I have only time for a few lines to go down by Mr. Strutt and Heathcote's
boat to Cairo. They are very good specimens and quite recognised as
'belonging to the higher people,' because they 'do not make themselves
big.' I received your letter of January 21 with little darling Rainie's
three days ago.
I am better now that the weather is fine again. We had a whole day's
rain (which Herodotus says is a portent here) and a hurricane from the
south worthy of the Cape. I thought we should have been buried under the
drifting sand. To-day is again heavenly. I saw Abd-el-Azeez, the
chemist in Cairo; he seemed a very good fellow, and was a pupil of my old
friend M. Chrevreul, and highly recommended by him. Here I am out of all
European ideas. The Sheykh-el-Arab (of the Ababdeh tribe), who has a
sort of town house here, has invited me out into the desert to the black
tents, and I intend to pay a visit with old Mustapha A'gha. There is a
Roman well in his yard with a ghoul in it. I can't get the story from
Mustapha, who is 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.