The Abab’deh Sheykh and his handsome brother propose to take me to the moolid of Sheykh-el-Shadhilee (the coffee saint) in the desert to see all the wild Abab’deh and Bishareeyeh.  It is very tempting, if I feel pretty well I must go I think and perhaps the change might do me good.  They believe no European ever went to that festival.  There are camel-races and a great show of pretty girls says the handsome Hassan.  A fine young Circassian cawass here has volunteered to be my servant anywhere and to fight anybody for me because I have cured his pretty wife.  You would love Kursheed with his clear blue eyes, fair face and brisk neat soldierly air.  He has a Crimean medal and such a lot of daggers and pistols and is such a tremendous Muslim, but never-the-less he loves me and tells me all his affairs and how tiresome his wife’s mother is.  I tell him all wives’ mothers always are, but he swears Wallahi, Howagah (Mr.) Ross don’t say so, Wallahi, Inshallah!

March 30, 1865:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  LUXOR, March 30, 1865.

Dearest Alick,

I have just received your letter of March 3 with one from Janet, which shows of how little moment the extermination of four villages is in this country, for she does not allude to our revolt and evidently has not heard of it.

In my last letter to Mutter I told how one Achmet et Tayib, a mad darweesh had raised a riot at Gau below Keneh and how a boat had been robbed and how we were all rather looking out for a razzia and determined to fight Achmet et Tayib and his followers.  Then we called them haramee (wicked ones) and were rather blood-thirstily disposed towards them and resolved to keep order and protect our property.  But now we say nas messakeen (poor people) and whisper to each other that God will not forget what the Pasha has done.  The truth of course we shall never know.  But I do know that one Pasha said he had hanged five hundred, and another that he had sent three hundred to Fazoghlou (comme qui dirait Cayenne) and all for the robbery of one Greek boat in which only the steersman was killed.  I cannot make out that anything was done by the ‘insurgents’ beyond going out into the desert to listen to the darweesh’s nonsense, and ‘see a reed shaken by the wind;’ the party that robbed the boat was, I am told, about forty strong.  But the most horrid stories are current among the people of the atrocities committed on the wretched villagers by the soldiers.  Not many were shot, they say, and they attempted no resistance, but the women and girls were outraged and murdered and the men hanged and the steamers loaded with plunder.  The worst is that every one believes that the Europeans aid and abet, and all declare that the Copts were spared to please the Frangees.  Mind I am not telling