Seeing a man in a burnous ploughing with oxen and a wooden plough on a plain where there was no background, he said, “Look, there’s Abraham!” At Constantine, Sir Richard and Lady Burton celebrated their 29th, and as it proved, their last wedding day.  With Algiers, the next stopping place, which boasted a cardinal’s Moorish palace and a Museum, Burton was in ecstasies, and said he wanted to live there always; but in less than three weeks he was anxious to get as far away from it as possible.

From Algiers he wrote to Mr. Payne (28th January 1890).  After recording his failure to obtain manuscripts of The Scented Garden at Tunis he says:  “To-day I am to see M. Macarthy, of the Algiers Bibliotheque Musee; but I am by no means sanguine.  This place is a Paris after Tunis and Constantine, but like all France (and Frenchmen) in modern days dirty as ditchwater.  The old Gaulois is dead and damned, politics and money getting have made the gay nation stupid as Paddies.  In fact the world is growing vile and bete, et vivent les Chinois![FN#613] A new Magyar irruption would do Europe much good.”

In a letter to Mr. A. G. Ellis, dated 12th February, 1890, he refers to the anecdote of the famous Taymor al Wahsh, who, according to a Damascus tradition, played polo with the heads of his conquered enemies.  “Every guide book,” he continues, “mentions my Lord Iron’s nickname ‘The Wild Beast,’ and possibly the legend was invented by way of comment.  He drove away all the Persian swordsmiths, and from his day no ‘Damascus blade’ has been made at Damascus.  I have found these French colonies perfectly casual and futile.  The men take months before making up their minds to do anything.  A most profligate waste of time!  My prime object in visiting Tunis was to obtain information concerning The Scented Garden, to consult MSS. &c.  After a month’s hard work I came upon only a single copy, the merest compendium, lacking also Chapter 21, my chief Righah (the absurd French R’irha) for a week or ten days [for the sake of the baths] then return to Algiers, steam for Marseilles and return to Trieste via the Riviera and Northern Italy—­a route of which I am dead sick.  Let us hope that the untanned leather bindings have spared you their malaria.  You will not see me in England next summer, but after March 1891, I shall be free as air to come and go.”  At Hammam R’irha, Burton began in earnest his translation of Catullus, and for weeks he was immersed in it night and day.  The whole of the journey was a pleasurable one, or would have been, but for the cruelty with which animals were treated; and Burton, who detested cruelty in all forms, and had an intense horror of inflicting pain, vented his indignation over and over again against the merciless camel and donkey drivers.

As the party were steaming from Algiers to Toulon, a curious incident occurred.  Burton and Dr. Baker having sauntered into the smoke room seated themselves at a table opposite to an old man and a young man who looked like, and turned out to be, an Oxford don.  Presently the don, addressing the old man, told him with dramatic gesticulations the venerable story about Burton killing two Arabs near Mecca, and he held out his hand as if he were firing a pistol.