Notes from Egypt

Dearest Alick,

The weather has been lovely, for the last week, and I am therefore somewhat better. My boat arrived to-day, with all the men in high good-humour, and Omar tells me all is in good order, only the people in Cairo gave her the evil eye, and broke the iron part of the rudder which had to be repaired at Benisouef. Mr. Lear has been here the last few days, and is just going up to the second cataract; he has done a little drawing of my house for you—a new view of it. He is a pleasant man and I was glad to see him.

[Picture: Lady Duff Gordon, from oil portrait by Henry W. Phillips, about 1851]

Such a queer fellow came here the other day—a tall stalwart Holsteiner, I should think a man of fifty, who has been four years up in the Soudan and Sennaar, and being penniless, had walked all through Nubia begging his way. He was not the least ‘down upon his luck’ and spoke with enthusiasm of the hospitality and kindness of Sir Samuel Baker’s ‘tigers.’ Ja, das sind die rechten Kerls, dass ist das glückliche Leben. His account is that if you go with an armed party, the blacks naturally show fight, as men with guns, in their eyes, are always slave hunters; but if you go alone and poor, they kill an ox for you, unless you prefer a sheep, give you a hut, and generally anything they have to offer, merissey (beer) to make you as drunk as a lord, and young ladies to pour it out for you—and—you need not wear any clothes. If you had heard him you would have started for the interior at once. I gave him a dinner and a bottle of common wine, which he emptied, and a few shillings, and away he trudged merrily towards Cairo. I wonder what the Nubians thought of a howagah begging. He said they were all kind, and that he was sure he often ate what they pinched themselves to give—dourrah bread and dates.

In the evening we were talking about this man’s stories, and of ‘anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow’ to a prodigious height, by means of an edifice woven of their own hair, and other queer things, when Hassan told me a story which pleased me particularly. ‘My father,’ said he, ‘Sheykh Mohammed (who was a taller and handsomer man than I am), was once travelling very far up in the black country, and he and the men he was with had very little to eat, and had killed nothing for many days; presently they heard a sort of wailing from a hole in the rock, and some of the men went in and dragged out a creature—I know not, and my father knew not, whether a child of Adam or a beast. But it was like a very foul and ill-shaped woman, and had six toes on its feet. The men wished to slay it, according to the law declaring it to be a beast and lawful food, but when it saw the knife, it cried sadly and covered its face with its hands in terror, and my father said, ‘By the Most High God, ye shall not slay the poor woman-beast which thus begs its life; I tell you it is unlawful to eat one so like the children of Adam.’ And the beast or woman clung to him and hid under his cloak; and my father carried her for some time behind him on his horse, until they saw some creatures like her, and then he sent her to them, but he had to drive her from him by force, for she clung to him. Thinkest thou oh Lady, it was really a beast, or some sort of the children of Adam?’

‘God knows, and He only,’ said I piously, ‘but by His indulgent name, thy father, oh Sheykh, was a true nobleman.’ Sheykh Yussuf chimed in and gave a decided opinion that a creature able to understand the sight of the knife and to act so, was not lawful to kill for food. You see what a real Arab Don Quixote was. It is a picture worthy of him,—the tall, noble-looking Abab’deh sheltering the poor ‘woman-beast,’ most likely a gorilla or chimpanzee, and carrying her en croupe.