The weather is quite cool and fresh again but the winds very violent and the dust pours over us like water from the dried up land, as well as from the Goomeh mountain. It is miserably uncomfortable, but my health is much better again—spite of all.
The Hakeem business goes on at a great rate. I think on an average I have four sick a day. Sometimes a dozen. A whole gipsy camp are great customers—the poor souls will bring all manner of gifts it goes to my heart to eat, but they can’t bear to be refused. They are astounded to hear that people of their blood live in England and that I knew many of their customs—which are the same here.
Kursheed Agha came to take final leave being appointed to Keneh. He had been at Gau and had seen Fadil Pasha sit and make the soldiers lay sixty men down on their backs by ten at a time and chop them to death with the pioneers’ axes. He estimated the people killed—men, women, and children at 1,600—but Mounier tells me it was over 2,000. Sheykh Hassan agreed exactly with Kursheed, only the Arab was full of horror and the Circassian full of exultation. His talk was exactly what we all once heard about ‘Pandies,’ and he looked and talked and laughed so like a fine young English soldier, that I was ashamed to call him the kelb (dog) which rose to my tongue, and I bestowed it on Fadil Pasha instead. I must also say in behalf of my own countrymen that they had provocation while here there was none. Poor Haggee Sultan lies in chains at Keneh. One of the best and kindest of men! I am to go and take secret messages to him, and money from certain men of religion to bribe the Moudir with. The Shurafa who have asked me to do this are from another place, as well as a few of the Abu-l-Hajjajieh. A very great Shereef indeed from lower Egypt, said to me the other day, ‘Thou knowest if I am a Muslim or no. Well, I pray to the most Merciful to send us Europeans to govern us, and to deliver us from these wicked men.’ We were all sitting after the funeral of one of the Shurafa and I was sitting between the Shereef of Luxor and the Imám—and this was said before thirty or forty men, all Shurafa. No one said ‘No,’ and many assented aloud.
The Shereef asked me to lend him the New Testament, it was a pretty copy and when he admired it I said, ‘From me to thee, oh my master the Shereef, write in it as we do in remembrance of a friend—the gift of a Nazraneeyeh who loves the Muslimeen.’ The old man kissed the book and said ‘I will write moreover—to a Muslim who loves all such Christians’—and after this the old Sheykh of Abou Ali took me aside and asked me to go as messenger to Haggee Sultan for if one of them took the money it would be taken from them and the man get no good by it.
Soldiers are now to be quartered in the Saeed—a new plague worse than all the rest. Do not the cawasses already rob the poor enough? They fix their own price in the market and beat the sakkas as sole payment. What will the soldiers do? The taxes are being illegally levied on lands which are sheragi, i.e. totally unwatered by the last Nile and therefore exempt by law—and the people are driven to desperation. I feel sure there will be more troubles as soon as there arises any other demagogue like Achmet et-Tayib to incite the people and now every Arab sympathises with him. Janet has written me the Cairo version of the affair cooked for the European taste—and monstrous it is. The Pasha accuses some Sheykh of the Arabs of having gone from Upper Egypt to India to stir up the Mutiny against us! Pourquoi pas to conspire in Paris or London? It is too childish to talk of a poor Saeedee Arab going to a country of whose language and whereabouts he is totally ignorant, in order to conspire against people who never hurt him. You may suppose how Yussuf and I talk by ourselves of all these things. He urged me to try hard to get my husband here as Consul-General—assuming that he would feel as I do. I said, my master is not young, and to a just man the wrong of such a place would be a martyrdom. ‘Truly thou hast said it, but it is a martyr we Arabs want; shall not the reward of him who suffers daily vexation for his brethren’s sake be equal to that of him who dies in battle for the faith? If thou wert a man, I would say to thee, take the labour and sorrow upon thee, and thine own heart will repay thee.’ He too said like the old Sheykh, ‘I only pray for Europeans to rule us—now the fellaheen are really worse off than any slaves.’ I am sick of telling of the daily oppressions and robberies. If a man has a sheep, the Moodir comes and eats it, if a tree, it goes to the Nazir’s kitchen. My poor sakka is beaten by the cawasses in sole payment of his skins of water—and then people wonder my poor friends tell lies and bury their money.
I now know everybody in my village and the ‘cunning women’ have set up the theory that my eye is lucky; so I am asked to go and look at young brides, visit houses that are building, inspect cattle, etc. as a bringer of good luck—which gives me many a curious sight.
I went a few days ago to the wedding of handsome Sheykh Hassan the Abab’deh, who married the butcher’s pretty little daughter. The group of women and girls lighted by the lantern which little Achmet carried up for me was the most striking thing I have seen. The bride—a lovely girl of ten or eleven all in scarlet, a tall dark slave of Hassan’s blazing with gold and silver necklaces and bracelets, with long twisted locks of coal black hair and such glittering eyes and teeth, the wonderful wrinkled old women, and the pretty, wondering, yet fearless children were beyond description. The mother brought the bride up to me and unveiled her and asked me to let her kiss my hand, and to look at her, I said all the usual Bismillah Mashallah’s, and after a time went to the men who were eating, all but Hassan who sat apart and who begged me to sit by him, and whispered anxious enquiries about his aroosah’s looks. After a time he went to visit her and returned in half an hour very shy and covering his face and hand and kissed the hands of the chief guests. Then we all departed and the girl was taken to look at the Nile, and then to her husband’s house. Last night he gave me a dinner—a very good dinner indeed, in his house which is equal to a very poor cattle shed at home. We were only five. Sheykh Yussuf, Omar, an elderly merchant and I. Hassan wanted to serve us but I made him sit.
The merchant, a well-bred man of the world who has enjoyed life and married wives everywhere—had arrived that day and found a daughter of his dead here. He said he felt very miserable—and everyone told him not to mind and consoled him oddly enough to English ideas. Then people told stories. Omar’s was a good version of the man and wife who would not shut the door and agreed that the first to speak should do it—very funny indeed. Yussuf told a pretty tale of a Sultan who married a Bint el-Arab (daughter of the Bedawee) and how she would not live in his palace, and said she was no fellaha to dwell in houses, and scorned his silk clothes and sheep killed for her daily, and made him live in the desert with her. A black slave told a prosy tale about thieves—and the rest were more long than pointed.
Hassan’s Arab feelings were hurt at the small quantity of meat set before me. (They can’t kill a sheep now for an honoured guest.) But I told him no greater honour could be paid to us English than to let us eat lentils and onions like one of the family, so that we might not feel as strangers among them—which delighted all the party. After a time the merchant told us his heart was somewhat dilated—as a man might say his toothache had abated—and we said ‘Praise be to God’ all round.
A short time ago my poor friend the Maōhn had a terrible ‘tile’ fall on his head. His wife, two married daughters and nine miscellaneous children arrived on a sudden, and the poor man is now tasting the pleasures which Abraham once endured between Sarah and Hagar. I visited the ladies and found a very ancient Sarah and a daughter of wonderful beauty. A young man here—a Shereef—has asked me to open negotiations for a marriage for him with the Maōhn’s grand daughter a little girl of eight—so you see how completely I am ‘one of the family.’