Ali Bey Rheda told me the other day that Prince Arthur is coming here and that he was coming up with him after taking a Prince of Hohenzollern back to Cairo.  There will be all the fantasia possible for him here.  Every man that has a horse will gallop him to pieces in honour of the son of the Queen of the English, and not a charge of powder will be spared.  If you see Layard tell him that Mustapha A’gha had the whole Koran read for his benefit at the tomb of Abu-l-Hajjaj besides innumerable fathahs which he said for him himself.  He consulted me as to the propriety of sending Layard a backsheesh, but I declared that Layard was an Emeer of the Arabs and a giver, not a taker of backsheesh.

January 9, 1865:  Mrs. Austin

To Mrs. Austin.  LUXOR, January 9, 1865.

I gave Sheykh Yussuf your knife to cut his kalem (reed pen) with, and to his little girl the coral waistband clasp you gave me as from you.  He was much pleased.  I also brought the Shereef the psalms in Arabic to his great delight.  The old man called on all ‘our family’ to say a fathah for their sister, after making us all laugh by shouting out ‘Alhamdulillah! here is our darling safe back again.’

I wish you could have seen me in the crowd at Keneh holding on to the Kadee’s farageeyeh (a loose robe worn by the Ulema).  He is the real original Kadee of the Thousand and One Nights.  Did ever Kadee tow an Englishwoman round a Sheykh’s tomb before? but I thought his determination to show the people that he considered a Christian not out of place in a Muslim holy place very edifying.

I find an exceedingly pleasant man here, an Abab’deh, a very great Sheykh from beyond Khartoum, a man of fifty I suppose, with manners like an English nobleman, simple and polite and very intelligent.  He wants to take me to Khartoum for two months up and back, having a tent and a takhterawan (camel-litter) and to show me the Bishareen in the desert.  We traced the route on my map which to my surprise he understood, and I found he had travelled into Zanzibar and knew of the existence of the Cape of Good Hope and the English colony there.  He had also travelled in the Dinka and Shurook country where the men are seven feet and over high (Alexander saw a Dinka girl at Cairo three inches taller than himself!).  He knows Madlle.  Tine and says she is ’on everyone’s head and in their eyes’ where she has been.  You may fancy that I find Sheykh Alee very good company.

To-day the sand in front of the house is thronged with all the poor people with their camels, of which the Government has made a new levy of eight camels to every thousand feddans.  The poor beasts are sent off to transport troops in the Soudan, and not being used to the desert, they all die—­at all events their owners never see one of them again.  The discontent is growing stronger every day.  Last week the people were cursing the Pasha in the streets of Assouan, and every one talks aloud of what they think.