only take Omar and a bath and carpet-bag.  If the weather gets cool I shall stay in my boat.  The heat is far more oppressive here than it was at Luxor two years ago; it is not so dry.  The Viceroy is afraid of cholera, and worried the poor Hajjees this year with most useless quarantine.  The Mahmal was smuggled into Cairo before sunrise, without the usual honours, and all sightseers and holiday makers disappointed, and all good Muslims deeply offended.  The idea that the Pasha has turned Christian or even Jew is spreading fast; I hear it on all sides.  The new firman illegitimatising so many of his children is of course just as agreeable to a sincere Moslem as a law sanctioning polygamy for our royal family would be with us.

August 20, 1866:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  OFF BOULAK, August 20, 1866.

Dearest Alick,

Since I wrote I have had a bad bilious attack, which has of course aggravated my cough.  Everyone has had the same, and most far worse than I, but I was very wretched and most shamefully cross.  Omar said, ’That is not you but the sickness,’ when I found fault with everything, and it was very true.  I am still seedy.  Also I am beyond measure exasperated about my boat.  I went up to the Ata el-Khalig (cutting of the canal) to see the great sight of the ‘Bride of the Nile,’ a lovely spectacle; and on returning we all but sank.  I got out into a boat of Zubeydeh’s with all my goods, and we hauled up my boat, and found her bottom rotten from stem to stern.  So here I am in the midst of wood merchants, sawyers, etc., etc., rebuilding her bottom.  My Reis said he had ’carried her on his head all this time’ but ’what could such a one as he say against the word of a Howagah, like Ross’s storekeeper?’ When the English cheat each other there remains nothing but to seek refuge with God.  Omar buys the wood and superintends, together with the Reis, and the builders seem good workmen and fair-dealing.  I pay day by day, and have a scribe to keep the accounts.  If I get out of it for 150 pounds I shall think Omar has done wonders, for every atom has to be new.  I never saw anything so rotten afloat.  If I had gone up the Cataract I should never have come down alive.  It is a marvel we did not sink long ago.

Mahbrook, Palgrave’s boy, has arrived, and turns out well.  He is a stout lubberly boy, with infinite good humour, and not at all stupid, and laughs a good real nigger yahyah, which brings the fresh breezes and lilac mountains of the Cape before me when I hear it.  When I tell him to do anything he does it with strenuous care, and then asks, tayib? (is it well) and if I say ‘Yes’ he goes off, as Omar says, ’like a cannon in Ladyship’s face,’ in a guffaw of satisfaction.  Achmet, who is half his size, orders him about and teaches him, with an air of extreme dignity and says pityingly