January 11.—­The whole place is in desolation, the men are being beaten, one because his camel is not good enough, another because its saddle is old and shabby, and the rest because they have not money enough to pay two months’ food and the wages of one man, to every four camels, to be paid for the use of the Government beforehand.  The courbash has been going on my neighbours’ backs and feet all the morning.  It is a new sensation too when a friend turns up his sleeve and shows the marks of the wooden handcuffs and the gall of the chain on his throat.  The system of wholesale extortion and spoliation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go.  The story of Naboth’s vineyard is repeated daily on the largest scale.  I grieve for Abdallah-el-Habbashee and men of high position like him, sent to die by disease (or murder), in Fazoghou, but I grieve still more over the daily anguish of the poor fellaheen, who are forced to take the bread from the mouths of their starving families and to eat it while toiling for the private profit of one man.  Egypt is one vast ‘plantation’ where the master works his slaves without even feeding them.  From my window now I see the men limping about among the poor camels that are waiting for the Pasha’s boats to take them, and the great heaps of maize which they are forced to bring for their food.  I can tell you the tears such a sight brings to one’s eyes are hot and bitter.  These are no sentimental grievances; hunger, and pain, and labour without hope and without reward, and the constant bitterness of impotent resentment.  To you all this must sound remote and almost fabulous.  But try to imagine Farmer Smith’s team driven off by the police and himself beaten till he delivered his hay, his oats and his farm-servant for the use of the Lord Lieutenant, and his two sons dragged in chains to work at railway embankments—­and you will have some idea of my state of mind to-day.  I fancy from the number of troops going up to Assouan that there is another rising among the blacks.  Some of the black regiments revolted up in the Soudan last summer, and now I hear Shaheen Pasha is to be here in a day or two on his way up, and the camels are being sent off by hundreds from all the villages every day.  But I am weary of telling, and you will sicken of hearing my constant lamentations.

Sheykh Hassan dropped in and dined with me yesterday and described his mother and her high-handed rule over him.  It seems he had a ’jeunesse orageuse’ and she defended him against his father’s displeasure, but when the old Sheykh died she informed her son that if he ever again behaved in a manner unworthy of a Sheykh-el-Arab she would not live to see it.  ’Now if my mother told me to jump into the river and drown I should say hader (ready), for I fear her exceedingly and love her above all people in the world, and have left everything in her hand.’  He was good enough to tell me that I was the only woman he knew like his mother and that was why he loved me so much.  I am to visit this Arab Deborah at the Abab’deh village two days ride from the first Cataract.  She will come and meet me at the boat.  Hassan was splendid when he said how he feared his mother exceedingly.