Notes from Egypt

DEAR TOM,

I cannot tell you how delighted I was to hear that all had gone well with Laura and your little daughter. Mashallah! God bless her! When I told Omar that a friend ‘like my brother,’ as Arabs say, had got a baby, he proposed to illuminate our house and fire off all the pistols in the premises. Pray give my kind love and best wishes to Laura.

I am living here a very quiet, dreamy sort of life in hot Thebes, visiting a little among my neighbours and learning a little Arabic from a most sweet, gentle young Sheykh who preaches on Fridays in the mosque of Luxor. I wish I could draw his soft brown face and graceful, brown-draped figure; but if I could, he is too devout I believe, to permit it. The police magistrate—el-Maōhn—Seleem Effendi, is also a great friend of mine, and the Kadee is civil, but a little scornful to heretical Hareem, I think. It is already very hot, and the few remaining traveller’s dahabiehs are now here on their way down the river; after that I shall not see a white face for many months, except Sally’s.

Sheykh Yussuf laughed so heartily over a print in an illustrated paper, from a picture of Hilton’s, of Rebekah at the well, with the old Vakeel of Sidi Ibraheem (Abraham’s chief servant) kneeling before the girl he was sent to fetch like an old fool without his turban, and Rebekah and the other girls in queer fancy dresses, and the camels with snouts like pigs. ‘If the painter could not go to Es-Sham (Syria) to see how the Arab (Bedaween) really look,’ said Sheykh Yussuf, ‘why did he not paint a well in England with girls like English peasants? At least it would have looked natural to English people, and the Vakeel would not seem so like a majnoon (a madman) if he had taken off a hat.’ I cordially agreed with Yussuf’s art criticism. Fancy pictures of Eastern things are hopelessly absurd, and fancy poems too. I have got hold of a stray copy of Victor Hugo’s ‘Orientales,’ and I think I never laughed more in my life.

The corn is now full-sized here, but still green; in twenty days will be harvest, and I am to go to the harvest-home to a fellah friend of mine in a village a mile or two off. The crop is said to be unusually fine. Old Nile always pays back the damage he does when he rises so very high. The real disaster is the cattle disease, which still goes on, I hear, lower down. It has not at present spread above Minieh, but the destruction has been fearful.

I more and more feel the difficulty of quite understanding a people so unlike ourselves—the more I know them, I mean. One thing strikes me, that like children, they are not conscious of the great gulf which divides educated Europeans from themselves; at least, I believe it is so. We do not attempt to explain our ideas to them, but I cannot discover any such reticence in them. I wonder whether this has struck people who can talk fluently and know them better than I do? I find they appeal to my sympathy in trouble quite comfortably, and talk of religious and other feelings apparently as freely as to each other. In many respects they are more unprejudiced than we are, and very intelligent, and very good in many ways; and yet they seem so strangely childish, and I fancy I detect that impression even in Lane’s book, though he does not say so.

If you write to me, dear Tom, please address me care of Briggs and Co., Cairo. I shall be so glad to hear of you and yours. Janet is going to England. I wish I were going too, but it is useless to keep trying a hopeless experiment. At present I am very comfortable in health as long as I do nothing and the weather is warm. I suffer little pain, only I feel weak and weary.

I have extensive practice in the doctoring line; bad eyes, of course, abound. My love to Watts, and give greetings to any other of my friends. I grieve over Thackeray much, and more over his girls’ lonely sort of position.

I think you would enjoy, as I do, the peculiar sort of social equality which prevails here; it is the exact contrary of French égalité. There are the great and powerful people, much honoured (outwardly, at all events), but nobody has inferiors. A man comes in and kisses my hand, and sits down off the carpet out of respect; but he smokes his pipe, drinks his coffee, laughs, talks and asks questions as freely as if he were an Effendi or I were a fellahah; he is not my inferior, he is my poor brother. The servants in my friends’ houses receive me with profound demonstrations of respect, and wait at dinner reverently, but they mix freely in the conversation, and take part in all amusements, music, dancing-girls, or reading of the Koran. Even the dancing-girl is not an outcast; she is free to talk to me, and it is highly irreligious to show any contempt or aversion. The rules of politeness are the same for all. The passer-by greets the one sitting still, or the one who comes into a room those who are already there, without distinction of rank. When I have greeted the men they always rise, but if I pass without, they take no notice of me. All this is very pleasant and graceful, though it is connected with much that is evil. The fact that any man may be a Bey or a Pasha to-morrow is not a good fact, for the promotion is more likely to fall on a bad slave than on a good or intelligent free man. Thus, the only honourable class are those who have nothing to hope from the great—I won’t say anything to fear, for all have cause for that. Hence the high respectability and gentility of the merchants, who are the most independent of the Government. The English would be a little surprised at Arab judgments of them; they admire our veracity and honesty, and like us on the whole, but they blame the men for their conduct to women. They are shocked at the way Englishmen talk about Hareem among themselves, and think the English hard and unkind to their wives, and to women in general. English Hareemát is generally highly approved, and an Arab thinks himself a happy man if he can marry an English girl. I have had an offer for Sally from the chief man here for his son, proposing to allow her a free exercise of her religion and customs as a matter of course. I think the influence of foreigners is much more real and much more useful on the Arabs than on the Turks, though the latter show it more in dress, etc. But all the engineers and physicians are Arabs, and very good ones, too. Not a Turk has learnt anything practical, and the dragomans and servants employed by the English have learnt a strong appreciation of the value of a character for honesty, deserved or no; but many do deserve it. Compared to the couriers and laquais de place of Europe, these men stand very high. Omar has just run in to say a boat is going, so good-bye, and God bless you.