April 6, 1864:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  LUXOR, April 6, 1864.

Dearest Alick,

I received yours of March 10 two days ago; also one from Hekekian Bey, much advising me to stay here the summer and get my disease ‘evaporated.’  Since I last wrote the great heat abated, and we now have 76 to 80 degrees, with strong north breezes up the river—­glorious weather—­neither too hot nor chilly at any time.  Last evening I went out to the threshing-floor to see the stately oxen treading out the corn, and supped there with Abdurachman on roasted corn, sour cream, and eggs, and saw the reapers take their wages, each a bundle of wheat according to the work he had done—­the most lovely sight.  The graceful, half-naked, brown figures loaded with sheaves; some had earned so much that their mothers or wives had to help to carry it, and little fawn-like, stark-naked boys trudged off, so proud of their little bundles of wheat or of hummuz (a sort of vetch much eaten both green and roasted).  The sakka (water-carrier), who has brought water for the men, gets a handful from each, and drives home his donkey with empty waterskins and a heavy load of wheat, and the barber who has shaved all these brown heads on credit this year past gets his pay, and everyone is cheerful and happy in their gentle, quiet way; here is no beer to make men sweaty and noisy and vulgar; the harvest is the most exquisite pastoral you can conceive.  The men work seven hours in the day (i.e., eight, with half-hours to rest and eat), and seven more during the night; they go home at sunset to dinner, and sleep a bit, and then to work again—­these ‘lazy Arabs’!  The man who drives the oxen on the threshing-floor gets a measure and a half for his day and night’s work, of threshed corn, I mean.  As soon as the wheat, barley, addas (lentils) and hummuz are cut, we shall sow dourrah of two kinds, common maize and Egyptian, and plant sugar-cane, and later cotton.  The people work very hard, but here they eat well, and being paid in corn they get the advantage of the high price of corn this year.

I told you how my purse had been stolen and the proceedings thereanent.  Well, Mustapha asked me several times what I wished to be done with the thief, who spent twenty-one days here in irons.  With my absurd English ideas of justice I refused to interfere at all, and Omar and I had quite a tiff because he wished me to say, ’Oh, poor man, let him go; I leave the affair to God.’  I thought Omar absurd, but it was I who was wrong.  The authorities concluded that it would oblige me very much if the poor devil were punished with a ‘rigour beyond the law,’ and had not Sheykh Yussuf come and explained the nature of the proceedings, the man would have been sent up to the mines in Fazogloo for life, out of civility to me, by the Moudir of Keneh, Ali Bey.  There