CAIRO, March 11, 1893.
DEAR MOTHER:
In a famous book this line occurs, "He determined to go to that hotel in Cairo where they were to have spent their honeymoon," or words like that. He is now at that hotel and you can buy the famous book across the street. It is called "Gallegher." So—in this way everything comes to him who waits and he comes to it. "Gallegher" is not the only thing you buy in Egypt. You ride to the Pyramids on a brake with a man in a white felt hat blowing a horn, and the bugler of the Army of Occupation is as much in evidence as the priest who calls them to prayer from the minaret. I left the people I liked on the Sultey last Thursday in the Suez Canal and came on here in a special train. It is very cold here, and it is not a place where the cold is in keeping with the surroundings. You see people in white helmets and astrakan overcoats. It is an immense city and intensely interesting, especially the bazaars, but you feel so ignorant about it all that it rather angers you. I wish I was not such a very bad hand at languages. That is ONE THING I cannot do, that and ride. I need it very much, traveling so much, and I shall study very hard while I am in Paris. Our consul-general here is a very young man, and he showed me a Kansas paper when I called on him, which said that I was in the East and would probably call on "Ed" L. He is very civil to me and gives me his carriages and outriders with gold clothes and swords whenever I will take them.
It is so beastly cold here that it spoils a lot of things, and there are a lot of Americans who say, "I had no idea you were so young a man," and that, after being five years old for a month and playing children's games with English people who didn't know or care anything about you except that you made them laugh, is rather trying. I am disappointed so far in the trip because it has developed nothing new beyond the fact that going around the world is of no more importance than going to breakfast, and I am selfish in my sightseeing and want to see things others do not. And if you even do see more than those who are not so fortunate and who have to remain at home, still you are so ignorant in comparison with those who have lived here for years and to whom the whole of Africa is a speculation in land or railroads, it makes you feel like such a faker and as if it were better to turn correspondent for the N. Y. Herald, Paris edition, and send back the names of those who are staying at the hotels. That is really all you can speak with authority about. When you have Gordon and Stanley dishes on the bill-of-fare, you feel ashamed to say you've been in Egypt. Anyway, I am a faker and I don't care, and I proved it today by being photographed on a camel in front of the Pyramids, and if that wasn't impertinence I do not know its name. I accordingly went and bought a lot of gold dresses for Nora as a penance.
As a matter of fact, unless I get into the interior for a month and see something new, I shall consider the trip a failure, except as a most amusing holiday for one, and that was not exactly what I wanted or all I wanted. After this I shall go to big cities only and stay there. Everybody travels and everybody sees as much as you do and says nothing of it, certainly does not presume to write a book about it. Anyway, it has been great fun, so I shall put it down to that and do some serious work to make up for it. I'd rather have written a good story about the Inauguration than about Cairo.
I am well, as usual, and having a fine loaf, only I don't think much of what I have written—that's all.
DICK.
CAIRO, March 19th, 1893.
DEAR MOTHER:
I went up the Pyramids yesterday and I am very sore today. It sounds easy because so many people do it, but they do it because they don't know. I have been putting it off, and putting it off, until I felt ashamed to such a degree that I had to go. Little had never been either, so we went out together and met Stanford White and the Emmetts there, and we all went up. I would rather go into Central Africa than do it again. I am getting fat and that's about it—and I had to half pull a much fatter man than myself who pretended to help me. I finally told them I'd go alone unless the fat man went away, so the other two drove him off. Going down is worse. It's like looking over a precipice all the time. I was so glad when I got down that I sang with glee. I hate work like that, and to make it worse I took everybody's picture on top of the Pyramid, and forgot to have one of them take me, so there is no way to prove I ever went up. Little and I hired two donkeys and called them "Gallegher" and "Van Bibber" and raced them. My donkey was so little that they couldn't see him—only his ears. Gallegher won. The donkey-boys called it Von Bebey, so I don't think it will help the sale of the book.