All the houses in Luxor are built of mud, or mud bricks, the bigger ones being colour-washed over, but often you see a little bit of straw sticking through the colour-wash just to remind you that it is "a house of straw."
We are building a little summer-house out at Karnak, and sometimes drive out there with our lunch and spend the day—the air is fresher away from the village and the cultivated land; and one of the engineers who is building the railway from Cairo to Assouan sometimes lends us his trolley on the line, and a couple of Arabs shove us (with Hassan in attendance) several miles out into the desert. We also do some sailing on the Nile when there is any wind.
Rameses III. stayed here a few days on her way down the river, and most of the passengers came to look us up. One evening they had a fancy dress ball on board. I went down for a little while, and it was such a pretty sight; the boat was moored close in, so that they could dance on deck and then stroll in the hotel grounds, and it was all lit up with Japanese lanterns, and looked so pretty with the palms waving above.
There was a gymkhana one day, and it was very good fun; camel races and buffalo races and all varieties of donkey races; one very amusing race was for gentlemen riding one donkey and driving another with long reins in front of him. The leaders would seldom go straight, and they got hopelessly mixed up in the reins, and had to be disentangled several times.
A favourite amusement here is to play hare and hounds on donkeys. They have quite a big meet of hounds near the hotel, and the hares (three of them) have a long start to give them time to ride out to Karnak, and then they have to try to ride back to the racecourse without being caught.
The hounds are divided into three packs—the fast, the medium, and the slow; the master has to be a man of tact: he sends off with the fast pack the keen young tourists, many of them Americans, the men riding in their shirt sleeves, and they gallop out to the boundary to drive the hares in; then the medium pack trot out in a business-like way, ladies and gentlemen, who are probably very correct in their costume for riding in the Row, and who would not think of riding at home without a top-hat; and, lastly, the slow pack, consisting of people who (in some cases) hardly know a horse from a donkey, and who solemnly jog down to the racecourse and then loiter about to see the fun when the hares come in.
The natives take a great interest in this sport, and call it "hunting the Mahdi," but their sympathies seem to be entirely with the hares, and they give them every assistance by scouting about for the hounds, and secreting the hares and their donkeys in their mud houses when there is danger about.
Dr. R. and I were the hares one day, and we had a most exciting ride, but were caught at last just as we reached the racecourse. At one point I was hustled into a native house (just mud walls with no proper roof), and found a buffalo being milked in one corner and a baby lying on the ground in another, and from there I watched half-a-dozen hounds gallop past, thinking they were close on my heels, and when they got out of sight I doubled off in another direction.
The donkeys seem quite to enter into the fun of the thing, and do their best, but sometimes they get excited and bray—inexcusable behaviour, which is most disconcerting when you are trying to hide in a patch of sugar-cane!