Notes from Egypt

I gave Sheykh Yussuf your knife to cut his kalem (reed pen) with, and to his little girl the coral waistband clasp you gave me as from you. He was much pleased. I also brought the Shereef the psalms in Arabic to his great delight. The old man called on all ‘our family’ to say a fathah for their sister, after making us all laugh by shouting out ‘Alhamdulillah! here is our darling safe back again.’

I wish you could have seen me in the crowd at Keneh holding on to the Kadee’s farageeyeh (a loose robe worn by the Ulema). He is the real original Kadee of the Thousand and One Nights. Did ever Kadee tow an Englishwoman round a Sheykh’s tomb before? but I thought his determination to show the people that he considered a Christian not out of place in a Muslim holy place very edifying.

I find an exceedingly pleasant man here, an Abab’deh, a very great Sheykh from beyond Khartoum , a man of fifty I suppose, with manners like an English nobleman, simple and polite and very intelligent. He wants to take me to Khartoum for two months up and back, having a tent and a takhterawan (camel-litter) and to show me the Bishareen in the desert. We traced the route on my map which to my surprise he understood, and I found he had travelled into Zanzibar and knew of the existence of the Cape of Good Hope and the English colony there. He had also travelled in the Dinka and Shurook country where the men are seven feet and over high (Alexander saw a Dinka girl at Cairo three inches taller than himself!). He knows Madlle. Tiné and says she is ‘on everyone’s head and in their eyes’ where she has been. You may fancy that I find Sheykh Alee very good company.

To-day the sand in front of the house is thronged with all the poor people with their camels, of which the Government has made a new levy of eight camels to every thousand feddans. The poor beasts are sent off to transport troops in the Soudan, and not being used to the desert, they all die—at all events their owners never see one of them again. The discontent is growing stronger every day. Last week the people were cursing the Pasha in the streets of Assouan, and every one talks aloud of what they think.

January 11.—The whole place is in desolation, the men are being beaten, one because his camel is not good enough, another because its saddle is old and shabby, and the rest because they have not money enough to pay two months’ food and the wages of one man, to every four camels, to be paid for the use of the Government beforehand. The courbash has been going on my neighbours’ backs and feet all the morning. It is a new sensation too when a friend turns up his sleeve and shows the marks of the wooden handcuffs and the gall of the chain on his throat. The system of wholesale extortion and spoliation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go. The story of Naboth’s vineyard is repeated daily on the largest scale. I grieve for Abdallah-el-Habbashee and men of high position like him, sent to die by disease (or murder), in Fazoghou, but I grieve still more over the daily anguish of the poor fellaheen, who are forced to take the bread from the mouths of their starving families and to eat it while toiling for the private profit of one man. Egypt is one vast ‘plantation’ where the master works his slaves without even feeding them. From my window now I see the men limping about among the poor camels that are waiting for the Pasha’s boats to take them, and the great heaps of maize which they are forced to bring for their food. I can tell you the tears such a sight brings to one’s eyes are hot and bitter. These are no sentimental grievances; hunger, and pain, and labour without hope and without reward, and the constant bitterness of impotent resentment. To you all this must sound remote and almost fabulous. But try to imagine Farmer Smith’s team driven off by the police and himself beaten till he delivered his hay, his oats and his farm-servant for the use of the Lord Lieutenant, and his two sons dragged in chains to work at railway embankments—and you will have some idea of my state of mind to-day. I fancy from the number of troops going up to Assouan that there is another rising among the blacks. Some of the black regiments revolted up in the Soudan last summer, and now I hear Shaheen Pasha is to be here in a day or two on his way up, and the camels are being sent off by hundreds from all the villages every day. But I am weary of telling, and you will sicken of hearing my constant lamentations.

Sheykh Hassan dropped in and dined with me yesterday and described his mother and her high-handed rule over him. It seems he had a ‘jeunesse orageuse’ and she defended him against his father’s displeasure, but when the old Sheykh died she informed her son that if he ever again behaved in a manner unworthy of a Sheykh-el-Arab she would not live to see it. ‘Now if my mother told me to jump into the river and drown I should say hader (ready), for I fear her exceedingly and love her above all people in the world, and have left everything in her hand.’ He was good enough to tell me that I was the only woman he knew like his mother and that was why he loved me so much. I am to visit this Arab Deborah at the Abab’deh village two days ride from the first Cataract. She will come and meet me at the boat. Hassan was splendid when he said how he feared his mother exceedingly.

To my amazement to-day in walked the tremendous Alim from Tunis, Sheykh Abd-el-Moutovil, who used to look so black at me. He was very civil and pleasant and asked no end of questions about steam engines, and telegraphs and chemistry; especially whether it was true that the Europeans still fancied they could make gold. I said that no one had believed that for nearly two hundred years, and he said that the Arabs also knew it was ‘a lie,’ and he wondered to hear that Europeans, who were so clever, believed it. He had just been across the Nile to see the tombs of the Kings and of course ‘improved the occasion’ and uttered a number of the usual fine sayings about the vanity of human things. He told me I was the only Frank he had ever spoken to. I observed he did not say a word about religion, or use the usual pious phrases. By the bye, Sheykh Yussuf filled up my inkstand for me the other evening and in pouring the ink said ‘Bismillah el-Rachman el-Racheem’ (In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate). I said ‘I like that custom, it is good to remind us that ink may be a cruel poison or a good medicine.’

I am better, and have hardly any cough. The people here think it is owing to the intercession of Abu-l-Hajjaj who specially protects me. I was obliged to be wrapped in the green silk cover of his tomb when it was taken off to be carried in procession, partly for my health and general welfare, and as a sort of adoption into the family. I made a feeble resistance on the score of being a Nazraneeyeh but was told ‘Never fear, does not God know thee and the Sheykh also? no evil will come to thee on that account but good.’ And I rather think that general goodwill and kindness is wholesome.