Part 36

My boat has been well let in Cairo and is expected here every day. The gentlemen shoot, and tell the crew not to row, and in short take it easy, and give them 2 pounds in every place. Imagine what luxury for my crew. I shall have to dismiss the lot, they will be so spoilt. The English Consul-General came up in a steamer with Dr. Patterson and Mr. Francis. I dined with them one day; I wish you could have seen me carried in my armchair high up on the shoulders of four men, like a successful candidate, or more like one of the Pharaohs in an ancient bas-relief, preceded by torch bearers and other attendants and followers, my procession was quite regal. I wish I could show you a new friend of mine, Osman Ibraheem, who studied medicine five years in Paris. My heart warmed to him directly, because like most high-bred Arabs, he is so like Don Quixote--only Don Quixote quite in his senses. The sort of innocent sententiousness, and perfectly natural love of fine language and fine sentiments is unattainable to any European, except, I suppose, a Spaniard. It is quite unlike Italian fustian or French sentiment. I suppose to most Europeans it is ridiculous, but I used to cry when the carriers beat the most noble of all knights, when I was a little girl and read Don Quixote; and now I felt as it were like Sancho, when I listened to Osman reciting bits of heroic poetry, or uttering 'wise saws' and 'modern instances,' with the peculiar mixture of strong sense of 'exultation' which stamps the great Don. I may not repeat all I heard from him of the state of things here, and the insults he had to endure--a Shereef and an educated man--from coarse Turkish Pashas; it was the carriers over again. He told me he had often cried like a woman, at night in his own room, at the miseries he was forced to witness and could do nothing to relieve; all the men I have particularly liked I find are more or less pupils of the Sheykh el-Bagooree now dead, who seems to have had a gift of inspiring honourable feeling. Our good Maohn is one; he is no conjuror, but the honesty and goodness are heroic which lead a man to starve on 15 pounds a month, when he is expected to grow rich on plunder.

The war in Crete saddens many a household here. Sheykh Yussuf's brother, Sheykh Yooris, is serving there, and many more. People are actually beginning to say 'We hope the English and French won't fight for the Sultan if the Moscovites want to eat him--there will be no good for us till the Turks are driven out.' All the old religious devotion to the Sultan seems quite gone.

Poor Mustapha has been very unwell and I stopped his Ramadan, gave him some physic and ordered him not to fast, for which I think he is rather grateful. The Imaam and Mufti always endorse my prohibitions of fasting to my patients. Old Ismaeen is dead, aged over a hundred; he served Belzoni, and when he grew doting was always wanting me to go with him to join Belzoni at Abu Simbel. He was not at all ill--he only went out like a candle. His grandson brought me a bit of the meat cooked at his funeral, and begged me to eat it, that I might live to be very old, according to the superstition here. When they killed the buffalo for the Sheykh Abu-l-Hajjaj, the man who had a right to the feet kindly gave them to Omar, who wanted to make calves' foot jelly for me. I had a sort of profane feeling, as if I were eating a descendant of the bull Apis.

I am reading Mme. du Deffand's letters. What a repulsive picture of a woman. I don't know which I dislike most, Horace Walpole or herself: the conflict of selfishness, vanity and ennui disguised as sentiment is quite hateful: to her Turgot was un sot animal,--so much for her great gifts.

Remember me kindly to William and tell him how much I wish I could see his 'improvements,' Omar also desires his salaam to him, having a sort of fellow feeling for your faithful henchman. I need not say he kisses your hand most dutifully.

January 22, 1867: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.

LUXOR, January 22, 1867.

DEAREST ALICK,

The weather has been lovely, for the last week, and I am therefore somewhat better. My boat arrived to-day, with all the men in high good-humour, and Omar tells me all is in good order, only the people in Cairo gave her the evil eye, and broke the iron part of the rudder which had to be repaired at Benisouef. Mr. Lear has been here the last few days, and is just going up to the second cataract; he has done a little drawing of my house for you--a new view of it. He is a pleasant man and I was glad to see him.

Such a queer fellow came here the other day--a tall stalwart Holsteiner, I should think a man of fifty, who has been four years up in the Soudan and Sennaar, and being penniless, had walked all through Nubia begging his way. He was not the least 'down upon his luck' and spoke with enthusiasm of the hospitality and kindness of Sir Samuel Baker's 'tigers.' Ja, das sind die rechten Kerls, dass ist das gluckliche Leben. His account is that if you go with an armed party, the blacks naturally show fight, as men with guns, in their eyes, are always slave hunters; but if you go alone and poor, they kill an ox for you, unless you prefer a sheep, give you a hut, and generally anything they have to offer, merissey (beer) to make you as drunk as a lord, and young ladies to pour it out for you--and--you need not wear any clothes. If you had heard him you would have started for the interior at once. I gave him a dinner and a bottle of common wine, which he emptied, and a few shillings, and away he trudged merrily towards Cairo. I wonder what the Nubians thought of a howagah begging. He said they were all kind, and that he was sure he often ate what they pinched themselves to give--dourrah bread and dates.

In the evening we were talking about this man's stories, and of 'anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow' to a prodigious height, by means of an edifice woven of their own hair, and other queer things, when Hassan told me a story which pleased me particularly. 'My father,' said he, 'Sheykh Mohammed (who was a taller and handsomer man than I am), was once travelling very far up in the black country, and he and the men he was with had very little to eat, and had killed nothing for many days; presently they heard a sort of wailing from a hole in the rock, and some of the men went in and dragged out a creature--I know not, and my father knew not, whether a child of Adam or a beast. But it was like a very foul and ill-shaped woman, and had six toes on its feet. The men wished to slay it, according to the law declaring it to be a beast and lawful food, but when it saw the knife, it cried sadly and covered its face with its hands in terror, and my father said, 'By the Most High God, ye shall not slay the poor woman-beast which thus begs its life; I tell you it is unlawful to eat one so like the children of Adam.' And the beast or woman clung to him and hid under his cloak; and my father carried her for some time behind him on his horse, until they saw some creatures like her, and then he sent her to them, but he had to drive her from him by force, for she clung to him. Thinkest thou oh Lady, it was really a beast, or some sort of the children of Adam?'

'God knows, and He only,' said I piously, 'but by His indulgent name, thy father, oh Sheykh, was a true nobleman.' Sheykh Yussuf chimed in and gave a decided opinion that a creature able to understand the sight of the knife and to act so, was not lawful to kill for food. You see what a real Arab Don Quixote was. It is a picture worthy of him,--the tall, noble-looking Abab'deh sheltering the poor 'woman-beast,' most likely a gorilla or chimpanzee, and carrying her en croupe.

January 26, 1867: Mrs. Austin

To Mrs. Austin.

LUXOR, January 26, 1867.

DEAREST MUTTER,

I must betray dear Sheykh Yussuf's confidence, and tell you his love story.

A young fellow ran away with a girl he loved a short time ago, she having told him that her parents wanted to marry her to another, and that she would go to such a spot for water, and he must come on a horse, beat her and carry her off (the beating saves the maiden's blushes). Well, the lad did it, and carried her to Salamieh where they were married, and then they went to Sheykh Yussuf to get him to conciliate the family, which he did. He told me the affair, and I saw he sympathized much with the runaways. 'Ah,' he said 'Lady, it is love, and that is terrible, I can tell thee love is dreadful indeed to bear.' Then he hesitated and blushed, and went on, 'I felt it once, Lady, it was the will of God that I should love her who is now my wife. Thirteen years ago I loved her and wished to marry her, but my father, and her grandfather my uncle the Shereef, had quarrelled, and they took her and married her to another man. I never told anyone of it, but my liver was burning and my heart ready to burst for three years; but when I met her I fixed my eyes on the ground for fear she should see my love, and I said to myself, Oh Yussuf, God has afflicted thee, praise be unto Him, do thou remember thy blood (Shereef) and let thy conduct be that of the Beni Azra who when they are thus afflicted die rather than sin, for they have the strongest passion of love and the greatest honour. And I did not die but went to Cairo to the Gama el-Azhar and studied, and afterwards I married twice, as thou knowest, but I never loved any but that one, and when my last wife died the husband of this one had just divorced her to take a younger and prettier one and my father desired me then to take her, but I was half afraid not knowing whether she would love me; but, Praise be to God I consented, and behold, poor thing, she also had loved me in like manner.' I thought when I went to see her that she was unusually radiant with new-married happiness, and she talked of 'el-Sheykh' with singular pride and delight, and embraced me and called me 'mother' most affectionately. Is it not a pretty piece of regular Arab romance like Ghamem?

My boat has gone up to-day with two very nice Englishmen in her. Their young Maltese dragoman, aged twenty-four, told me his father often talked of 'the Commissioners' and all they had done, and how things were changed in the island for the better. (1) Everything spiritual and temporal has been done for the boat's safety in the Cataract--urgent letters to the Maohn el Baudar, and him of Assouan to see to the men, and plenty of prayers and vows to Abu-l-Hajjaj on behalf of the 'property of the Lady,' or kurzweg 'our boat' as she is commonly called in Luxor.

Here we have the other side of the misery of the Candian business; in Europe, of course, the obvious thing is the sufferings of the Cretans, but really I am more sorry for the poor fellah lads who are dragged away to fight in a quarrel they had no hand in raising, and with which they have no sympathy. The Times suggests that the Sultan should relinquish the island, and that has been said in many an Egyptian hut long before. The Sultan is worn out, and the Muslims here know it, and say it would be the best day for the Arabs if he were driven out; that after all a Turk never was the true Ameer el-Moomeneen (Commander of the Faithful). Only in Europe people talk and write as if it were all Muslim versus Christian, and the Christians were all oppressed, and the Muslims all oppressors. I wish they could see the domineering of the Greeks and Maltese as Christians. The Englishman domineers as a free man and a Briton, which is different, and that is the reason why the Arabs wish for English rule, and would dread that of Eastern Christians. Well they may; for if ever the Greeks do reign in Stamboul the sufferings of the Muslims will satisfy the most eager fanatic that ever cursed Mahound. I know nothing of Turkey, but I have seen and heard enough to know that there are plenty of other divisions besides that of Christian and Muslim. Here in Egypt it is clear enough: it is Arab versus Turk and the Copt siding with the stronger for his interest, while he rather sympathizes with his brother fellah. At all events the Copt don't want other Christians to get power; he would far rather have a Muslim than a heretic ruler, above all the hated Greek. The Englishman he looks on as a variety of Muslim--a man who washes, has no pictures in his church, who has married bishops, and above all, who does not fast from all that has life for half the year, and this heresy is so extreme as not to give offence, unless he tries to convert.

The Pasha's sons have just been up the river: they ordered a reading of the Koran at the tomb of Abu-l-Hajjaj and gave every Alim sixpence. We have not left off chaffing (as Maurice would say) Sheykh Allah-ud-deen, the Muezzin, and sundry others on this superb backsheesh, and one old Fikee never knows whether to laugh, to cry, or to scold, when I ask to see the shawl and tarboosh he has bought with the presents of Pashas. Yussuf and the Kadee too had been called on to contribute baskets of bread to the steamer so that their sixpences were particularly absurd.

The little boy whose father died is still with the Abab'deh, who will not let him travel to Cairo till the weather is warmer and they find a safe person to be kind to him. Rachmeh says 'Please God, he will go with the Sitt, perhaps.' Hassan has consoled him with sugar-cane and indulgence, and if I lose Mabrook, and the little boy takes to me, he may fall into my hands as Achmet has done. I hear he is a good boy but a perfect savage; that however, I find makes no difference--in fact, I think they learn faster than those who have ways of their own. So I see Terence was a nigger! I would tell Rachmeh so if I could make him understand who Terence was, and that he, Rachmeh, stood in need of any encouragement, but the worthy fellow never imagines that his skin is in any way inferior to mine.

February 3, 1867: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.

LUXOR, February 3, 1867.

DEAREST ALICK,

The boat goes down to-morrow and I have little to add to Mutter's letter, only that I am better.