To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  ASSOUAN, January 25, 1869.

Dearest Alick,

We have been here ten days, and I find the air quite the best for me.  I cough much less, only I am weak and short of breath.  I have got a most excellent young Reis for my boat, and a sailor who sings like a nightingale, indeed he is not a sailor at all, but a professional Cairo singer who came up with me for fun.  He draws crowds to hear him, and at Esneh the congregation prayed for me in the mosque that God might reward me for the pleasure I had provided for them.  Fancy desiring the prayers of this congregation for the welfare of the lady who gave me her opera-box last Saturday.  If prayers could avail to cure I ought to get well rapidly.  At Luxor Omar killed the sheep he had vowed, and Mustapha and Mohammed each killed two, as thank-offerings for my life, and all the derweeshes held two great Zikrs in a tent pitched behind the boat, and drummed and chanted and called on the Lord for two whole nights; and every man in my boat fasted Ramadan severely, from Omar and the crew to the little boys.  I think Darfour was the most meritorious of all, because he has such a Gargantuan appetite, but he fasted his thirty days bravely and rubbed his little nose in the dust energetically in prayer.

On Christmas day I was at Esneh, it was warm and fine, and I made fantasia and had the girls to dance.  Zeyneb and Hillaleah claim to be my own special Ghazawee, so to speak my Ballerine da camera, and they did their best.  How I did long to transport the whole scene before your eyes—­Ramadan warbling intense lovesongs, and beating on a tiny tambourine, while Zeyneb danced before him and gave the pantomime to his song; and the sailors, and girls, and respectable merchants sat pele-mele all round on the deck, and the player on the rabab drew from it a wail like that of Isis for dead Osiris.  I never quite know whether it is now or four thousand years ago, or even ten thousand, when I am in the dreamy intoxication of a real Egyptian fantasia; nothing is so antique as the Ghazawee—­the real dancing girls.  They are still subject to religious ecstasies of a very curious kind, no doubt inherited from the remotest antiquity.  Ask any learned pundit to explain to you the Zar—­it is really curious.

Now that I am too ill to write I feel sorry that I did not persist and write on the beliefs of Egypt in spite of your fear that the learned would cut me up, for I honestly believe that knowledge will die with me which few others possess.  You must recollect that the learned know books, and I know men, and what is still more difficult, women.