grand brother dead.  See how characteristic!—­the urging his brother to take the young slave girl ‘as his Hareem,’ like a respectable man—­that would have been all right; but what he did was ‘not good.’  I’ll trouble you (as Mrs. Grote used to say) to settle these questions to everyone’s satisfaction.  I own Omar seemed to me to take a view against which I had nothing to say.  His account of his other brother, a confectioner’s household with two wives, was very curious.  He and they, with his wife and sister-in-law, all live together, and one of the brother’s wives has six children—­three sleep with their own mother and three with their other mother—­and all is quite harmonious.

SIOUT,
December 10.

I could not send a letter from Minieh, where we stopped, and I visited a sugar manufactory and a gentlemanly Turk, who superintended the district, the Moudir.  I heard a boy singing a Zikr (the ninety-nine attributes of God) to a set of dervishes in a mosque, and I think I never heard anything more beautiful and affecting.  Ordinary Arab singing is harsh and nasal, but it can be wonderfully moving.  Since we left Minieh we have suffered dreadfully from the cold; the chickens died of it, and the Arabs look blue and pinched.  Of course it is my weather and there never was such cold and such incessant contrary winds known.  To-day was better, and Wassef, a Copt here, lent me his superb donkey to go up to the tomb in the mountain.  The tomb is a mere cavern, so defaced, but the view of beautiful Siout standing in the midst of a loop of the Nile was ravishing.  A green deeper and brighter than England, graceful minarets in crowds, a picturesque bridge, gardens, palm-trees, then the river beyond it, the barren yellow cliffs as a frame all around that.  At our feet a woman was being carried to the grave, and the boys’ voices rang out the Koran full and clear as the long procession—­first white turbans and then black veils and robes—­wound along.  It is all a dream to me.  You can’t think what an odd effect it is to take up an English book and read it and then look up and hear the men cry, ‘Yah Mohammad.’  ’Bless thee, Bottom, how art thou translated;’ it is the reverse of all one’s former life when one sat in England and read of the East. ’Und nun sitz ich mitten drein’ in the real, true Arabian Nights, and don’t know whether ‘I be I as I suppose I be’ or not.

Tell Alick the news, for I have not written to any but you.  I do so long for my Rainie.  The little Copt girls are like her, only pale; but they don’t let you admire them for fear of the evil-eye.

December 20, 1862:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  THEBES, December 20, 1862.

Dear Alick,