“Never forgetting the delicious hours I have spent in your company charming. Hans Bleichroder. Cairo, December 12, 1878.”
Among the Orientals, I should say, my cousin Julia was the admired one of our little party. Her tall, dignified figure and tendency to embonpoint filled them with delight.
Another of my partners, my old friend, Augustus Gurnee, writes me à propos of this ball of forty years ago:
“Indeed I was with you, and danced with you at the last ball Ismaïl gave before he was deposed; and while we were circling, an awkward Levantine couple caromed into us, so that my heel came down on the foot of Tewfik, who was standing in a doorway. We stopped to crave pardon, and he was smiling and courteous, so I never knew whether he felt any pain. Inshallah!”
The company at the ball was of many nationalities,—French, English, and German officers, the Americans of the Khedive’s staff, and representatives of all the powers, great and small. The diplomats and army officers knew the dreadful confusion of Ismaïl’s affairs. Though all were guarded in their talk, one felt that Cairo society was an armed camp, where France and England were engaged in a silent duel for the control of the Suez Canal, Germany was “out for trade”, and only the American Condottieri were for the Khedive!
The catastrophe came a few months later, when Ismaïl Pasha was deposed and left Alexandria for Naples with his harem, his suite, and his two sons, Hussein and Hassan, on the yacht Mahroussahl, leaving his uneasy throne to my friend Tewfik Pasha. When she read of this my mother exclaimed:
“Our friends the Princesses of the Abdin Palace have their wish at last; they are now traveling to a new country!”
In Egypt my mother seemed much of the time to be living a life quite apart from the sight-seeing and adventuring we shared. At the first glimpse of the river Nile she seemed to enter a world where I could not follow her. Moses, Joseph, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, all the figures in Bible history with whom she had been familiar since earliest childhood, stole between us like impalpable shadows, claiming her for their own. In Palestine this absorption increased. If all the rest of our long wandering was planned for my profit and pleasure, the trip to the Holy Land was for herself the realization of a life’s dream. For the only time in her life, so far as I know, she borrowed money to make what was then a very expensive journey.
“Those are the mountains of Judea,” a returning missionary pointed out, as we neared the coast. Soon the faint blue line grew stronger, we could make out the yellow beach, olive groves, palm trees, and the flags of many nationalities floating from the different consulates. We landed at Jaffa, not an easy matter, as the steamer anchored half a mile from shore, and we were compelled to clamber down to a small boat tossing like a cockleshell on the rough sea.
We traveled chiefly on horseback, over precipitous mountain trails, through the desert where we were told there was danger from the wild tribesmen. My mother was obliged to pay a large sum for an escort of Turkish soldiers to protect us from these wandering Bedouins. She made her arrangements so well that while we were camping in the desert near Jericho, Eugene Thayer, a rich young Bostonian, asked to join our party, his own men having proved untrustworthy.