Notes from Egypt

MY DARLING MAURICE,

I was delighted to get your note, which arrived on New Year’s day in the midst of the hubbub of the great festival in honour of the Saint of Luxor. I wish you could have seen two young Arabs (real Arabs from the Hedjaz, in Arabia) ride and play with spears and lances. I never saw anything like it—a man who played the tom-fool stood in the middle, and they galloped round and round him, with their spears crossed and the points resting on the ground, in so small a circle that his clothes whisked round with the wind of the horses’ legs. Then they threw jereeds and caught them as they galloped: the beautiful thing was the perfect mastery of the horses: they were ‘like water in their hands,’ as Sheykh Hassan remarked. I perceived that I had never seen real horsemanship in my life before.

I am now in the ‘palace’ at Luxor with my dahabieh, ‘Arooset er-Ralee’ (the Darling Bride), under my windows; quite like a Pasha.

In coming up we had an alarm of robbers. Under the mountain called Gebel Foodah, we were entangled in shoals, owing to a change in the bed of the river, and forced to stay all night; and at three in the morning, the Reis sent in the boy to say he had seen a man creeping on all fours—would I fire my pistol? As my revolver had been stolen in Janet’s house, I was obliged to beg him to receive any possible troop of armed robbers very civilly, and to let them take what they pleased. However, Omar blazed away with your father’s old cavalry pistols (which had no bullets) and whether the robbers were frightened, or the man was only a wolf, we heard no more of the affair. My crew were horribly frightened, and kept awake till daybreak.

The last night before reaching Keneh, the town forty miles north of Luxor, my men held a grand fantasia on the bank. There was no wind, and we found a lot of old maize stalks; so there was a bonfire, and no end of drumming, singing and dancing. Even Omar relaxed his dignity so far as to dance the dance of the Alexandria young men; and very funny it all was. I laughed consumedly; especially at the modest airs and graces of a great lubberly fellow—one Hezayin, who acted the bride—in a representation of a Nubian wedding festivity. The new song of this year is very pretty—a declaration of love to a young Mohammed, sung to a very pretty tune. There is another, rather like the air of ‘Di Provenza al mar’ in the ‘Traviata,’ with extremely pretty words. As in England, every year has its new song, which all the boys sing about the streets.

I hope, darling, you are sapping this year, and intend to make up a bit for lost time. I hear you have lost no time in growing tall at all events—‘ill weeds, etc.’—you know Omar desires all sorts of messages to you.