Notes from Egypt

I shall soon sail up the river. Yesterday Seyd Mustapha arrived, who says that the Greeks are all gone, and the poor Austrian at Thebes is dead, so I shall represent Europe in my single person from Siout to, I suppose, Khartoum .

You would delight in Mabrook; a man asked him the other day after his flogging, if he would not run away, to see what he would say as he alleged, I suspect he meant to steal and sell him. ‘I run away, to eat lentils like you? when my Effendi gives me meat and bread every day, and I eat such a lot.’ Is not that a delicious practical view of liberty? The creature’s enjoyment of life is quite a pleasure to witness, and he really works very well and with great alacrity. If Palgrave claims him I think I must buy him.

I hear sad accounts from the Saeed: the new taxes and the new levies of soldiers are driving the people to despair and many are running away from the land, which will no longer feed them after paying all exactions, to join the Bedaween in the desert, which is just as if our peasantry turned gipsies. A man from Dishné visited me: the people there want me to settle in their village and offer me a voluntary corvée if I will buy land, so many men to work for me two days a month each, I haven’t a conception why. It is a place about fifty miles below Luxor, a large agricultural village.

Omar’s wife Mabrookah came here yesterday, a nice young woman, and the babies are fine children and very sweet-tempered. She told me that the lion’s head, which I sent down to Alexandria to go to you, was in her room when a neighbour of hers, who had never had a child, saw it, and at once conceived. The old image worship survives in the belief, which is all over Egypt, that the ‘Anteeks’ (antiques) can cure barrenness. Mabrookah was of course very smartly dressed, and the reckless way in which Eastern women treat their fine clothes gives them a grand air, which no Parisian Duchess could hope to imitate—not that I think it a virtue mind you, but some vices are genteel.

Last night was a great Sheykh’s fête, such drumming and singing, and ferrying across the river. The Nile is running down unusually fast, and I think I had better go soon, as the mud of Cairo is not so sweet as the mud of the upper land.