ashamed of such superstitions, but I’ll find it out.  We had a fantasia at Mustapha’s for young Strutt and Co., and a very good dancing-girl.  Some dear old prosy English people made me laugh so.  The lady wondered how the women here could wear clothes ’so different from English females—­poor things!’ but they were not malveillants, only pitying and wonderstruck—­nothing astonished them so much as my salutations with Seleem Effendi, the Maohn.

I begin to feel the time before me to be away from you all very long indeed, but I do think my best chance is a long spell of real heat.  I have got through this winter without once catching cold at all to signify, and now the fine weather is come.  I am writing in Arabic from Sheykh Yussuf’s dictation the dear old story of the barber’s brother with the basket of glass.  The Arabs are so diverted at hearing that we all know the Alf Leyleh o Leyleh, the ‘Thousand Nights and a Night.’  The want of a dictionary with a teacher knowing no word of English is terrible.  I don’t know how I learn at all.  The post is pretty quick up to here.  I got your letter within three weeks, you see, but I get no newspapers; the post is all on foot and can’t carry anything so heavy.  One of my men of last year, Asgalani the steersman, has just been to see me; he says his journey was happier last year.

I hear that Phillips is coming to Cairo, and have written to him there to invite him up here to paint these handsome Saeedees.  He could get up in a steamer as I did through Hassaneyn Effendi for a trifle.  I wish you could come, but the heat here which gives me life would be quite impossible to you.  The thermometer in the cold antechamber now is 67 degrees where no sun ever comes, and the blaze of the sun is prodigious.

February 26, 1864:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  LUXOR, February 26, 1864.

Dearest Alick,

I have just received your letter of the 3rd inst., and am glad to get such good tidings.  You would be amused to see Omar bring me a letter and sit down on the floor till I tell him the family news, and then Alhamdulillah, we are so pleased, and he goes off to his pots and pans again.  Lord and Lady Spencer are here, and his sister, in two boats.  The English ‘Milord,’ extinct on the Continent, has revived in Egypt, and is greatly reverenced and usually much liked.  ’These high English have mercy in their stomachs,’ said one of my last year’s sailors who came to kiss my hand—­a pleasing fact in natural history! Fee wahed Lord, was little ragged Achmet’s announcement of Lord Spencer—­’Here’s a Lord.’  They are very pleasant people.  I heard from Janet to-day of ice at Cairo and at Shoubra, and famine prices.  I cannot attempt Cairo with meat at 1s. 3d. a pound, and will e’en stay here and grill at Thebes.  Marry-come-up with your Thebes and savagery!  What if we do wear ragged brown shirts? ‘’Tis manners makyth man,’ and we defy you to show better breeding.