To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  KAFR ZEYAT, October 31, 1863.

Dearest Alick,

We left Alexandria on Thursday about noon, and sailed with a fair wind along the Mahmoudieh Canal.  My little boat flies like a bird, and my men are a capital set of fellows, bold and careful sailors.  I have only seven in all, but they work well, and at a pinch Omar leaves the pots and pans and handles a rope or a pole manfully.  We sailed all night and passed the locks at Atleh at four o’clock yesterday, and were greeted by old Nile tearing down like a torrent.  The river is magnificent, ’seven men’s height,’ my Reis says, above its usual pitch; it has gone down five or six feet and left a sad scene of havoc on either side.  However what the Nile takes he repays with threefold interest, they say.  The women are at work rebuilding their mud huts, and the men repairing the dykes.  A Frenchman told me he was on board a Pasha’s steamer under M. de Lesseps’ command, and they passed a flooded village where two hundred or so people stood on their roofs crying for help.  Would you, could you, believe it that they passed on and left them to drown?  None but an eyewitness could have made me believe such villainy.

All to-day we sailed in such heavenly weather—­a sky like nothing but its most beautiful self.  At the bend of the river just now we had a grand struggle to get round, and got entangled with a big timber boat.  My crew got so vehement that I had to come out with an imperious request to everyone to bless the Prophet.  Then the boat nearly pulled the men into the stream, and they pulled and hauled and struggled up to their waists in mud and water, and Omar brandished his pole and shouted ’Islam el Islam!’ which gave a fresh spirit to the poor fellows, and round we came with a dash and caught the breeze again.  Now we have put up for the night, and shall pass the railway-bridge to-morrow.  The railway is all under water from here up to Tantah—­eight miles—­and in many places higher up.

November 14, 1863:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  CAIRO, November 14, 1863.

Here I am at last in my old quarters at Thayer’s house, after a tiresome negotiation with the Vice-Consul, who had taken possession and invented the story of women on the ground-floor.  I was a week in Briggs’ damp house, and too ill to write.  The morning I arrived at Cairo I was seized with haemorrhage, and had two days of it; however, since then I am better.  I was very foolish to stay a fortnight in Alexandria.