This is a sad year—­all the cattle are dead, the Nile is now as low as it was last July, and the song of the men watering with the shadoofs sounds sadly true as they chant Ana ga-ahn, etc.  ’I am hungry, I am hungry for a piece of dourrah bread,’ sings one, and the other chimes in, Meskeen, meskeen ‘Poor man, poor man,’ or else they sing a song about Seyyidna Iyoob ‘Our master Job’ and his patience.  It is sadly appropriate now and rings on all sides as the shadoofs are greatly multiplied for lack of oxen to turn the sakiahs (waterwheels).  All is terribly dear, and many are sick from sheer weakness owing to poor food; and then I hear fifty thousand are to be taken to work at the canal from Geezeh to Siout through the Fayoum.  The only comfort is the enormous rise of wages, which however falls heavy on the rich.  The sailors who got forty to fifty piastres five years ago now get three to five hundred piastres a month.  So I fear I must give up my project of a dahabieh.  If the new French Consul-General ‘knows not Joseph’ and turns me out, I am to live in a new house which Sheykh Yussuf is now building and of which he would give me the terrace and build three rooms on it for me.  I wish I got better or worse, and could go home.  I do get better, but so slowly, I cough a good deal at times, and I am very thin, but not so weak as I was or so breathless.

February 7, 1867:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  LUXOR, February 7, 1867.

Dearest Alick,

I am enjoying a ‘great indulgence of talk’ with M. Prevost Paradol as heartily as any nigger.  He is a delightful person.  This evening he is coming with Arakel Bey, his Armenian companion, and I will invite a few Arabs to show him.  I sent off the proofs yesterday per passenger steamer.  I trust they will arrive safe.  It is too disheartening about letters, so many are lost.  I am dreadfully disappointed in my letters, I really don’t think them good—­you know I don’t blaguer about my own performances.  I am very glad people like my Cape letters which I forget—­but honestly I don’t think the Egyptian good.  You know I don’t ‘pretend’ if I think I have done something well and I was generally content with my translations, but I feel these all to be poor and what Maurice calls ‘dry’ when I know how curious and interesting and poetical the country really is.

I paid Fadil Pasha a visit on his boat, and it was just like the middle ages.  In order to amuse me he called up a horrid little black boy of about four to do tricks like a dancing dog, which ended in a performance of the Mussulman prayer.  The little beast was dressed in a Stamboulee dress of scarlet cloth.