The suppleness of the limbs of the children here is extraordinary. I have seen little girls squatting like grasshoppers in the Nile drinking, à même, the water in which they were standing little more than ankle deep.
An hour after nightfall the dahabieh, my neighbour, slipped her cables and began to drift down the river; but not till the rhapsodist had chanted his ditty to the approving murmurs of his little circle as on the preceding night. His singing has a great charm for me; I shall miss it. It reminds me much of Andalusian singing and moonlight nights in the Bay of Cadiz—there is about it a strangeness and a wayward melancholy that attach and charm me. It was a love song (I am told, for I could not hear the words, and should have understood very few if I had).
"Ya leyl! ya leyl! ya leyl!"—the eternal refrain of Arab songs. "Oh night! oh night! oh night! you have left a fire in my heart, oh my beloved! Oh my beloved, do not forget me!" &c. &c. &c.
A day or two ago I heard a youth calling the faithful to noonday prayer, from the gallery of a minaret, with one of the finest voices I have ever heard; he was tearing his notes from the inmost depths of his chest with that eagerness of yet unconscious passion that I have often noticed in southern children, and which to me is singularly pathetic; he retained his last notes as long as his breath allowed it, and they vibrated in distinct waves like a sonorous metal set in motion: from a little distance the effect was saisissant. I could not see him, and the air seemed to throb with sound as well as with heat in the sultry noon.
The departure of the dahabieh was celebrated with the usual Arab waste of powder, and all the echoes of the valley of the tombs across the river were aroused by the popping of many guns. All the consuls fired officially, everybody else fired unofficially. Hosseyn fired officiously—chuckling and nearly tumbling over; and the dahabieh itself, having opened the ball, fired again at intervals from a long distance as if it had forgotten somebody—they are too funny.
Thursday, 12th.—More sketching. The weather, which is a little too canicular at noon, is deliciously fresh and cool for an hour after sunrise; the Arabs, however, look much aggrieved at the severity of the cold; they sit huddled in muffled groups with a pinched look that would become a British December day.
I observe that half the men in middle life have no forefinger to their right hand. They all of them mutilated themselves to avoid conscription under Said Pasha, who, however, having found them out, enlisted them all the same. A curious equality prevails here: whilst sketching two of Mustafa Aga's servants this morning, I learnt from his son that they were both his relations. One of them appears to be a particularly nice fellow, and is a perfect gentleman in his manners.
Friday, 13th.—My last day in Thebes. When I arrived here and found neither friends nor letters, I thought, caring little for the place apart from the ruins, that I should stay four or five days; to-morrow when I leave I shall have been here nine, and shall go with regret. Work has exercised its usual attaching influence.
I have drawn in pencil a few heads that will be of use and interest to me. The subject of one of my studies (Mustafa's gardener) on receiving from Hosseyn two shillings for one hour's sitting, accused him, to his infinite disgust and anger, of having suppressed the remaining eighteen shillings out of a putative pound which he conceived to be destined for him. Excusez!
Saturday, 14th.—Got up early to finish a couple of sketches, and started at half-past eleven amidst salutes and salaams. To my great relief, the letters which I very rashly sent for from Cairo three weeks ago have just turned up at the last moment—fewer than I had expected, but a great delight: the first and only news I have received since leaving home—such are Egyptian posts!