Notes from Egypt

Dearest Mutter,

We have had a very cold winter and I have been constantly ailing, luckily the cough has transferred itself from the night to the day, and I get some good sleep. The last two days have been much warmer and I hope matters will mend. I am beginning to take cod-liver oil, as we can’t find a milch camel anywhere.

My boat has been well let in Cairo and is expected here every day. The gentlemen shoot, and tell the crew not to row, and in short take it easy, and give them £2 in every place. Imagine what luxury for my crew. I shall have to dismiss the lot, they will be so spoilt. The English Consul-General came up in a steamer with Dr. Patterson and Mr. Francis. I dined with them one day; I wish you could have seen me carried in my armchair high up on the shoulders of four men, like a successful candidate, or more like one of the Pharaohs in an ancient bas-relief, preceded by torch bearers and other attendants and followers, my procession was quite regal. I wish I could show you a new friend of mine, Osman Ibraheem, who studied medicine five years in Paris. My heart warmed to him directly, because like most high-bred Arabs, he is so like Don Quixote—only Don Quixote quite in his senses. The sort of innocent sententiousness, and perfectly natural love of fine language and fine sentiments is unattainable to any European, except, I suppose, a Spaniard. It is quite unlike Italian fustian or French sentiment. I suppose to most Europeans it is ridiculous, but I used to cry when the carriers beat the most noble of all knights, when I was a little girl and read Don Quixote; and now I felt as it were like Sancho, when I listened to Osman reciting bits of heroic poetry, or uttering ‘wise saws’ and ‘modern instances,’ with the peculiar mixture of strong sense of ‘exultation’ which stamps the great Don. I may not repeat all I heard from him of the state of things here, and the insults he had to endure—a Shereef and an educated man—from coarse Turkish Pashas; it was the carriers over again. He told me he had often cried like a woman, at night in his own room, at the miseries he was forced to witness and could do nothing to relieve; all the men I have particularly liked I find are more or less pupils of the Sheykh el-Bagooree now dead, who seems to have had a gift of inspiring honourable feeling. Our good Maōhn is one; he is no conjuror, but the honesty and goodness are heroic which lead a man to starve on £15 a month, when he is expected to grow rich on plunder.

The war in Crete saddens many a household here. Sheykh Yussuf’s brother, Sheykh Yooris, is serving there, and many more. People are actually beginning to say ‘We hope the English and French won’t fight for the Sultan if the Moscovites want to eat him—there will be no good for us till the Turks are driven out.’ All the old religious devotion to the Sultan seems quite gone.

Poor Mustapha has been very unwell and I stopped his Ramadan, gave him some physic and ordered him not to fast, for which I think he is rather grateful. The Imaam and Mufti always endorse my prohibitions of fasting to my patients. Old Ismaeen is dead, aged over a hundred; he served Belzoni, and when he grew doting was always wanting me to go with him to join Belzoni at Abu Simbel. He was not at all ill—he only went out like a candle. His grandson brought me a bit of the meat cooked at his funeral, and begged me to eat it, that I might live to be very old, according to the superstition here. When they killed the buffalo for the Sheykh Abu-l-Hajjaj, the man who had a right to the feet kindly gave them to Omar, who wanted to make calves’ foot jelly for me. I had a sort of profane feeling, as if I were eating a descendant of the bull Apis.

I am reading Mme. du Deffand’s letters. What a repulsive picture of a woman. I don’t know which I dislike most, Horace Walpole or herself: the conflict of selfishness, vanity and ennui disguised as sentiment is quite hateful: to her Turgot was un sot animal,—so much for her great gifts.

Remember me kindly to William and tell him how much I wish I could see his ‘improvements,’ Omar also desires his salaam to him, having a sort of fellow feeling for your faithful henchman. I need not say he kisses your hand most dutifully.