Part 13

To Mrs. Austin.

LUXOR, February 19, 1864.

DEAREST MUTTER,

I have only time for a few lines to go down by Mr. Strutt and Heathcote's boat to Cairo. They are very good specimens and quite recognised as 'belonging to the higher people,' because they 'do not make themselves big.' I received your letter of January 21 with little darling Rainie's three days ago.

I am better now that the weather is fine again. We had a whole day's rain (which Herodotus says is a portent here) and a hurricane from the south worthy of the Cape. I thought we should have been buried under the drifting sand. To-day is again heavenly. I saw Abd-el-Azeez, the chemist in Cairo; he seemed a very good fellow, and was a pupil of my old friend M. Chrevreul, and highly recommended by him. Here I am out of all European ideas. The Sheykh-el-Arab (of the Ababdeh tribe), who has a sort of town house here, has invited me out into the desert to the black tents, and I intend to pay a visit with old Mustapha A'gha. There is a Roman well in his yard with a ghoul in it. I can't get the story from Mustapha, who is ashamed of such superstitions, but I'll find it out. We had a fantasia at Mustapha's for young Strutt and Co., and a very good dancing-girl. Some dear old prosy English people made me laugh so. The lady wondered how the women here could wear clothes 'so different from English females--poor things!' but they were not malveillants, only pitying and wonderstruck--nothing astonished them so much as my salutations with Seleem Effendi, the Maohn.

I begin to feel the time before me to be away from you all very long indeed, but I do think my best chance is a long spell of real heat. I have got through this winter without once catching cold at all to signify, and now the fine weather is come. I am writing in Arabic from Sheykh Yussuf's dictation the dear old story of the barber's brother with the basket of glass. The Arabs are so diverted at hearing that we all know the Alf Leyleh o Leyleh, the 'Thousand Nights and a Night.' The want of a dictionary with a teacher knowing no word of English is terrible. I don't know how I learn at all. The post is pretty quick up to here. I got your letter within three weeks, you see, but I get no newspapers; the post is all on foot and can't carry anything so heavy. One of my men of last year, Asgalani the steersman, has just been to see me; he says his journey was happier last year.

I hear that Phillips is coming to Cairo, and have written to him there to invite him up here to paint these handsome Saeedees. He could get up in a steamer as I did through Hassaneyn Effendi for a trifle. I wish you could come, but the heat here which gives me life would be quite impossible to you. The thermometer in the cold antechamber now is 67 degrees where no sun ever comes, and the blaze of the sun is prodigious.

February 26, 1864: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.

LUXOR, February 26, 1864.

DEAREST ALICK,

I have just received your letter of the 3rd inst., and am glad to get such good tidings. You would be amused to see Omar bring me a letter and sit down on the floor till I tell him the family news, and then Alhamdulillah, we are so pleased, and he goes off to his pots and pans again. Lord and Lady Spencer are here, and his sister, in two boats. The English 'Milord,' extinct on the Continent, has revived in Egypt, and is greatly reverenced and usually much liked. 'These high English have mercy in their stomachs,' said one of my last year's sailors who came to kiss my hand--a pleasing fact in natural history! Fee wahed Lord, was little ragged Achmet's announcement of Lord Spencer--'Here's a Lord.' They are very pleasant people. I heard from Janet to-day of ice at Cairo and at Shoubra, and famine prices. I cannot attempt Cairo with meat at 1s. 3d. a pound, and will e'en stay here and grill at Thebes. Marry-come-up with your Thebes and savagery! What if we do wear ragged brown shirts? ''Tis manners makyth man,' and we defy you to show better breeding.

We are now in the full enjoyment of summer weather; there has been no cold for fully a fortnight, and I am getting better every day now. My cough has quite subsided, and the pain in the chest much diminished; if the heat does not overpower me I feel sure it will be very healing to my lungs. I sit out on my glorious balcony and drink the air from early morning till noon, when the sun comes upon it and drives me under cover. The thermometer has stood at 64 degrees for a fortnight or three weeks, rising sometimes to 67 degrees, but people in the boats tell me it is still cold at night on the river. Up here, only a stone's-throw from it, it is warm all night. I fear the loss of cattle has suspended irrigation to a fearful extent, and that the harvests of Lower Egypt of all kinds will be sadly scanty. The disease has not spread above Minieh, or very slightly; but, of course, cattle will rise in price here also. Already food is getting dearer here; meat is 4.5 piastres--7d.--the rotl (a fraction less than a pound), and bread has risen considerably--I should say corn, for no bakers exist here. I pay a woman to grind and bake my wheat which I buy, and delicious bread it is. It is impossible to say how exactly like the early parts of the Bible every act of life is here, and how totally new it seems when one reads it here. Old Jacob's speech to Pharaoh really made me laugh (don't be shocked), because it is so exactly what a fellah says to a Pasha: 'Few and evil have been the days,' etc. (Jacob being a most prosperous man); but it is manners to say all that, and I feel quite kindly to Jacob, whom I used to think ungrateful and discontented; and when I go to Sidi Omar's farm, does he not say, 'Take now fine meal and bake cakes quickly,' and wants to kill a kid? Fateereh with plenty of butter is what the 'three men' who came to Abraham ate; and the way that Abraham's chief memlook, acting as Vakeel, manages Isaac's marriage with Rebekah! All the vulgarized associations with Puritanism and abominable little 'Scripture tales and pictures' peel off here, and the inimitably truthful representation of life and character--not a flattering one certainly--comes out, and it feels like Homer. Joseph's tears and his love for the brother born of the same mother is so perfect. Only one sees what a bad inferior race the Beni Israel were compared to the Beni Ishmael or to the Egyptians. Leviticus and Deuteronomy are so very heathenish compared to the law of the Koran, or to the early days of Abraham. Verily the ancient Jews were a foul nation, judging by the police regulations needful for them. Please don't make these remarks public, or I shall be burnt with Stanley and Colenso (unless I suffer Sheykh Yussuf to propose me El-Islam). He and M. de Rouge were here last evening, and we had an Arabic soiree. M. de Rouge speaks admirably, quite like an Alim, and it was charming to see Sheykh Yussuf's pretty look of grateful pleasure at finding himself treated like a gentleman and a scholar by two such eminent Europeans; for I (as a woman) am quite as surprising as even M. de Rouge's knowledge of hieroglyphics and Arabic Fosseeha. It is very interesting to see something of Arabs who have read and have the 'gentleman' ideas. His brother, the Imam, has lost his wife; he was married twenty-two years, and won't hear of taking another. I was struck with the sympathy he expressed with the English Sultana, as all the uneducated people say, 'Why doesn't she marry again?' It is curious how refinement brings out the same feelings under all 'dispensations.' I apologized to Yussuf for inadvertently returning the Salaam aleykoum (Peace be with thee), which he said to Omar, and which I, as an unbeliever, could not accept. He coloured crimson, touched my hand and kissed his own, quite distressed lest the distinction might wound me. When I think of a young parsonic prig at home I shudder at the difference. But Yussuf is superstitious; he told me how someone down the river cured his cattle with water poured over a Mushaf (a copy of the Koran), and has hinted at writing out a chapter for me to wear as a hegab (an amulet for my health). He is interested in the antiquities and in M. de Rouge's work, and is quite up to the connection between Ancient Egypt and the books of Moses, exaggerating the importance of Seyidna Moussa, of course.

If I go down to Cairo again I will get letters to some of the Alim there from Abd-el-Waris, the Imam here, and I shall see what no European but Lane has seen. I think things have altered since his day, and that men of that class would be less inaccessible than they were then; and then a woman who is old (Yussuf guessed me at sixty) and educated does not shock, and does interest them. All the Europeans here are traders, and only speak the vulgarest language, and don't care to know Arab gentlemen; if they see anything above their servants it is only Turks, or Arab merchants at times. Don't fancy that I can speak at all decently yet, but I understand a good deal, and stammer out a little.

March 1, 1864: Mrs. Austin

To Mrs. Austin.

LUXOR, March 1, 1864.

DEAREST MUTTER,

I think I shall have an opportunity of sending letters in a few days by a fast steamer, so I will begin one on the chance and send it by post if the steamer is delayed long. The glory of the climate now is beyond description, and I feel better every day. I go out early--at seven or eight o'clock--on my tiny black donkey, and come in to breakfast about ten, and go out again at four.

I want to photograph Yussuf for you. The feelings and prejudices and ideas of a cultivated Arab, as I get at them little by little, are curious beyond compare. It won't do to generalize from one man, of course, but even one gives some very new ideas. The most striking thing is the sweetness and delicacy of feeling--the horror of hurting anyone (this must be individual, of course: it is too good to be general). I apologized to him two days ago for inadvertently answering the Salaam aleykoum, which he, of course, said to Omar on coming in. Yesterday evening he walked in and startled me by a Salaam aleykee addressed to me; he had evidently been thinking it over whether he ought to say it to me, and come to the conclusion that it was not wrong. 'Surely it is well for all the creatures of God to speak peace (Salaam) to each other,' said he. Now, no uneducated Muslim would have arrived at such a conclusion. Omar would pray, work, lie, do anything for me--sacrifice money even; but I doubt whether he could utter Salaam aleykoum to any but a Muslim. I answered as I felt: 'Peace, oh my brother, and God bless thee!' It was almost as if a Catholic priest had felt impelled by charity to offer the communion to a heretic. I observed that the story of the barber was new to him, and asked if he did not know the 'Thousand and One Nights.' No; he studied only things of religion, no light amusements were proper for an Alim (elder of religion); we Europeans did not know that, of course, as our religion was to enjoy ourselves; but he must not make merry with diversions, or music, or droll stories. (See the mutual ignorance of all ascetics!) He has a little girl of six or seven, and teaches her to write and read; no one else, he believes, thinks of such a thing out of Cairo; there many of the daughters of the Alim learn--those who desire it. His wife died two years ago, and six months ago he married again a wife of twelve years old! (Sheykh Yussuf is thirty he tells me; he looks twenty-two or twenty-three.) What a stepmother and what a wife! He can repeat the whole Koran without a book, it takes twelve hours to do it. Has read the Towrat (old Testament) and the el-Aangeel (Gospels), of course, every Alim reads them. 'The words of Seyyidna Eesa are the true faith, but Christians have altered and corrupted their meaning. So we Muslims believe. We are all the children of God.' I ask if Muslims call themselves so, or only the slaves of God. ''Tis all one, children or slaves. Does not a good man care for both tenderly alike?' (Pray observe the Oriental feeling here. Slave is a term of affection, not contempt; and remember the Centurion's 'servant (slave) whom he loved.') He had heard from Fodl Pasha how a cow was cured of the prevailing disease in Lower Egypt by water weighed against a Mushaf (copy of the Koran), and had no doubt it was true, Fodl Pasha had tried it. Yet he thinks the Arab doctors no use at all who use verses of the Koran.

M. de Rouge, the great Egyptologue, came here one evening; he speaks Arabic perfectly, and delighted Sheykh Yussuf, who was much interested in the translations of the hieroglyphics and anxious to know if he had found anything about Moussa (Moses) or Yussuf (Joseph). He looked pleased and grateful to be treated like a 'gentleman and scholar' by such an Alim as M. de Rouge and such a Sheykhah as myself. As he acts as clerk to Mustapha, our consular agent, and wears a shabby old brown shirt, or gown, and speaks no English, I dare say he not seldom encounters great slights (from sheer ignorance). He produced a bit of old Cufic MS. and consulted M. de R. as to its meaning--a pretty little bit of flattery in an Arab Alim to a Frenchman, to which the latter was not insensible, I saw. In answer to the invariable questions about all my family I once told him my father had been a great Alim of the Law, and that my mother had got ready his written books and put some lectures in order to be printed. He was amazed--first that I had a mother, as he told me he thought I was fifty or sixty, and immensely delighted at the idea. 'God has favoured your family with understanding and knowledge; I wish I could kiss the Sheykhah your mother's hand. May God favour her!' Maurice's portrait (as usual) he admired fervently, and said one saw his good qualities in his face--a compliment I could have fully returned, as he sat looking at the picture with affectionate eyes and praying, sotto voce, for el gedda, el gemeel (the youth, the beautiful), in the words of the Fathah, 'O give him guidance and let him not stray into the paths of the rejected!' Altogether, something in Sheykh Yussuf reminds me of Worsley: there is the same look of Seelen reinheit, with far less thought and intelligence; indeed little thought, of course, and an additional childlike innocence. I suppose some medieval monks may have had the same look, but no Catholic I have ever seen looks so peaceful or so unpretending. I see in him, like in all people who don't know what doubt means, that easy familiarity with religion. I hear him joke with Omar about Ramadan, and even about Omar's assiduous prayers, and he is a frequent and hearty laugher. I wonder whether this gives you any idea of a character new to you. It is so impossible to describe manner, which gives so much of the impression of novelty. My conclusion is the heretical one: that to dream of converting here is absurd, and, I will add, wrong. All that is wanted is general knowledge and education, and the religion will clear and develop itself. The elements are identical with those of Christianity, encumbered, as that has been, with asceticism and intolerance. On the other hand, the creed is simple and there are no priests, a decided advantage. I think the faith has remained wonderfully rational considering the extreme ignorance of those who hold it. I will add Sally's practical remark, that 'The prayers are a fine thing for lazy people; they must wash first, and the prayer is a capital drill.'

You would be amused to hear Sally when Omar does not wake in time to wash, pray, and eat before daybreak now in Ramadan. She knocks at his door and acts as Muezzin. 'Come, Omar, get up and pray and have your dinner' (the evening meal is 'breakfast,' the early morning one 'dinner'). Being a light sleeper she hears the Muezzin, which Omar often does not, and passes on the 'Prayers is better than sleep' in a prose version. Ramadan is a dreadful business; everybody is cross and lazy--no wonder! The camel-men quarrelled all day under my window yesterday, and I asked what it was all about. 'All about nothing; it is Ramadan with them,' said Omar laughing. 'I want to quarrel with someone myself; it is hot to-day, and thirsty weather.' Moreover, I think it injures the health of numbers permanently, but of course it is the thing of most importance in the eyes of the people; there are many who never pray at ordinary times, but few fail to keep Ramadan. It answers to the Scotch Sabbath, a comparison also borrowed from Sally.

Friday.--My friend Seleem Effendi has just been here talking about his own affairs and a good deal of theology. He is an immense talker, and I just put eywas (yes) and la (no) and sahe (very true), and learn manners and customs. He tells me he has just bought two black slave women, mother and daughter, from a Copt for about 35 pounds the two. The mother is a good cook, and the daughter is 'for his bed,' as his wife does not like to leave Cairo and her boys at school there. It does give one a sort of start to hear a most respectable magistrate tell one such a domestic arrangement. He added that it would not interfere with the Sittel Kebeer (the great lady), the black girl being only a slave, and these people never think they have children enough. Moreover, he said he could not get on with his small pay without women to keep house, which is quite true here, and women are not respectable in a man's house on other terms. Seleem has a high reputation, and is said not to 'eat the people.' He is a hot Mussulman, and held forth very much as a very superficial Unitarian might do, evidently feeling considerable contempt for the absurdities, as he thinks them, of the Copts (he was too civil to say Christians), but no hatred (and he is known to show no partiality), only he 'can't understand how people can believe such nonsense.' He is a good specimen of the good, honest, steady-going man-of-the-world Muslim, a strong contrast to the tender piety of dear Sheykh Yussuf, who has all the feelings which we call Christian charity in the highest degree, and whose face is like that of 'the beloved disciple,' but who has no inclination for doctrinal harangues like worthy Seleem. There is a very general idea among the Arabs that Christians hate the Muslims; they attribute to us the old Crusading spirit. It is only lately that Omar has let us see him at prayer, for fear of being ridiculed, but now he is sure that is not so, I often find him praying in the room where Sally sits at work, which is a clean, quiet place. Yussuf went and joined him there yesterday evening, and prayed with him, and gave him some religious instruction quite undisturbed by Sally and her needlework, and I am continually complimented on not hating the Muslims. Yussuf promises me letters to some Alim in Cairo when I go there again, that I may be shown the Azhar (the great college). Omar had told him that I refused to go with a janissary from the Consul for fear of giving offence to any very strict Muslims, which astonished him much. He says his friends shall dress me in their women's clothes and take me in. I asked whether as a concealment of my religion, and he said no, only there were 'thousands' of young men, and it would be 'more delicate' that they should not stare and talk about my face.

Seleem told me a very pretty grammatical quibble about 'son' and 'prophet' (apropos of Christ) on a verse in the Gospel, depending on the reduplicative sign [Arabic sign for sheddeh] (sheddeh) over one letter; he was just as put out when I reminded him that it was written in Greek, as our amateur theologians are if you say the Bible was not originally composed in English. However, I told him that many Christians in England, Germany, and America did not believe that Seyyidna Eesa was God, but only the greatest of prophets and teachers, and that I was myself of that opinion. He at once declared that that was sufficient, that all such had 'received guidance,' and were not 'among the rejected'; how could they be, since such Christians only believed the teaching of Eesa, which was true, and not the falsifications of the priests and bishops (the bishops always 'catch it,' as schoolboys say). I was curious to hear whether on the strength of this he would let out any further intolerance against the Copts, but he said far less and far less bitterly than I have heard from Unitarians, and debited the usual most commonplace, common-sense kind of arguments on the subject. I fancy it would not be very palatable to many Unitarians, to be claimed mir nichts dir nichts as followers of el-Islam; but if people really wish to convert in the sense of improving, that door is open, and no other.

Monday, 7th.--The steamer is come down already and will, I suppose, go on to-morrow, so I must finish this letter to go by it. I have not received any letter for some time, and am anxiously expecting the post. We have now settled into quite warm weather ways, no more going out at mid-day. It is now broiling, and I have been watching eight tall fine blacks swimming and capering about, their skins shining like otters' fur when wet. They belong to a gellaab--a slave-dealer's boat. The beautiful thing is to see the men and boys at work among the green corn, the men half naked and the boys wholly so; in the sun their brown skins look just like dark clouded amber--semi-transparent, so fine are they.

I rejoice to say that on Wednesday is Bairam, and to-morrow Ramadan 'dies.' Omar is very thin and yellow and headachy, and everyone is cross. How I wish I were going, instead of my letter, to see you all, but it is evident that this heat is the thing that does me good, if anything will.

March 7, 1864: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.