I have gained so much during this month that I hope the remaining three will do real good, as the weather will improve with the new year they tell me.  All the English stay here and ’make Christmas,’ as Omar calls it, but I shall go on and do my devotions with the Copts at Esneh or Edfou.  I found that their seeming disinclination to let one attend their service arose from an idea that we English would not recognise them as Christians.  I wrote a curious story of a miracle to my mother, I find that I was wrong about the saint being a Mussulman (and so is Murray); he is no less than Mar Girghis, our own St. George himself.  Why he selected a Mussulman mason I suppose he best knows.

In a week I shall be in Nubia.  Some year we must all make this voyage; you would revel in it.  Kiss my darlings for me.

February 11, 1863:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  THEBES, February 11, 1863.

Dearest Alick,

On arriving here last night I found one letter from you, dated December 10, and have received nothing else.  Pray write again forthwith to Cairo where I hope to stay some weeks.  A clever old dragoman I met at Philae offers to lend me furniture for a lodging or a tent for the desert, and when I hesitated he said he was very well off and it was not his business to sell things, but only to be paid for his services by rich people, and that if I did not accept it as he meant it he should be quite hurt.  This is what I have met with from everything Arab—­nothing but kindness and politeness.  I shall say farewell to Egypt with real feeling; among other things, it will be quite a pang to part with Omar who has been my shadow all this time and for whom I have quite an affection, he is so thoroughly good and amiable.

I am really much better I hope and believe, though only within the last week or two.  We have had the coldest winter ever known in Nubia, such bitter north-east winds, but when the wind by great favour did not blow, the weather was heavenly.  If the millennium really does come I shall take a good bit of mine on the Nile.  At Assouan I had been strolling about in that most poetically melancholy spot, the granite quarry of old Egypt and burial-place of Muslim martyrs, and as I came homewards along the bank a party of slave merchants, who had just loaded their goods for Senaar from the boat on the camels, asked me to dinner, and, oh! how delicious it felt to sit on a mat among the camels and strange bales of goods and eat the hot tough bread, sour milk and dates, offered with such stately courtesy.  We got quite intimate over our leather cup of sherbet (brown sugar and water), and the handsome jet-black men, with features as beautiful as those of the young Bacchus, described the distant lands in a way which would have charmed Herodotus.  They proposed to me to join them, ‘they had food enough,’ and Omar and I were equally inclined