How is my darling Rainie? I do so long for her earnest eyes at times, and wonder if I shall ever be able to get back to you all again. I fear that break down at Soden sent me down a great terrace. I have never lost the pain and the cough for a day since. I have not been out for an age, or seen anyone. Would you know the wife of your bosom in a pair of pink trousers and a Turkish tob? Such is my costume as I write. The woman who came to sew could not make a gown, so she made me a pair of trousers instead. Farewell, dearest, I dare hardly say how your hint of possibly coming has made me wish it, and yet I dread to persuade you. The great heat is quite over with the high Nile, and the air on the river fresh and cool—cold at night even.
August 27, 1866: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon
To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.
Off Boulak
August 27, 1866.
Dearest Alick,
Your letter of the 18th has this moment arrived. I am very glad to hear you are so much better. I am still seedy-ish, but no worse. Everybody is liver-sick this year, I give calomel and jalep all round—except to myself.
The last two or three days we have been in great tribulation about the boat. On Saturday all her ribs were finished, and the planking and caulking ready to be put on, when in the night up came the old Nile with a rush, and threatened to carry her off; but by the favour of Abu-l-Hajjaj and Sheykh el-Bostawee she was saved in this wise. You remember the tall old steersman who went with us to Bedreeshayn, and whom we thought so ill-conditioned; well, he was in charge of a dahabieh close by, and he called up all the Reises and steermen to help. ‘Oh men of el-Bostawee, this is our boat (i.e. we are the servants of her owner) and she is in our faces;’ and then he set the example, stripped and carried dust and hammered in piles all night, and by the morning she was surrounded by a dyke breast-high. The ‘long-shore’ men of Boulak were not a little surprised to see dignified Reises working for nothing like fellaheen. Meanwhile my three Ma-allimeen, the chief builder, caulker and foreman, had also stayed all night with Omar and my Reis, who worked like the rest, and the Sheykh of all the boat-builders went to visit one of my Ma-allimeen, who is his nephew, and hearing the case came down too at one in the morning and stayed till dawn. Then as the workmen passed, going to their respective jobs, he called them, and said, ‘Come and finish this boat; it must be done by to-morrow night.’ Some men who objected and said they were going to the Pasha’s dockyard, got a beating pro forma and the end of it was that I found forty-six men under my boat working ‘like Afreets and Shaitans,’ when I went to see how all was going in the morning. The old Sheykh marked out a piece to each four men, and then said, ‘If that is not done to-night, Oh dogs! to-morrow I’ll put on the hat’—i.e. ‘To-day I have beaten moderately, like an Arab, but to-morrow, please God, I’ll beat like a Frank, and be mad with the stick.’ Kurz und gut, the boat which yesterday morning was a skeleton, is now, at four p.m. to-day, finished, caulked, pitched and all capitally done; if the Nile carries off the dyke, she will float safe. The shore is covered with débris of other people’s half-finished boats I believe. I owe the ardour of the Ma-allims and of the Sheykh of the builders to one of my absurd pieces of Arab civility. On the day when Omar killed poor Ablook, my black sheep, over the bows and ‘straked’ his blood upon them, the three Ma-allimeen came on board this boat to eat their dish, and I followed the old Arab fashion and ate out of the wooden dish with them and the Reis ‘for luck,’ or rather ‘for a blessing’ as we say here; and it seems that this gave immense satisfaction.
My Reis wept at the death of the black sheep, which used to follow him to the coffee-shop and the market, and ‘was to him as a son,’ he said, but he ate of him nevertheless. Omar surreptitiously picked out the best pieces for my dinner for three days, with his usual eye to economy; then lighted a fire of old wood, borrowed a cauldron of some darweeshes, cut up the sheep, added water and salt, onions and herbs, and boiled the sheep. Then the big washing copper (a large round flat tray, like a sponging bath) was filled with bread broken in pieces, over which the broth was slowly poured till the bread was soaked. Next came a layer of boiled rice, on the top of that the pieces of boiled meat, and over all was poured butter, vinegar and garlic boiled together. This is called a Fettah, and is the orthodox dish of darweeshes and given at all Khatmehs and other semi-religious, semi-festive, semi-charitable festivities. It is excellent and not expensive. I asked how many had eaten and was told one hundred and thirty men had ‘blessed my hand.’ I expended 160 piastres on bread, butter and vinegar, etc. and the sheep was worth two napoleons; three napoleons in all, or less—for I ate for two days of the mutton.
The three Ma-allims came on board this boat, as I said and ate; and it was fine to hear us—how polite we were. ‘A bit more, oh Ma-allim?’ ‘Praise be to God, we have eaten well—we will return to our work’; ‘By the Prophet, coffee and a pipe.’ ‘Truly thou art of the most noble people.’ ‘Oh Ma-allim, ye have honoured us and rejoiced us,’ ‘Verily this is a day white among days,’ etc. A very clever Egyptian engineer, a pupil of Whitworth’s, who is living in a boat alongside mine, was much amused, and said, ‘Ah you know how to manage ’em.’
I have learnt the story of the two dead bodies that hitched in my anchor-chain some time ago. They were not Europeans as I thought, but Circassians—a young man and his mother. The mother used to take him to visit an officer’s wife who had been brought up in the hareem of the Pasha’s mother. The husband caught them, killed them, tied them together and flung them into the Nile near Rhoda, and gave himself into the hands of the police. All was of course hushed up. He goes to Fazoghlou; and I don’t know what becomes of the slave-girl, his wife. These sort of things happen every day (as the bodies testify) among the Turks, but the Europeans never hear it. I heard it by a curious chance.