CAIRO,
July 17, 1866.

Dearest Alick,

I am perfectly comfortable now with my aquatic menage.  The Reis is very well behaved and steady and careful, and the sort of Caliban of a sailor is a very worthy savage.  Omar of course is hardworked—­what with going to market, cooking, cleaning, ironing, and generally keeping everything in nice order but he won’t hear of a maid of any sort.  No wonder!

A clever old Reis has just come and over-hauled the bottom of the boat, and says he can mend her without taking her out of the water.  We shall see; it will be great luck if he can.  As I am the river doctor, all the sailoring men are glad to do me a civility.

We have had the hottest of summers; it is now 98 in the cabin.  I have felt very unwell, but my blue devils are quite gone, and I am altogether better.  What a miserable war it is in Europe!  I am most anxious for the next papers.  Here it is money misery; the Pasha is something like bankrupt, and no one has had a day’s pay these three months, even pensions of sixty piastres a month (seven shillings) to poor old female slaves of Mahommed Ali’s are stopped.

August 4.—­The heat is and has been something fearful:  we are all panting and puffing.  I can’t think what Palgrave meant about my being tired of poor old Egypt; I am very happy and comfortable, only I felt rather weak and poorly this year, and sometimes, I suppose, rather wacham, as the Arabs say, after you and the children.  The heat, too, has made me lazy—­it is 110 in the cabin, and 96 at night.

I saw the Moolid en-Nebbee (Festival of the Prophet), and the wonderful Doseh (treading); it is an awful sight; so many men drunk with religious ardour. {293} I also went to a Turkish Hareem, where my darweesh friends sent me; it is just like a tea-party at Hampton Court, only handsomer, not as to the ladies, but the clothes, furniture and jewels, and not a bit like the description in Mrs. Lott’s most extraordinary book.  Nothing is so clean as a Turkish hareem, the furniture is Dutch as to cleanliness, and their persons only like themselves—­but oh! how dull and triste it all seemed.  One nice lady said to me, ’If I had a husband and children like thee, I would die a hundred times rather than leave them for an hour,’ another envied me the power of going into the street and seeing the Doseh.  She had never seen it, and never would.

To-morrow Olagnier will dine and spend the night here, to see the cutting of the canal, and the ‘Bride of the Nile’ on Monday morning.  We shall sail up to old Cairo in the evening with the Bride’s boat; also Hajjee Hannah is coming for the fantasia; after the high Nile we shall take the boat out and caulk her and then, if the excessive heat continues, I rather think of a month’s jaunt to Beyrout just to freshen me up.  Hajjee Ali is there, with all his travelling materials and tents, so I need