any cough at all. I am so sorry that the young Rothschild was so hard to air Rashidi and that his French doctor refused to come and see him. It makes bad blood, naturally. However, the German doctors were most kind and helpful. The festival of Abul Hajjaj was quite a fine sight, not splendid at all, au contraire, but spirit-stirring, the flags of the shake borne by his family chanting, and the men tearing about in mimic fight on horseback with their spears. My acquaintance of last year, Abid el-Mutubil, the fanatical shake from Tunis, was there. At first he scowled at me. Then someone told him how Rothschild had left Ero Rashidi, and he held forth about the hatred of all the unbelievers to the Muslims, and ended by asking where the sick man was. A quaint little smile twinkled in shake use of soft eyes, and he curled his silky mustache as he said demurely, Your honour must go and visit him at the house of the English lady. I am bound to say that the Pharisee executed himself handsomely. For in a few minutes he came up to me and took my hand, and even hoped I would visit the tomb of Abul Hajjaj with him. Since I wrote last I have been rather poorly, more cough and most wearing sleeplessness. A poor young Englishman died here at the house of the Austrian consular agent. I was too ill to go to him, but a kind, dear English woman, a Mrs. Walker, who was here with her family in a boat, sat up with him three nights and nursed him like a sister. A young American lay sick at the same time in the house, he has now gone down to Cairo, but I doubt whether he will reach it alive. The Englishman was buried on the first day of Ramadan where they buried strangers, on the site of a former Coptic church. Archdeacon Moore read the service, Omar and I spread my old flag over the beer, and cops and Muslims helped to carry the poor stranger. It was a most impressive sight. The party of Europeans, all strangers to the dead but all deeply moved. The group of black-robed and turbaned cops. The sailors from the boats. The gaily dressed dragoons. Several brown-shirted fellowheen, and the thick crowd of children. All the little Arabdas start naked and behaving so well. The expression on their faces touched me most of all. As Muslims, Omar and the boatmen, laid him down in the grave, and while the English prayer was read, the sun went down in a glorious flood of light over the distant bend of the Nile. Had he a mother, he was young, said an abominable woman to me with tears in her eyes, and pressing my hand in sympathy for that far-off mother of such a different race. Passenger steamboats now come here every fortnight, but I have had no letter for a month. I have no almanac and have lost count of European time. Today is the third of Ramadan, that is all I know. The poor black slave was sent from Kenna, God knows why, because he had no money and the mutur could not eat off him, as he could off the money and property, he believes. He is a capital fellow, and in order to compensate me for what he eats, he proposed to wash for me, and he would be amused to see Kayir with his cold black face and filed teeth during laundry-made out in the yard. He fears the family will sell him and hopes he may fetch a good price for his boy. Only on the other hand he would so like me to buy him, and so his mind is disturbed. Meanwhile the having all my clothes washed clean is a great luxury. The steamer has come, and I must finish in haste. I have corrected the proofs. There is not much to alter, and though I regret several lost letters, I can't replace them. I tried, but it felt like a forgery. Do you cut out and correct, dearest mutter? You will do it much better than I." End of Letter forty-nine Read by Sabella Denton All Libravox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit Libravox.org. Letter fifty of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon Read for Libravox.org into the public domain. To the Dowager Lady Duff Gordon Luxor, January 8, 1865 Dear old lady, I received your kind letter in the midst of the drumming and piping and chanting and firing of guns and pistols and scampering of horses which constitute a religious festival in Egypt. The last day of the mullied of Abul Hajj fell on the first January, so you came to wish me may all the year be good to thee, as the people here were civil enough to do, when I told them it was the first day of the Frankish year. The Christian year here begins in September. I was very sorry to hear of poor Lady Teresa's—Lady Teresa Lewis's—death. I feel as if I had no right to survive people whom I left well and strong when I came away so ill. As usual the air of Upper Egypt has revived me again, but I am still weak and thin, and hear many lamentations at my altered looks. However, in shala, thou wilt soon be better. Why don't you make Alexander edit your letters from Spain? I am sure they would be far more amusing than mine can possibly be, for you can write letters than I never could. I wish I had Miss Berry's, though I never did think her such a genius as most people, but her letters must be amusing from the time when they were written. Alexander will tell you how heavy the hand of Pharaoh is upon this poor people. My father scourged you with whips, but I will scourge you with scorpions. Did not Rehoboam say so? Or I forget which King of Judah. The distress here is frightful in all classes, and no man's life is safe. Lady Bae Reda told me the other day that Prince Arthur is coming here, and that he was coming up with him after taking a prince of Hosan Zoloran back to Cairo. There will be all the fantasia possible for him here. Every man that has a horse will gallop him to pieces in honor of the son of the Queen of the English, and not a charge of powder will be spared. If you see Layard, tell him that Mustafa Aga had the whole Koran read for his benefit at the tomb of Abul Hajjaj, besides innumerable fatas which he said for him himself. He consulted me as to the propriety of sending Layard a Bakshish, but I declared that Layard was an emir of the Arabs and a giver not a taker of Bakshish. To Mrs. Austin, Luxor, January 9th, 1865. I gave Shake Yousuf your knife to cut his column, read pen with, and to his little girl the coral waistband clasp you gave me as from you. He was much pleased. I also brought the Sharif, the Psalms in Arabic, to his great delight. The old man called on all our family to say a fatah for their sister after making us all laugh by shouting out, Alhamdulillah, here is our darling safe back again. I wish you could have seen me in the crowd at Kenna holding on to the Qadi's Faragia, a loose row worn by the Ulima. He is the real original Qadi of the Thousand and One Nights. Did ever Qadi tow an Englishwoman round a Shake's tomb before? But I thought his determination to show the people that he considered a Christian not out of place in a Muslim holy place very edifying. I find an exceedingly pleasant man here, an Ababda, a very great Shake from beyond Khartoum, a man of fifty, I suppose, with manners like an English nobleman, simple and polite and very intelligent. He wants to take me to Khartoum for two months up and back, having a tent and a top tarawan, camel litter, and to show me the Bishareen in the desert. We traced the route on my map, which to my surprise he understood, and I found he had traveled into Zanzibar and knew of the existence of the Cape of Good Hope and the English colony there. He had also traveled in the Dinka and Shahrut country where the men are seven feet and over high. Alexander saw a Dinka girl at Cairo three inches taller than himself. He knows Mademoiselle Tiney and says she is on every one's head and in their eyes where she has been. You may fancy that I find Shake Ali very good company. Today the sand in front of the house is thronged with all the poor people with their camels, of which the government has made a new levy of eight camels to every thousand fed-ins. The poor beasts are sent off to transport troops in the Sudan and not being used to the desert they all die. At all events their owners never see one of them again. The discontent is growing stronger every day. Last week the people were cursing the Pasha in the streets of Aswan, and everyone talks aloud of what they think. January 11. The whole place is in desolation. The men are being beaten, one because his camel is not good enough, another because its saddle is old and shabby, and the rest because they have not money enough to pay two months' food and the wages of one man to every four camels, to be paid for the use of the government beforehand. The kurbash has been going on in my neighbor's backs and feet all the morning. It is a new sensation, too, when a friend turns up his sleeve and shows the marks of the wooden handcuffs and the gall of the chain on his throat. The system of wholesale extortion and spoilation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go. The story of Nabath's vineyards is repeated daily on the largest scale. I grieve for Abdallah el-Habashi and the men of high position like him, sent to die by disease or murder in the fagazo, but I grieve still more over the daily anguish of the poor feline, who are forced to take the bread from the mouths of their starving families and to eat it while toiling for the private profit of one man. Egypt is one vast plantation where the master works his slaves without even feeding them. From my window now I see the men limping about among the poor camels that are waiting for the posh's boats to take them, and the great heaps of maize which they are forced to bring for their food. I can tell you the tears such as sight brings to one's eyes are hot and bitter. These are no sentimental grievances, hunger and pain and labor without hope and without reward, and the constant bitterness of impotent resentment. To you all this must sound remote and almost fabulous, but try to imagine Farmer Smith's team driven off by the police and himself beaten till he delivered his hay, his oats and his farm-servant for the use of the Lord Lieutenant, and his two sons dragged in chains to work at railway embankments, and you will have some idea of my state of mind today. I fancy from the number of troops going up to Aswan that there is another rising among the blacks. Some of the black regiments revolted up in the Sudan last summer, and now I hear Shaheen Pasha is to be here in a day or two on his way up, and the camels are being sent off by hundreds from all the villages every day. But I am weary of telling, and you will sicken of hearing my constant lamentations. Sheikh Hassan dropped in and dined with me yesterday and described his mother and her high-handed rule over him. It seems he had a jeunesse or a jeus, and she defended him against his father's displeasure, but when the old Sheikh died she informed her son that if he ever again behaved in a manner unworthy of a Sheikh el-Arab she would not live to see it. Now if my mother told me to jump into the river and drown, I should say Hader, ready, for I fear her exceedingly and love her above all people in the world, and have left everything in her hand. He was good enough to tell me that I was the only woman he knew like his mother, and that was why he loved me so much. I am to visit this Arab Deborah at the Ababda village two days ride from the first cataract. She will come and meet me at the boat. Hassan was splendid when he said how he feared his mother exceedingly. To my amazement to-day in walked the tremendous Alim from Tunis, Sheikh Abid el-Mutawil, who used to look so black at me. He was very civil and pleasant and asked no end of questions about steam engines, telegraphs, and chemistry, especially whether it was true that the Europeans still fancied they could make gold. I said that no one had believed that for nearly two hundred years, and he said that the Arabs also knew it was a lie, and he wondered here that Europeans, who were so clever, believed it. He had just been across the Nile to see the tombs of the things, and, of course, improved the occasion and uttered a number of the usual fine sayings about the vanity of human things. He told me I was the only frank he had ever spoken to. I observed he did not say a word about religion or use the usual pious phrases. By the by Sheikh Yusuf filled up my ink-stand for me the other evening, and in pouring the ink said, Bismillah al-Rakman al-Rakim, in the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. I said I like that custom, it is good to remind us that the ink may be a cruel poison or a good medicine. I am better and have hardly any cough. The people here think it is owing to the intercession of Abul Hajj, who specially protects me. I was obliged to be wrapped in the green silk cover of his tomb when it was taken off to be carried in procession, partly for my health and general welfare and as a sort of adoption into the family. I made a feeble resistance on the score of being a Nazarena, but was told, never fear, does not God know thee and the Sheikh also? No evil will come to thee on that account, but good. And I rather think that general goodwill and kindness is wholesome. End of LETTER No. 51, read by Cibela Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 52 of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Miss Austin, Bluxor, February 7th, 1865. My dearest Charlie, I am tolerably well, but I am growing very homesick, or rather children sick. As the time slips on, I get more and more the feeling of all I am losing of my children. We have delicious weather here and have had it all the time. There has been no cold at all this winter here. Monsieur Prevost Paradol is here for a few days, a very pleasant man indeed, and a little good European talk is a very agreeable interlude to the Arab prosiness, or rather, en fontilage, on the part of the women. I have sought about for shells and a few have been brought to me from the cataract, but of snails I can learn no tidings, nor have I ever seen one, neither can I discover that there are any shells in the Nile mud. At the first cataract they are found sticking to the rocks. The people here are very stupid about natural objects that are of no use to them. Like with the French, small birds are all sparrows, and wildflowers there are none, and only about five varieties of trees in all Egypt. This is a sad year, all the cattle are dead, and the Nile is now as low as it was last July, and the song of the men watering with the Shadoofs sounds sadly true as they chant, Anna Ga'an, etc. I am hungry, I am hungry for a piece of Dura bread, sings one, and the other chimes in, Meskeen, Meskeen, poor man, poor man, or else they sing a song about Syedna Eub, our master Job, and his patience. It is sadly appropriate now, and rings on all sides, as the Shadoofs are greatly multiplied, for lack of oxen to turn the Sakeas, water-wheels. All is terribly dear, and many are sick from sheer weakness owing to poor food, and then I hear fifty thousand are to be taken to work at the canal from Giza to Syoud, through the Fayoum. The only comfort is the enormous rise of wages, which, however, falls heavy on the rich. The sailors, who got forty to fifty piestras five years ago, now get three to five hundred piestras a month. So I fear I must give up my project of Adahabiyah. With the new French consul-general knows not Joseph, and turns me out, I am to live in a new house which Shakeusif is now building, and of which he would give me the terrace and build three rooms on it for me. I wish I got better or worse, and can go home. I do get better, but so slowly, I cough a good deal at times, and I am very thin, but not so weak as I was, or so breathless. To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, Luxor, February 7, 1867. Dearest Alec, I am enjoying a great indulgence of talk with M. Prevost Paradol as hardy as any nigger. He is a delightful person. This evening he is coming with Eric L. Bay, his Armenian companion, and I will invite a few Arabs to show him. I sent off the proofs yesterday per passenger steamer. I trust they will arrive safe. It is too disheartening about letters, so many are lost. I am dreadfully disappointed in my letters. I really don't think them good. You know I don't blagur about my own performances. I am very glad people like my Cape Letters, which I forget, but honestly I don't think the Egyptian good. You know I don't pretend if I think I have done something well, and I was generally content with my translations, but I feel these all to be poor and what Maurice calls dry when I know how curious and interestingly poetical the country really is. I paid Fadi al-Pasha a visit on his boat, and it was just like the Middle Ages. In order to amuse me he called up a horrid little black boy of about four to do tricks like a dancing dog, which ended in a performance of the Musselman prayer. The little beast was dressed in a stumbly dress of scarlet cloth. All the Arab doctors come to see me now as they go up and down the river to give me help if I want it. Some are very pleasant men. Morid Afendi speaks German exactly like a German. The old Sheik Elbeda of Ermont, who visits me whenever he comes here, and has the sweetest voice I ever heard, complained of the climate of Cairo. There is no sun there at all, and it is no brighter or warmer than the moon. What do you think our sun must be now, you know Cairo? We have had a glorious winter, like the finest summer weather at home, only so much finer. Janet wishes to go with me if I go to Sodan. I must make inquiries about the climate. As fears it is too cold for an Egyptian like me. I should enjoy to have all the family au grand complot. I will leave Luxor in May and get to you towards the latter part of June, if that pleases you, inshallah. End of Letter 53 Read by Cibella Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter 54 of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Mrs. Ross, Luxor, February 7th, 1865 Dearest Janet, it is quite heart-rending about my letters. I have got the eye, evidently. The black slave of the poor dregoman who died in my house is still here, and like a dog that has lost his master, has devoted himself to me. It seems nobody's business to take him away, as the Qadi did the money and the goods, and so it looks as if I should quietly inherit poor ugly kair. He is of a degree of ugliness quite transcendent, with teeth filed sharp in order to eat people, as he says, but the most good, humoured creature and a very fair laundrymaid. It is evidently no concern of mine to send him to be sold in Cairo, so I wait the event. If nobody ever claims him I shall keep him at whatever wages may seem fit, and he will subside into liberty. Dearest, the Maoun here, says he is legally entitled to his freedom. If the new French consul-general will let me stay on here, I will leave my furniture and come down straight to your hospitable roof in Alexandria, all-route for Europe. I fear my plan of a Dahabia of my own would be too expensive. The wages of common boatmen now are three napoleons a month. Monsieur Préveuse Proudal, whose company has been a real bone for charm to me, will speak to the consul-general. I know all thieves would sign a round robin in my favour if they only knew how, for I am very popular here, and the only Hakim. I have affected some brilliant curers and get lots of presents—eggs, turkeys, etc., etc.—it is quite a pleasure to see how the poor people, instead of trying to sponge on one, are anxious to make a return for kindness. I give nothing whatever but my physique. These country people are very good. A nice young Circassian kawa sat up with a stranger, a dying Englishman, all night, because I had doctored his wife. I have also a pupil, Mustapha's youngest boy, a sweet, intelligent lad who is pining for an education. I wish he could go to England. He speaks English very well and reads and writes indifferently, but I never saw a boy so wild to learn. Is it difficult to get a boy into the Abysseia College? As it is gratuitous, I suppose it is. I quite grieve over little Ahmed, forced to dwaddle away his time and his faculties here. End of Letter Fifty-Four Read by Cibella Denton All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter Fifty-Five of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain To Mrs. Austin, Luxor, March 13, 1865 Dearest Mutter, I hope your mind has not been disturbed by any rumors of battle, murder, and sudden death up in our part of the world. A week ago we heard that a Prussian boat had been attacked, all on board murdered, and the boat burned, then that ten villages were in open revolt, and that Effendina, the viceroy, himself had come up and taken a broom and swept them clean, i.e., exterminated the inhabitants. The truth now appears to be that a crazy darwish has made a disturbance, but I will tell it as I heard it. He did as his father likewise did thirty years ago, and made himself ism, name, by repeating one of the appellations of God, like Yah Latif three thousand times every night for three years, which rendered him invulnerable. He then made friends with the jinn who taught him many more tricks, among others, that practiced in England by the Davenports of slipping out of any bonds. He then deluded the people of the desert by giving himself out as El-Madi, he who is to come with the Lord Jesus and to slay Antichrist at the end of the world, and proclaimed a revolt against the Turks. Three villages below Kenna, Gow, Rania, and Betta, took part in the disturbance, and Fadel Pasha came up with steamboats, burnt the villages, shot about one hundred men, and devastated the fields. At first we heard one thousand were shot, now it is one hundred. The women and children will be distributed among other villages. The Darwish, some say, is killed, others say that he has gone off into the desert with the body of Bettaween and a few of the Felaheen from the three ravaged villages. Gow is a large place, as large, I think, as Luxor. The Darwish is a native of Salamiah, a village close by here, and yesterday his brother, a very quiet man, and his father's father-in-law, old Haji Sultan, were carried off prisoners to Cairo, or Kenna, we don't know which. It seems that the boat robbed belonged to Greek traders, but no one was hurt, I believe, and no European boat has been molested. Baron Kevin Brink was here yesterday with his wife, and they saw all the sacking of the villages and said no resistance was offered by the people whom the soldiers shot down as they ran, and they saw the sheep, etc., being driven off by the soldiers. You need be in no alarm about me. The Darwish and his followers could not pounce on us as we are a good eight miles from the desert, i.e. the mountain, so we must have timely notice, and we have arranged that if they appear in the neighborhood, the women and children of the outlying huts should come into my house, which is a regular fortress, and also any travelers and boats, and we muster a little short of seven hundred able to fight, including Karnak, moreover, Fadil Pasha and the troops are at Kenna only forty miles off. Three English boats went down river to-day, and one came up. The Kevin Brinks went up last night. I dined with them, she is very lively and pleasant. I nearly died of laughing to-day when little Ahmet came for his lesson. He pronounced that he was sick of love for her. He played at cards with her yesterday afternoon, and it seems lost his heart. He is twelve and quite a boyish boy, though a very clever one, and he said he was wishing to play a game for a kiss at the stake. He put on a turban today, on the strength of his passion, to look like a man, and had neglected his dress otherwise, because when young men are sick of love they always do. The fact is the bare-ness was kind and amiable, and tried to amuse him as she would have done to a white boy, hence Ahmet's susceptible heart was on fire for her. He also asked me if I had any medicine to make him white. I supposed to look lovely in her eyes. He little knows how very pretty he is with his brown face, as he sits cross-legged on the carpet at my feet in his white turban and blue shirt, reading aloud. He was quite a picture. I have grown very fond of the little fellow. He is so eager to learn and to improve, and so remarkably clever. My little Ahmet, who is donkey-boy and general little slave, the smallest, slenderest, quietest little creature, has implored me to take him with me to England. I wish Raney could see him. She would be so apprised at his dark, brown little face, so feign, and with eyes like a door-mouse. He is a true little Arab, can run all day in the heat, sleeps on the stones and eats anything—quick, gentle, and noiseless, and fiercely jealous. If I speak to any other boy he rushes at him and drives him away, and while Black Kayir was in the house he suffered martyrdom and the kitchen was a scene of incessant wrangle about the coffee. Kayir would bring me my coffee, and Ahmet resented the usurpation of his functions. Of course, quite hopelessly, as Kayir was a great stout black of eighteen and poor little Ahmet not bigger than Raney. I am really tempted to adopt the vigilant, active little creature. March 15. Sheikh Yusuf returned from a visit to Salima last night. He tells me that Darwish Ahmet el-Tayyib is not dead. He believes that he is a mad fanatic and a communist. He wants to divide all properly equally and to kill all the Salima and destroy all theological teachings by learned men, and to preach the sort of revelation or interpretation of the Koran of his own. He would break up your pretty clock, said Yusuf, and give every man a broken wheel out of it, and so with all things. One of the drago-men's here had been urging me to go down, but Yusuf laughed at any idea of danger. He says the people here have fought the Bedouin before, and will not be attacked by such a handful as are out in the mountain now. Dures the Abu el-Hajjaji, family of Abu el-Hajjaj, will put their seal to it that I am their sister, and answer for me with a man's life. It would be foolish to go down into whatever disturbance there may be alone in a small country boat, and where I am not known. The Pasha himself we hear is at Girga with steamboats and soldiers, and if the slightest fear should arise steamers will be sent up to fetch all the Europeans. What I grieve over is the poor villagers whose little property is all confiscated, guilty and innocent alike, and many shot as they ran away. Haji Ali tells me privately that he believes the discontent against the government is very deep and universal, and that there will be an outbreak, but not yet. The Pasha's attempt to regulate the price of food by edicts has been very disastrous, and of course the present famine prices are laid to his charge. If a man will be omnipotent he must take the consequences when he fails. I don't believe in an outbreak, I think the people are too thoroughly accustomed to suffer and to obey. Besides they have no means of communication, and the steamboats can run up and down and destroy them in detail, in a country which is eight hundred miles long, by from one to eight wide and thinly people. Only Cairo could do anything, and everything is done to please the Kairins at the expense of the Felaen. The great heat has begun these last three days. My cough is better and I am grown fatter again. The Nile is so low now that I fancy that six weeks or two months hence I shall have to go down in two little boats. Even now the Dahabiyas keep sticking fast continually. I have promised some neighbors to bring back a little seed-corn for them, some of the best English wheat without beard. All the wheat here is bearded and they have an ambition for some of ours. I long to bring them wheel-barrows and spades and pick-axes. The great folks get steam-plows, but the laborers work with their bare hands and a rush-basket, pour two potage, and it takes six to do the work of one who has got good tools. End of Letter Fifty-Five Read by Cibella Denton All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information please visit LibriVox.org Letter Fifty-Six of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain To Mrs. Ross Luxor March Twenty-Fifth, 1865 Dearest Janet I hope you have not had visions of me plundered and massacred by the crazy Darwish, who has caused the destruction of Gao and three other villages. I assure you we are quite quiet here and, moreover, have arranged matters for our defense if Ahmed et Tayyub should honor us with a visit. The heat has just set in, thermometer eighty-nine degrees today. Of course I am much better, fatter, and cough less. Many thanks to Henry about Ahmed Ibn Mustafa, but his father is going to send him to England into Mr. Fowler's workshop, which will be a much better training, I think. Mr. Fowler takes him without a premium most kindly. Lord Dudley will tell you what a splendid entertainment I gave him. I think he was quite frightened at the sight of the tray and the black fingers in the dishes. The Arabda Sheikh and his handsome brother proposed to take me to the muleed of Sheikh El Shadheeli, the coffee-saint, in the desert to see all the wild Ababda and Bisharia. It is very tempting. If I feel pretty well, I must go, I think, and perhaps the change might do me good. They believe no European ever went to that festival. There are camel races and a great show of pretty girls, says the handsome Hassan. A fine young Circassian Kawas here has volunteered to be my servant anywhere and to fight anybody for me, because I have cured his pretty wife. You would love Kershid with his clear blue eyes, fair face and brisk, neat, soldierly air. He has a Crimean medal and such a lot of daggers and pistols and is such a tremendous Muslim, but nevertheless he loves me and tells me all his affairs and how tiresome his wife's mother is. I tell him all wives's mothers always are, but he swears Wahali Hawaga, Mr. Ross, don't say so, Wahali, inshallah. End of letter fifty-six, read by Subella Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter fifty-seven of Letters from Egypt by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, Luxor, March thirtieth, eighteen-sixty-five. Dearest Alec, I have just received your letter of March third with one from Janet, which shows of how little moment the extermination of four villages is in this country, for she does not allude to our revolt and evidently has not heard of it. In my last letter to Mother I told how one Ahmed at Tayyib, a mad Darwish, had raised a riot at Gow below Kenna, and how a boat had been robbed, and how we were all rather looking out for Orazia and determined to fight Ahmed at Tayyib and his followers. Then we called the harem he, wicked ones, and were rather blood thirstily disposed towards them, and resolved to keep order and protect our property. But now we say Nas Mesakine, poor people, and whisper to each other that God will not forget what the Pasha has done. The truth, of course, we shall never know. But I do know that one Pasha said he had hanged five hundred, and another that he had sent three hundred to Fazaglou, Khamqidurakayin, and all for the robbery of one Greek boat in which only the steersmen was killed. I cannot make out that anything was done by the insurgents beyond going out into the desert to listen to the Darwish's nonsense, and see a reed shaken by the wind. The party that had robbed the boat was, I am told, about forty strong. But the most horrid stories are current among the people of the atrocities committed on the wretched villagers by the villagers. Not many were shot, they say, and they attempted no resistance, but the women and girls were outraged and murdered, and the men hanged, and the steamers loaded with plunder. The worst is that every one believes the Europeans ate in a bet, and all declare that the cops were spared to please the frangies. Mind I am not telling you facts, only what the people are saying, in order to show you their feelings. One most respectable young man sat before me on the floor the other day, and told me what he had heard from those who had come up the river. Horrible tales of the stench of the bodies which were left unburied by the posh's order, of women big with child ripped open, etc., etc. Thou knowest, O our lady, that we are people of peace in this place, and behold now if one madman should come and a few idle fellows go out to the mountain, desert with him, Effendina will send his soldiers to destroy the place and spoil our poor little girls and hang us. Is that right, O lady, and Ahmed al-Babri saw Europeans with hats in the steamer with Effendina in the soldiers? Truly in all the world none are miserable like us Arabs. The Turks beat us, and the Europeans hate us, and say quite right. By God we had better lay down our heads in the dust, die, and let the strangers take our land and grow cotton for themselves. As for me I am tired of this miserable life and of fearing for my poor little girls. Ahmed was really eloquent, and when he threw his malea over his face and sobbed, I am not ashamed to say that I cried too. I know very well that Mohamed was not quite right in what he says of the Europeans. I know the cruel old platitudes about governing orientals by fear, which the English pick up like mockingbirds from the Turks. I know all about the stick and vigor and all that, but I sit among the people, and I know too that Mohamed feels just as John Smith or Tom Brown would feel in his place, and that men who were very savage against the riders in the beginning are now almost in a humor to rise against the Turks themselves, just exactly as free-born Britons might be. There are even men of the class who have something to lose who express their disgust very freely. I saw the steamer pass up to Fazoglo, but the prisoners were all below. The shake of the Ababdah here has had to send a party of his men to guard them through the desert. All together this year is miserable in Egypt. I have not once heard the zagar eat. Everyone is anxious and depressed, and I fear hungry. The land is parched from the low Nile. The heat has set in six weeks earlier than usual. The animals are scarecrows for want of food, and now these horrid stories of bloodshed and cruelty and robbery, for the Pasha takes the lands of these villages for his own, have saddened every face. I think Haji Ali is right, and that there will be more disturbances. If there are, they will be caused by the cruelty and oppression at Gao and the three neighboring villages. From Salameya, two miles above Luxor, every man, woman and child, in any degree kin, to Akmet at Tayyib has been taken in chains to Kenna, and no one here expects to see one of them return alive. Some are remarkably good men, I hear, and I have heard men say, If Haji Sultan is killed and all his family, we will never do a good action any more, for we see it is of no use. There was a talk among the three or four Europeans here at the beginning of the rumors of a revolt of organizing a defense among Christians only. Conceived what a silly and gratuitous provocation. There was no religion in the business at all, and of course the proper person to organize a defense was the Ma'un, and he and Mustafa and others had planned using my house as a castle and defending that in case of a visit from the riders. I have no doubt the true cause of the row is the usual one, hunger, the high price of food. It was like our swing or bread-riots, nothing more and a very feeble affair, too. It is curious to see how the travelers gave to Habiyahs just as usual and the Europeans as far removed from all care or knowledge of the distresses as if they were at home. When I go and sit with the English I feel almost as if they were foreigners to me, too. So completely am I now Dint el-Belid, daughter of the country here. I dined three days running with the Kevin Brinks, and one day after dinner we sent for a lot of Arab shakes to come for coffee, the two Ababda and a relation of theirs from Khartoum, the shake of Karnak, one Muhammad, a rich fellow, and we were joined by the aga of Halim Pasha's Harim, and an ugly beast he is. The little Baroness won all hearts. She is a regular viva-arjant or, as we say, effrita, and to see the dark faces glittering with merry smiles as they watched her was very drall. I never saw a human being so thoroughly amused as the black shake from the Sudan. Next day we dined at the Austrian agents, and the Baroness at last made them own Danza Polka with her, while the agent played the guitar. There were a lot of cops about who nearly died of laughing, and indeed so did I. Next day we had a capital dinner at Mustafa's, and the two Ababda shakes, the shake of Karnak, the Ma'un, and shake Yusuf dined with us. The shake of Karnak gave a grand performance of eating like a Bedouin. I have heard you talk of tripas elásticas in Spain, but Oahali, anything like the performance of shake Abdullah, none but an eyewitness, could believe. How he plucked off the lamb's head and handed it to me in token of the highest respect, and how the bones crackled beneath his fingers, how huge handfuls of everything were chucked right down his throat all scorching hot. I encouraged him, of course, quoting the popular song about doing deeds that Antar did not, and we all grew quite uproarious. When shake Abdullah asked for drink I cried, Bring the Balehri, the big jar the women fetched water in, for the shake, and shake Yusuf compared him to Samson and to Oah, while I more profanely told how Antar broke the bones and threw them about. The little bare-ness was delighted and only expressed herself hurt that no one had crammed anything into her mouth. I told Amon her disappointment, which caused more laughter as such a custom is unknown here, but he, of course, made no end of sweet speeches to her. After dinner she showed the Arabs how ladies curtsy to the Queen in England, and the Ababda acted the ceremonial of presentation at the court of Darfur, where you have to rub your nose in the dust at the king's feet. Then we went out with lanterns and torches, and the Ababda did the sword dance for us. Two men with round shields and great swords do it. One dances a pas-soul of challenge and defiance with prodigious leaps and pirouettes and ha-haz, then the other comes in a grand fight ensues. When the handsome shake Hassan, whom you saw in Cairo, bounded out it was really heroic. All his attitudes were alike, grand and graceful. They all wanted shake Yusuf to play el-nibut, single-stick, and said he was the best man here at it, but his sister was not long dead and he could not. Hassan looks forward to Maurice's coming here to teach him the fighting of the English, how Maurice would pound him. On the fourth night I went to tea in Lord Hopeton's boat, and their sailors gave a grand fantasia excessively like a Christmas pantomime. One danced like a woman, and there was a regular pantaloon, only more so, and a sort of clown and sheepskin and a pink mask who was duly tumbled about, and who distributed clats freely with a huge wooden spoon. It was very good fun indeed, though it was quite as well that the ladies did not understand the dialogue or that part of the dance which made the moan roar with laughter. The Hopeton's had two handsome boats and were living like in Mayfair. I am so used now to our poor, shabby life that it makes quite a strange impression on me to see all that splendor. Here which a year or two ago I should not have even remarked, and thus out of my inward consciousness, as Germans say, many of the peculiarities and faults of the people of Egypt are explained to me and accounted for. April 2nd. It is so dreadfully hot and dusty that I shall rather hasten my departure if I can. And as all the land which last year was green is now desert and dry, the dust is four times as bad. If I hear that Ross has bought and sent up a Dahabia I will wait for that. If not I will go in three weeks if I can. End of Letter 57 Read by Spelledenton All LibriVox files are in the public domain.