My boat has gone up to-day with two very nice Englishmen in her.  Their young Maltese dragoman, aged twenty-four, told me his father often talked of ‘the Commissioners’ and all they had done, and how things were changed in the island for the better. (1) Everything spiritual and temporal has been done for the boat’s safety in the Cataract—­urgent letters to the Maohn el Baudar, and him of Assouan to see to the men, and plenty of prayers and vows to Abu-l-Hajjaj on behalf of the ‘property of the Lady,’ or kurzweg ‘our boat’ as she is commonly called in Luxor.

Here we have the other side of the misery of the Candian business; in Europe, of course, the obvious thing is the sufferings of the Cretans, but really I am more sorry for the poor fellah lads who are dragged away to fight in a quarrel they had no hand in raising, and with which they have no sympathy.  The Times suggests that the Sultan should relinquish the island, and that has been said in many an Egyptian hut long before.  The Sultan is worn out, and the Muslims here know it, and say it would be the best day for the Arabs if he were driven out; that after all a Turk never was the true Ameer el-Moomeneen (Commander of the Faithful).  Only in Europe people talk and write as if it were all Muslim versus Christian, and the Christians were all oppressed, and the Muslims all oppressors.  I wish they could see the domineering of the Greeks and Maltese as Christians.  The Englishman domineers as a free man and a Briton, which is different, and that is the reason why the Arabs wish for English rule, and would dread that of Eastern Christians.  Well they may; for if ever the Greeks do reign in Stamboul the sufferings of the Muslims will satisfy the most eager fanatic that ever cursed Mahound.  I know nothing of Turkey, but I have seen and heard enough to know that there are plenty of other divisions besides that of Christian and Muslim.  Here in Egypt it is clear enough:  it is Arab versus Turk and the Copt siding with the stronger for his interest, while he rather sympathizes with his brother fellah.  At all events the Copt don’t want other Christians to get power; he would far rather have a Muslim than a heretic ruler, above all the hated Greek.  The Englishman he looks on as a variety of Muslim—­a man who washes, has no pictures in his church, who has married bishops, and above all, who does not fast from all that has life for half the year, and this heresy is so extreme as not to give offence, unless he tries to convert.

The Pasha’s sons have just been up the river:  they ordered a reading of the Koran at the tomb of Abu-l-Hajjaj and gave every Alim sixpence.  We have not left off chaffing (as Maurice would say) Sheykh Allah-ud-deen, the Muezzin, and sundry others on this superb backsheesh, and one old Fikee never knows whether to laugh, to cry, or to scold, when I ask to see the shawl and tarboosh he has bought with the presents of Pashas.  Yussuf and the Kadee too had been called on to contribute baskets of bread to the steamer so that their sixpences were particularly absurd.