_To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon_.
OFF BOULAK,
_October_ 19, 1866.
I shall soon sail up the river. Yesterday Seyd Mustapha arrived, who
says that the Greeks are all gone, and the poor Austrian at Thebes is
dead, so I shall represent Europe in my single person from Siout to, I
suppose, Khartoum.
You would delight in Mabrook; a man asked him the other day after his
flogging, if he would not run away, to see what he would say as he
alleged, I suspect he meant to steal and sell him. 'I run away, to eat
lentils like you? when _my_ Effendi gives me meat and bread every day,
and _I eat such a lot_.' Is not that a delicious practical view of
liberty? The creature's enjoyment of life is quite a pleasure to
witness, and he really works very well and with great alacrity. If
Palgrave claims him I think I must buy him.
I hear sad accounts from the Saeed: the new taxes and the new levies of
soldiers are driving the people to despair and many are running away from
the land, which will no longer feed them after paying all exactions, to
join the Bedaween in the desert, which is just as if our peasantry turned
gipsies. A man from Dishne visited me: the people there want me to
settle in their village and offer me a voluntary _corvee_ if I will buy
land, so many men to work for me two days a month each, I haven't a
conception why. It is a place about fifty miles below Luxor, a large
agricultural village.
Omar's wife Mabrookah came here yesterday, a nice young woman, and the
babies are fine children and very sweet-tempered. She told me that the
lion's head, which I sent down to Alexandria to go to you, was in her
room when a neighbour of hers, who had never had a child, saw it, and at
once conceived. The old image worship survives in the belief, which is
all over Egypt, that the 'Anteeks' (antiques) can cure barrenness.
Mabrookah was of course very smartly dressed, and the reckless way in
which Eastern women treat their fine clothes gives them a grand air,
which no Parisian Duchess could hope to imitate--not that I think it a
virtue mind you, but some vices are genteel.
Last night was a great Sheykh's fete, such drumming and singing, and
ferrying across the river. The Nile is running down unusually fast, and
I think I had better go soon, as the mud of Cairo is not so sweet as the
mud of the upper land.