Letters from Egypt by Lucy Duff Gordon (classic literature books txt) 📖

for a few lines to go down by Mr. Strutt and Heathcote's boat to Cairo. They are very good specimens and quite recognised as 'belonging to the higher people,' because they 'do not make themselves big.' I received your letter of January 21 with little darling Rainie's three days ago.

I am better now that the weather is fine again. We had a whole day's rain (which Herodotus says is a portent here) and a hurricane from the south worthy of the Cape. I thought we should have been buried under the drifting sand. To-day is again heavenly. I saw Abd-el-Azeez, the chemist in Cairo; he seemed a very good fellow, and was a pupil of my old friend M. Chrevreul, and highly recommended by him. Here I am out of all European ideas. The Sheykh-el-Arab (of the Ababdeh tribe), who has a sort of town house here, has invited me out into the desert to the black tents, and I intend to pay a visit with old Mustapha A'gha. There is a Roman well in his yard with a ghoul in it. I can't get the story from Mustapha, who is ashamed of such superstitions, but I'll find it out. We had a fantasia at Mustapha's for young Strutt and Co., and a very good dancing-girl. Some dear old prosy English people made me laugh so. The lady wondered how the women here could wear clothes 'so different from English females--poor things!' but they were not _malveillants_, only pitying and wonderstruck--nothing astonished them so much as my salutations with Seleem Effendi, the Maohn.

I begin to feel the time before me to be away from you all very long indeed, but I do think my best chance is a long spell of real heat. I have got through this winter without once catching cold at all to signify, and now the fine weather is come. I am writing in Arabic from Sheykh Yussuf's dictation the dear old story of the barber's brother with the basket of glass. The Arabs are so diverted at hearing that we all know the _Alf Leyleh o Leyleh_, the 'Thousand Nights and a Night.' The want of a dictionary with a teacher knowing no word of English is terrible. I don't know how I learn at all. The post is pretty quick up to here. I got your letter within three weeks, you see, but I get no newspapers; the post is all on foot and can't carry anything so heavy. One of my men of last year, Asgalani the steersman, has just been to see me; he says his journey was happier last year.

I hear that Phillips is coming to Cairo, and have written to him there to invite him up here to paint these handsome Saeedees. He could get up in a steamer as I did through Hassaneyn Effendi for a trifle. I wish you _could_ come, but the heat here which gives me life would be quite _impossible_ to you. The thermometer in the cold antechamber now is 67 degrees where no sun ever comes, and the blaze of the sun is prodigious.


February 26, 1864: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

_To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon_.

LUXOR,
_February_ 26, 1864.

DEAREST ALICK,

I have just received your letter of the 3rd inst., and am glad to get such good tidings. You would be amused to see Omar bring me a letter and sit down on the floor till I tell him the family news, and then _Alhamdulillah_, we are so pleased, and he goes off to his pots and pans again. Lord and Lady Spencer are here, and his sister, in two boats. The English 'Milord,' extinct on the Continent, has revived in Egypt, and is greatly reverenced and usually much liked. 'These high English have mercy in their stomachs,' said one of my last year's sailors who came to kiss my hand--a pleasing fact in natural history! _Fee wahed Lord_, was little ragged Achmet's announcement of Lord Spencer--'Here's a Lord.' They are very pleasant people. I heard from Janet to-day of _ice_ at Cairo and at Shoubra, and famine prices. I cannot attempt Cairo with meat at 1s. 3d. a pound, and will e'en stay here and grill at Thebes. Marry-come-up with your Thebes and savagery! What if we _do_ wear ragged brown shirts? ''Tis manners makyth man,' and we defy you to show better breeding.

We are now in the full enjoyment of summer weather; there has been no cold for fully a fortnight, and I am getting better every day now. My cough has quite subsided, and the pain in the chest much diminished; if the heat does not overpower me I feel sure it will be very healing to my lungs. I sit out on my glorious balcony and drink the air from early morning till noon, when the sun comes upon it and drives me under cover. The thermometer has stood at 64 degrees for a fortnight or three weeks, rising sometimes to 67 degrees, but people in the boats tell me it is still cold at night on the river. Up here, only a stone's-throw from it, it is warm all night. I fear the loss of cattle has suspended irrigation to a fearful extent, and that the harvests of Lower Egypt of all kinds will be sadly scanty. The disease has not spread above Minieh, or very slightly; but, of course, cattle will rise in price here also. Already food is getting dearer here; meat is 4.5 piastres--7d.--the _rotl_ (a fraction less than a pound), and bread has risen considerably--I should say corn, for no bakers exist here. I pay a woman to grind and bake my wheat which I buy, and delicious bread it is. It is impossible to say how exactly like the early parts of the Bible every act of life is here, and how totally new it seems when one reads it here. Old Jacob's speech to Pharaoh really made me laugh (don't be shocked), because it is so exactly what a fellah says to a Pasha: 'Few and evil have been the days,' etc. (Jacob being a most prosperous man); but it is manners to say all that, and I feel quite kindly to Jacob, whom I used to think ungrateful and discontented; and when I go to Sidi Omar's farm, does he not say, 'Take now fine meal and bake cakes quickly,' and wants to kill a kid? _Fateereh_ with plenty of butter is what the 'three men' who came to Abraham ate; and the way that Abraham's chief memlook, acting as Vakeel, manages Isaac's marriage with Rebekah! All the vulgarized associations with Puritanism and abominable little 'Scripture tales and pictures' peel off here, and the inimitably truthful representation of life and character--not a flattering one certainly--comes out, and it feels like Homer. Joseph's tears and his love for the brother born of the _same mother_ is so perfect. Only one sees what a bad inferior race the Beni Israel were compared to the Beni Ishmael or to the Egyptians. Leviticus and Deuteronomy are so very heathenish compared to the law of the Koran, or to the early days of Abraham. Verily the ancient Jews were a foul nation, judging by the police regulations needful for them. Please don't make these remarks public, or I shall be burnt with Stanley and Colenso (unless I suffer Sheykh Yussuf to propose me El-Islam). He and M. de Rouge were here last evening, and we had an Arabic _soiree_. M. de Rouge speaks admirably, quite like an Alim, and it was charming to see Sheykh Yussuf's pretty look of grateful pleasure at finding himself treated like a gentleman and a scholar by two such eminent Europeans; for I (as a woman) am quite as surprising as even M. de Rouge's knowledge of hieroglyphics and Arabic _Fosseeha_. It is very interesting to see something of Arabs who have read and have the 'gentleman' ideas. His brother, the Imam, has lost his wife; he was married twenty-two years, and won't hear of taking another. I was struck with the sympathy he expressed with the English Sultana, as all the uneducated people say, 'Why doesn't she marry again?' It is curious how refinement brings out the same feelings under all 'dispensations.' I apologized to Yussuf for inadvertently returning the _Salaam aleykoum_ (Peace be with thee), which he said to Omar, and which I, as an unbeliever, could not accept. He coloured crimson, touched my hand and kissed his own, quite distressed lest the distinction might wound me. When I think of a young parsonic prig at home I shudder at the difference. But Yussuf is superstitious; he told me how someone down the river cured his cattle with water poured over a _Mushaf_ (a copy of the Koran), and has hinted at writing out a chapter for me to wear as a _hegab_ (an amulet for my health). He is interested in the antiquities and in M. de Rouge's work, and is quite up to the connection between Ancient Egypt and the books of Moses, exaggerating the importance of _Seyidna Moussa_, of course.

If I go down to Cairo again I will get letters to some of the Alim there from Abd-el-Waris, the Imam here, and I shall see what no European but Lane has seen. I think things have altered since his day, and that men of that class would be less inaccessible than they were then; and then a woman who is old (Yussuf guessed me at sixty) and educated does not shock, and does interest them. All the Europeans here are traders, and only speak the vulgarest language, and don't care to know Arab gentlemen; if they see anything above their servants it is only Turks, or Arab merchants at times. Don't fancy that I can speak at all decently yet, but I understand a good deal, and stammer out a little.


March 1, 1864: Mrs. Austin

_To Mrs. Austin_.

LUXOR,
_March_ 1, 1864.

DEAREST MUTTER,

I think I shall have an opportunity of sending letters in a few days by a fast steamer, so I will begin one on the chance and send it by post if the steamer is delayed long. The glory of the climate now is beyond description, and I feel better every day. I go out early--at seven or eight o'clock--on my tiny black donkey, and come in to breakfast about ten, and go out again at four.

I want to photograph Yussuf for you. The feelings and prejudices and ideas of a cultivated Arab, as I get at them little by little, are curious beyond compare. It won't do to generalize from one man, of course, but even one gives some very new ideas. The most striking thing is the sweetness and delicacy of feeling--the horror of hurting anyone (this must be individual, of course: it is too good to be general). I apologized to him two days ago for inadvertently answering the _Salaam aleykoum_, which he, of course, said to Omar on coming in. Yesterday evening he walked in and startled me by a _Salaam aleykee_ addressed to me; he had evidently been thinking it over whether he ought to say it to me, and come to the conclusion that it was not wrong. 'Surely it is well for all the creatures of God to speak peace (_Salaam_) to each other,' said he. Now, no uneducated Muslim