‘The good old rule and ancient plan,
That he should take who has the power,
And he should keep who can.’
Nor can I be bullied into looking on ‘might’ as ‘right.’ Many thanks for the papers, I am anxious to hear about the Candia business. All my neighbours are sick at heart. The black boy Palgrave left with me is a very good lad, only he can’t keep his clothes clean, never having been subject to that annoyance before. He has begun to be affectionate ever since I did not beat him for breaking my only looking-glass. I wish an absurd respect for public opinion did not compel him to wear a blue shirt and a tarboosh (his suit), I see it is misery to him. He is a very gentle cannibal.
I have been very unwell indeed and still am extremely weak, but I hope I am on the mend. A eunuch here who is a holy man tells me he saw my boat coming up heavily laden in his sleep, which indicates a ‘good let.’ I hope my reverend friend is right. If you sell any of your things when you leave Egypt let me have some blankets for the boat; if she is let to a friendly dragoman he will supply all deficiencies out of his own canteen, but if to one ‘who knows not Joseph’ I fear many things will be demanded by rightminded British travellers, which must be left to the Reis’s discretion to buy for them. I hope all the fattahs said for the success of the ‘Urania’s’ voyage will produce a due effect. Here we rely a good deal on the favour of Abu-l-Hajjaj in such matters. The naïveté with which people pray here for money is very amusing—though really I don’t know why one shouldn’t ask for one’s daily sixpence as well as one’s daily bread.
An idiot of a woman has written to me to get her a place as governess in an ‘European or Arabian family in the neighbourhood of Thebes!’ Considering she has been six years in Egypt as she says, she must be well fitted to teach. She had better learn to make gilleh and spin wool. The young Americans whom Mr. Hale sent were very nice. The Yankees are always the best bred and best educated travellers that I see here.
December 31, 1886: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon
To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.
Luxor,
December 31, 1886.
Dearest Alick,
I meant to have sent you a long yarn by a steamer which went the other day, but I have been in my bed. The weather set in colder than I ever felt it here, and I have been very unwell for some time. Dr. Osman Ibraheem (a friend of mine, an elderly man who studied in Paris in Mohammed Ali’s time) wants me to spend the summer up here and take sand baths, i.e. bury myself up to the chin in the hot sand, and to get a Dongola slave to rub me. A most fascinating derweesh from Esneh gave me the same advice; he wanted me to go and live near him at Esneh, and let him treat me. I wish you could see Sheykh Seleem, he is a sort of remnant of the Memlook Beys—a Circassian—who has inherited his master’s property up at Esneh, and married his master’s daughter. The master was one of the Beys, also a slave inheriting from his master. Well after being a terrible Shaitan (devil) after drink, women, etc. Seleem has repented and become a man of pilgrimage and prayer and perpetual fasting; but he has retained the exquisite grace and charm of manner which must have made him irresistible in his shaitan days, and also the beautifully delicate style of dress—a dove-coloured cloth sibbeh over a pale blue silk kuftan, a turban like a snow-drift, under which flowed the silky fair hair and beard, and the dainty white hands under the long muslin shirt sleeve made a picture; and such a smile, and such ready graceful talk. Sheykh Yussuf brought him to me as a sort of doctor, and also to try and convert me on one point. Some Christians had made Yussuf quite miserable, by telling him of the doctrine that all unbaptized infants went to eternal fire; and as he knew that I had lost a child very young, it weighed on his mind that perhaps I fretted about this, and so he said he could not refrain from trying to convince me that God was not so cruel and unjust as the Nazarene priests represented Him, and that all infants whatsoever, as well as all ignorant persons, were to be saved. ‘Would that I could take the cruel error out of the minds of all the hundreds and thousands of poor Christian mothers who must be tortured by it,’ said he, ‘and let them understand that their dead babies are with Him who sent and who took them.’ I own I did not resent this interference with my orthodoxy, especially as it is the only one I ever knew Yussuf attempt.
Dr. Osman is a lecturer in the Cairo school of medicine, a Shereef, and eminently a gentleman. He came up in the passenger steamer and called on me and spent all his spare time with me. I liked him better than the bewitching derweesh Seleem; he is so like my old love Don Quixote. He was amazed and delighted at what he heard here about me. ‘Ah Madame, on vous aime comme une sœur, et on vous respecte comme une reine; cela rejouit le cœur des honnêtes gens de voir tous les préjugés oubliés et détruits à ce point.’ We had no end of talk. Osman is the only Arab I know who has read a good deal of European literature and history and is able to draw comparisons. He said, ‘Vous seule dans toute l’Egypte connaissez le peuple et comprenez ce qui se passe, tous les autres Européens ne savent absolument rien que les dehors; il n’y a que vous qui ayez inspiré la confiance qu’il faut pour connaître la vénté.’ Of course this is between ourselves, I tell you, but I don’t want to boast of the kind thoughts people have of me, simply because I am decently civil to them.