By the bye, Sheykh Alee Abab’deh told me that all the villages close on the Nile escaped the cholera almost completely, whilst those who were half or a quarter of a mile inland were ravaged.  At Keneh 250 a day died; at Luxor one child was supposed to have died of it, but I know he had diseased liver for a year or more.  In the desert the Bishareen and Abab’deh suffered more than the people at Cairo, and you know the desert is usually the place of perfect health; but fresh Nile water seems to be the antidote.  Sheykh Yussuf laid the mortality at Keneh to the canal water, which the poor people drink there.  I believe the fact is as Sheykh Alee told me.

Now I will say good-bye, for I am tired, and will write anon to the rest.  Let Mutter have this.  I was very poorly till I got above Siout, and then gradually mended—­constant blood spitting and great weakness and I am very thin, but, by the protection of Abu-l-Hajjaj I suppose I am already much better, and begin to eat again.  I have not been out yet since the first day, having much to do in the house to get to rights.  I felt very dreary on Christmas-day away from you all, and Omar’s plum-pudding did not cheer me at all, as he hoped it would.  He begs me to kiss your hand for him, and every one sends you salaam, and all lament that you are not the new Consul at Cairo.

Kiss my chicks, and love to you all.  Janet, I hope is in Egypt ere this.

January 3, 1866:  Maurice Duff Gordon

To Maurice Duff Gordon.  LUXOR. January 3, 1866.

My Darling Maurice,

I was delighted to get your note, which arrived on New Year’s day in the midst of the hubbub of the great festival in honour of the Saint of Luxor.  I wish you could have seen two young Arabs (real Arabs from the Hedjaz, in Arabia) ride and play with spears and lances.  I never saw anything like it—­a man who played the tom-fool stood in the middle, and they galloped round and round him, with their spears crossed and the points resting on the ground, in so small a circle that his clothes whisked round with the wind of the horses’ legs.  Then they threw jereeds and caught them as they galloped:  the beautiful thing was the perfect mastery of the horses:  they were ‘like water in their hands,’ as Sheykh Hassan remarked.  I perceived that I had never seen real horsemanship in my life before.

I am now in the ‘palace’ at Luxor with my dahabieh, ‘Arooset er-Ralee’ (the Darling Bride), under my windows; quite like a Pasha.

In coming up we had an alarm of robbers.  Under the mountain called Gebel Foodah, we were entangled in shoals, owing to a change in the bed of the river, and forced to stay all night; and at three in the morning, the Reis sent in the boy to say he had seen a man creeping on all fours—­would I fire my pistol?  As my revolver had been stolen in Janet’s house, I was obliged to beg him to receive any possible troop of armed robbers very civilly, and to let them take what they pleased.  However, Omar blazed away with your father’s old cavalry pistols (which had no bullets) and whether the robbers were frightened, or the man was only a wolf, we heard no more of the affair.  My crew were horribly frightened, and kept awake till daybreak.