February 14th.—Yesterday we had a dust-storm off the desert. It made my head heavy and made me feel languid, but did not affect my chest at all. To-day is a soft gray day; there was a little thunder this morning and a few, very few, drops of rain—hardly enough for even Herodotus to consider portentous. My donkey came down last night, and I tried him to-day, and he is very satisfactory though alarmingly small, as the real Egyptian donkey always is; the big ones are from the Hejaz. But it is wonderful how the little creatures run along under one as easy as possible, and they have no will of their own. I rode mine out to Karnac and back, and he did not seem to think me at all heavy. When they are overworked and overgalloped they become bad on the legs and easily fall, and all those for hire are quite stumped up, poor beasts—they are so willing and docile that everyone overdrives them.
February 19, 1864: Mrs. Austin
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 Maōhn.
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° where no sun ever comes, and the blaze of the sun is prodigious.