Notes from Egypt

Dearest Alick,

I have just received your letter of the 3rd inst., and am glad to get such good tidings. You would be amused to see Omar bring me a letter and sit down on the floor till I tell him the family news, and then Alhamdulillah, we are so pleased, and he goes off to his pots and pans again. Lord and Lady Spencer are here, and his sister, in two boats. The English ‘Milord,’ extinct on the Continent, has revived in Egypt, and is greatly reverenced and usually much liked. ‘These high English have mercy in their stomachs,’ said one of my last year’s sailors who came to kiss my hand—a pleasing fact in natural history! Fee wahed Lord, was little ragged Achmet’s announcement of Lord Spencer—‘Here’s a Lord.’ They are very pleasant people. I heard from Janet to-day of ice at Cairo and at Shoubra, and famine prices. I cannot attempt Cairo with meat at 1s. 3d. a pound, and will e’en stay here and grill at Thebes. Marry-come-up with your Thebes and savagery! What if we do wear ragged brown shirts? ‘’Tis manners makyth man,’ and we defy you to show better breeding.

We are now in the full enjoyment of summer weather; there has been no cold for fully a fortnight, and I am getting better every day now. My cough has quite subsided, and the pain in the chest much diminished; if the heat does not overpower me I feel sure it will be very healing to my lungs. I sit out on my glorious balcony and drink the air from early morning till noon, when the sun comes upon it and drives me under cover. The thermometer has stood at 64° for a fortnight or three weeks, rising sometimes to 67°, but people in the boats tell me it is still cold at night on the river. Up here, only a stone’s-throw from it, it is warm all night. I fear the loss of cattle has suspended irrigation to a fearful extent, and that the harvests of Lower Egypt of all kinds will be sadly scanty. The disease has not spread above Minieh, or very slightly; but, of course, cattle will rise in price here also. Already food is getting dearer here; meat is 4½ piastres—7d.—the rötl (a fraction less than a pound), and bread has risen considerably—I should say corn, for no bakers exist here. I pay a woman to grind and bake my wheat which I buy, and delicious bread it is. It is impossible to say how exactly like the early parts of the Bible every act of life is here, and how totally new it seems when one reads it here. Old Jacob’s speech to Pharaoh really made me laugh (don’t be shocked), because it is so exactly what a fellah says to a Pasha: ‘Few and evil have been the days,’ etc. (Jacob being a most prosperous man); but it is manners to say all that, and I feel quite kindly to Jacob, whom I used to think ungrateful and discontented; and when I go to Sidi Omar’s farm, does he not say, ‘Take now fine meal and bake cakes quickly,’ and wants to kill a kid? Fateereh with plenty of butter is what the ‘three men’ who came to Abraham ate; and the way that Abraham’s chief memlook, acting as Vakeel, manages Isaac’s marriage with Rebekah! All the vulgarized associations with Puritanism and abominable little ‘Scripture tales and pictures’ peel off here, and the inimitably truthful representation of life and character—not a flattering one certainly—comes out, and it feels like Homer. Joseph’s tears and his love for the brother born of the same mother is so perfect. Only one sees what a bad inferior race the Beni Israel were compared to the Beni Ishmael or to the Egyptians. Leviticus and Deuteronomy are so very heathenish compared to the law of the Koran, or to the early days of Abraham. Verily the ancient Jews were a foul nation, judging by the police regulations needful for them. Please don’t make these remarks public, or I shall be burnt with Stanley and Colenso (unless I suffer Sheykh Yussuf to propose me El-Islam). He and M. de Rougé were here last evening, and we had an Arabic soirée. M. de Rougé speaks admirably, quite like an Alim, and it was charming to see Sheykh Yussuf’s pretty look of grateful pleasure at finding himself treated like a gentleman and a scholar by two such eminent Europeans; for I (as a woman) am quite as surprising as even M. de Rougé’s knowledge of hieroglyphics and Arabic Fosseeha. It is very interesting to see something of Arabs who have read and have the ‘gentleman’ ideas. His brother, the Imam, has lost his wife; he was married twenty-two years, and won’t hear of taking another. I was struck with the sympathy he expressed with the English Sultana, as all the uneducated people say, ‘Why doesn’t she marry again?’ It is curious how refinement brings out the same feelings under all ‘dispensations.’ I apologized to Yussuf for inadvertently returning the Salaam aleykoum (Peace be with thee), which he said to Omar, and which I, as an unbeliever, could not accept. He coloured crimson, touched my hand and kissed his own, quite distressed lest the distinction might wound me. When I think of a young parsonic prig at home I shudder at the difference. But Yussuf is superstitious; he told me how someone down the river cured his cattle with water poured over a Mushaf (a copy of the Koran), and has hinted at writing out a chapter for me to wear as a hegab (an amulet for my health). He is interested in the antiquities and in M. de Rougé’s work, and is quite up to the connection between Ancient Egypt and the books of Moses, exaggerating the importance of Seyidna Moussa, of course.

If I go down to Cairo again I will get letters to some of the Alim there from Abd-el-Waris, the Imam here, and I shall see what no European but Lane has seen. I think things have altered since his day, and that men of that class would be less inaccessible than they were then; and then a woman who is old (Yussuf guessed me at sixty) and educated does not shock, and does interest them. All the Europeans here are traders, and only speak the vulgarest language, and don’t care to know Arab gentlemen; if they see anything above their servants it is only Turks, or Arab merchants at times. Don’t fancy that I can speak at all decently yet, but I understand a good deal, and stammer out a little.