I prefer this place to Italy, at least to Naples, whose people on the whole impress me as the off-scourings of humanity. The great difference between Sicily and Italy strikes me very much: it is, perhaps, due to the fact that Sicily belongs (I believe), both geographically and geologically, to Africa.
From Egypt, where he spent one spring, being ordered a spell of dry desert air by the doctors, he wrote characteristically to a friend (a Benedictine monk), then resident in a remote corner of Brazil:
Helouan, Egypt.
I deserve your reproaches for not writing before. But really one has a feeling (I know I have) that writing to a distant address is, literally and physically, an heavier undertaking than writing to a near one. Query: If some philosophers are right in thinking that space, as well as time, is purely subjective, may not this have something to do with it?
One or two notes from his diary in Egypt are interesting:
"March 7. Amin Nassif brought a "professed sorcerer to see me" (a later note adds, "I believe him to be a pure impostor").
"March 15. Tried the ascent of the great Pyramid, but collapsed from giddiness half-way. Margaret [his daughter, then aged sixteen] had no difficulty."[[6]]
"April 6. Monophysite Copts do not now reserve the B. Sacrament (although they formerly did so), because the species was once eaten by a snake, which was then eaten by a priest, who died in consequence!"
"April 24 (Alexandria). At the Greek Catholic church the new French Consul was received with extraordinary honour by three priests, vested respectively in red, white, and blue! There was no sermon, but a speech in which the benefits conferred by France on Syria and Egypt were highly praised."
1891, Trip to Teneriffe