Letters from Egypt - Lucy Duff Gordon (best story books to read TXT) 📗

my _beled_ (town), and they all thought it so nice of 'my master' to have come so far to see me because I was sick--all but one Turk, who clearly looked with pitying contempt on so much trouble taken about a sick old woman.

I have left my letter for a long while. You will not wonder--for after some ten days' fever, my poor guest Mohammed Er-Rasheedee died to-day. Two Prussian doctors gave me help for the last four days, but left last night. He sank to sleep quietly at noon with his hand in mine, a good old Muslim sat at his head on one side and I on the other. Omar stood at his head and his black boy Khayr at his feet. We had laid his face to the Kibleh and I spoke to him to see if he knew anything and when he nodded the three Muslims chanted the _Islamee La Illaha_, etc., etc., while I closed his eyes. The 'respectable men' came in by degrees, took an inventory of his property which they delivered to me, and washed the body, and within an hour and a half we all went out to the burial place; I following among a troop of women who joined us to wail for 'the brother who had died far from his place.' The scene as we turned in between the broken colossi and the pylons of the temple to go to the mosque was over-powering. After the prayer in the mosque we went out to the graveyard, Muslims and Copts helping to carry the dead, and my Frankish hat in the midst of the veiled and wailing women; all so familiar and yet so strange. After the burial the Imam, Sheykh Abd-el-Waris, came and kissed me on the shoulders and the Shereef, a man of eighty, laid his hands on my shoulders and said, 'Fear not my daughter, neither all the days of thy life nor at the hour of thy death, for God is with thee.' I kissed the old man's hand and turned to go, but numberless men came and said 'A thousand thanks, O our sister, for what thou hast done for one among us,' and a great deal more. Now the solemn chanting of the _Fikees_, and the clear voice of the boy reciting the Koran in the room where the man died are ringing through the house. They will pass the night in prayer, and to-morrow there will be the prayer of deliverance in the mosque. Poor Khayr has just crept in to have a quiet cry--poor boy. He is in the inventory and to-morrow I must deliver him up to _les autorites_ to be forwarded to Cairo with the rest of the property. He is very ugly with his black face wet and swollen, but he kisses my hand and calls me his mother quite 'natural like'--you see colour is no barrier here.

The weather is glorious this year, and in spite of some fatigue I am extremely well and strong, and have hardly any cough at all. I am so sorry that the young Rothschild was so hard to Er-Rasheedee and that his French doctor refused to come and see him. It makes bad blood naturally. However, the German doctors were most kind and helpful.

The festival of Abu-l-Hajjaj was quite a fine sight, not splendid at all--_au contraire_--but spirit-stirring; the flags of the Sheykh borne by his family chanting, and the men tearing about in mimic fight on horseback with their spears. My acquaintance of last year, Abd-el-Moutovil, the fanatical Sheykh from Tunis was there. At first he scowled at me. Then someone told him how Rothschild had left Er-Rasheedee, and he held forth about the hatred of all the unbelievers to the Muslims, and ended by asking where the sick man was. A quaint little smile twinkled in Sheykh Yussuf's soft eyes and he curled his silky moustache as he said demurely, 'Your Honour must go and visit him at the house of the English Lady.' I am bound to say that the Pharisee 'executed himself handsomely, for in a few minutes he came up to me and took my hand and even hoped I would visit the tomb of Abu-l-Hajjaj with him!!

Since I wrote last I have been rather poorly--more cough, and most wearing sleeplessness. A poor young Englishman died here at the house of the Austrian Consular agent. I was too ill to go to him, but a kind, dear young Englishwoman, a Mrs. Walker, who was here with her family in a boat, sat up with him three nights and nursed him like a sister. A young American lay sick at the same time in the house, he is now gone down to Cairo, but I doubt whether he will reach it alive. The Englishman was buried on the first day of Ramadan where they bury strangers, on the site of a former Coptic church. Archdeacon Moore read the service; Omar and I spread my old flag over the bier, and Copts and Muslims helped to carry the poor stranger. It was a most impressive sight. The party of Europeans, all strangers to the dead but all deeply moved; the group of black-robed and turbaned Copts; the sailors from the boats; the gaily dressed dragomans; several brown-shirted fellaheen and the thick crowd of children--all the little Abab'deh stark naked and all behaving so well, the expression on their little faces touched me most of all. As Muslims, Omar and the boatmen laid him down in the grave, and while the English prayer was read the sun went down in a glorious flood of light over the distant bend of the Nile. 'Had he a mother, he was young?' said an Abab'deh woman to me with tears in her eyes and pressing my hand in sympathy for that far-off mother of such a different race.

Passenger steamboats come now every fortnight, but I have had no letter for a month. I have no almanack and have lost count of European time--to-day is the 3 of Ramadan, that is all I know. The poor black slave was sent back from Keneh, God knows why--because he had no money and the Moudir could not 'eat off him' as he could off the money and property--he believes. He is a capital fellow, and in order to compensate me for what he eats he proposed to wash for me, and you would be amused to see Khayr with his coal-black face and filed teeth doing laundry-maid out in the yard. He fears the family will sell him and hopes he may fetch a good price for 'his boy'--only on the other hand he would so like me to buy him--and so his mind is disturbed. Meanwhile the having all my clothes washed clean is a great luxury.

The steamer is come and I must finish in haste. I have corrected the proofs. There is not much to alter, and though I regret several lost letters I can't replace them. I tried, but it felt like a forgery. Do you cut out and correct, dearest Mutter, you will do it much better than I.


January 8, 1865: Dowager Lady Duff Gordon

_To the Dowager Lady Duff Gordon_.

LUXOR,
_January_ 8, 1865.

DEAR OLD LADY,

I received your kind letter in the midst of the drumming and piping and chanting and firing of guns and pistols and scampering of horses which constitute a religious festival in Egypt. The last day of the _moolid_ of Abu-l-Hajjaj fell on the 1st January so you came to wish me 'May all the year be good to thee' as the people here were civil enough to do when I told them it was the first day of the _Frankish_ year. (The _Christian_ year here begins in September.)

I was very sorry to hear of poor Lady Theresa's (Lady Theresa Lewis) death. I feel as if I had no right to survive people whom I left well and strong when I came away so ill. As usual the air of Upper Egypt has revived me again, but I am still weak and thin, and hear many lamentations at my altered looks. However, '_Inshallah_, thou wilt soon be better.'

Why don't you make Alexander edit your letters from Spain? I am sure they would be far more amusing than mine can possibly be--for you _can_ write letters and I never could. I wish I had Miss Berry's though I never did think her such a genius as most people, but her letters must be amusing from the time when they were written. Alexander will tell you how heavy the hand of Pharaoh is upon this poor people. 'My father scourged you with whips but I will scourge you with scorpions,' did not Rehoboam say so? or I forget which King of Judah. The distress here is frightful in all classes, and no man's life is safe.

Ali Bey Rheda told me the other day that Prince Arthur is coming here and that he was coming up with him after taking a Prince of Hohenzollern back to Cairo. There will be all the _fantasia_ possible for him here. Every man that has a horse will gallop him to pieces in honour of the son of the Queen of the English, and not a charge of powder will be spared. If you see Layard tell him that Mustapha A'gha had the whole Koran read for his benefit at the tomb of Abu-l-Hajjaj besides innumerable _fathahs_ which he said for him himself. He consulted me as to the propriety of sending Layard a backsheesh, but I declared that Layard was an Emeer of the Arabs and a giver, not a taker of backsheesh.


January 9, 1865: Mrs. Austin

_To Mrs. Austin_.

LUXOR,
_January_ 9, 1865.

I gave Sheykh Yussuf your knife to cut his _kalem_ (reed pen) with, and to his little girl the coral waistband clasp you gave me _as from you_. He was much pleased. I also brought the Shereef the psalms in Arabic to his great delight. The old man called on all 'our family' to say a _fathah_ for their sister, after making us all laugh by shouting out '_Alhamdulillah_! here is our darling safe back again.'

I wish you could have seen me in the crowd at Keneh holding on to the Kadee's _farageeyeh_ (a loose robe worn by the Ulema). He is the real original Kadee of the Thousand and One Nights. Did ever Kadee tow an Englishwoman round a Sheykh's tomb before? but I thought his determination to show the people that he considered a Christian not out of place in a Muslim holy place very edifying.

I find an exceedingly pleasant man here, an Abab'deh, a very great Sheykh from beyond Khartoum, a man of fifty I suppose, with manners like an English nobleman, simple and polite and very intelligent. He wants to take me to Khartoum for two months up and back, having a tent and a _takhterawan_ (camel-litter) and to show me the Bishareen in the desert. We traced the route on my map which to my surprise he understood, and I found he had travelled into Zanzibar and knew of the existence of the Cape of Good Hope and the English colony there. He had also travelled in the Dinka and Shurook country where the men are seven feet and over high (Alexander saw a Dinka girl at Cairo three inches taller