Mustapha intends to give you a grand fantasia if you come, and to have the best dancing girls down from Esneh for you; but I am consternated to hear that you can’t come till December.  I hoped you would have arrived in Cairo early in November, and spent a month there with me, and come up the river in the middle of December when Cairo gets very cold.

I remain very well in general health, but my cough has been troublesome again.  I do not feel at all like breathing cold damp air again.  This depresses me very much as you may suppose.  You will have to divorce me, and I must marry some respectable Kadee.  I have been too ‘lazy Arab,’ as Omar calls it, to go on with my Arabic lessons, and Yussuf has been very busy with law business connected with the land and the crops.  Every harvest brings a fresh settling of the land.  Wheat is selling at 1 pound the ardeb {188} here on the threshing-floor, and barley at one hundred and sixteen piastres; I saw some Nubians pay Mustapha that.  He is in comic perplexity about saying Alhamdulillah about such enormous gains—­you see it is rather awkward for a Muslim to thank God for dear bread—­so he compounds by very lavish almsgiving.  He gave all his fellaheen clothes the other day—­forty calico shirts and drawers.  Do you remember my describing an Arab emancipirtes Fraulein at Siout?  Well, the other day I saw as I thought a nice-looking lad of sixteen selling corn to my opposite neighbour, a Copt.  It was a girl.  Her father had no son and is infirm, so she works in the field for him, and dresses and does like a man.  She looked very modest and was quieter in her manner than the veiled women often are.

I am so glad to hear such good accounts of my Rainie and Maurice.  I can hardly bear to think of another year without seeing them.  However it is fortunate for me that ‘my lines have fallen in pleasant places,’ so long a time at the Cape or any Colony would have become intolerable.  Best love to Janet, I really can’t write, it’s too hot and dusty.  Omar desires his salaam to his great master and to that gazelle Sittee Ross.

August 13, 1864:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  LUXOR, August 13, 1864.

Dearest Alick,

For the last month we have had a purgatory of hot wind and dust, such as I never saw—­impossible to stir out of the house.  So in despair I have just engaged a return boat—­a Gelegenheit—­and am off to Cairo in a day or two, where I shall stop till Inshallah! you come to me.  Can’t you get leave to come at the beginning of November?  Do try, that is the pleasant time in Cairo.