the temple, Maurice fish in the Nile, and you go about with your spectacles on your nose.  I think you would discard Frangi dress and take to a brown shirt and a libdeh, and soon be as brown as any fellah.  It was so curious to see Sheykh Yussuf blush from shyness when he came in first; it shows quite as much in the coffee-brown Arab skin as in the fairest European—­quite unlike the much lighter-coloured mulatto or Malay, who never change colour at all.  A photographer who is living here showed me photographs done high up the White Nile.  One negro girl is so splendid that I must get him to do me a copy to send you.  She is not perfect like the Nubians, but so superbly strong and majestic.  If I can get hold of a handsome fellahah here, I’ll get her photographed to show you in Europe what a woman’s breast can be, for I never knew it before I came here—­it is the most beautiful thing in the world.  The dancing-girl I saw moved her breasts by some extraordinary muscular effort, first one and then the other; they were just like pomegranates and gloriously independent of stays or any support.

January 20, 1864:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon. Wednesday, January 20, 1864.

I received your welcome letters of December 15 and 25 on Monday, to my great joy, but was much grieved to hear of Thomas’s death, and still more so to hear from Janet that Thackeray and Mrs. Alison were dead.  She died the morning I left Cairo, so her last act almost was to send sweetmeats to the boat after me on the evening before.  Poor dear soul her sweetness and patience were very touching.  We have had a week of piercing winds, and yesterday I stayed in bed, to the great surprise of Mustapha’s little girl who came to see me.  To-day was beautiful again, and I mounted old Mustapha’s cob pony and jogged over his farm with him, and lunched on delicious sour cream and fateereh at a neighbouring village, to the great delight of the fellaheen.  It was more Biblical than ever; the people were all relations of Mustapha’s, and to see Sidi Omar, the head of the household, and the ‘young men coming in from the field,’ and the ‘flocks and herds and camels and asses,’ was like a beautiful dream.  All these people are of high blood, and a sort of ‘roll of Battle’ is kept here for the genealogies of the noble Arabs who came in with Amr—­the first Arab conqueror and lieutenant of Omar.  Not one of these brown men, who do not own a second shirt, would give his brown daughter to the greatest Turkish Pasha.  This country noblesse is more interesting to me by far than the town people, though Omar, who is quite a Cockney, and piques himself on being ‘delicate,’ turns up his nose at their beggarly pride, as Londoners used to do at bare-legged Highlanders.  The air of perfect equality—­except as to the respect due to the head of the clan—­with which