damp air again. This
depresses me very much as you may suppose. You will have to divorce me,
and I must marry some respectable Kadee. I have been too 'lazy Arab,' as
Omar calls it, to go on with my Arabic lessons, and Yussuf has been very
busy with law business connected with the land and the crops. Every
harvest brings a fresh settling of the land. Wheat is selling at 1 pound
the ardeb {188} here _on the threshing-floor_, and barley at one hundred
and sixteen piastres; I saw some Nubians pay Mustapha that. He is in
comic perplexity about saying _Alhamdulillah_ about such enormous
gains--you see it is rather awkward for a Muslim to thank God for dear
bread--so he compounds by very lavish almsgiving. He gave all his
fellaheen clothes the other day--forty calico shirts and drawers. Do you
remember my describing an Arab _emancipirtes Fraulein_ at Siout? Well,
the other day I saw as I thought a nice-looking lad of sixteen selling
corn to my opposite neighbour, a Copt. It was a girl. Her father had no
son and is infirm, so she works in the field for him, and dresses and
does like a man. She looked very modest and was quieter in her manner
than the veiled women often are.

I am so glad to hear such good accounts of my Rainie and Maurice. I can
hardly bear to think of another year without seeing them. However it is
fortunate for me that 'my lines have fallen in pleasant places,' so long
a time at the Cape or any Colony would have become intolerable. Best
love to Janet, I really can't write, it's too hot and dusty. Omar
desires his salaam to his great master and to that gazelle Sittee Ross.

August 13, 1864: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

_To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon_.

LUXOR,
_August_ 13, 1864.

DEAREST ALICK,

For the last month we have had a purgatory of hot wind and dust, such as
I never saw--impossible to stir out of the house. So in despair I have
just engaged a return boat--a _Gelegenheit_--and am off to Cairo in a day
or two, where I shall stop till _Inshallah_! you come to me. Can't you
get leave to come at the beginning of November? Do try, that is the
pleasant time in Cairo.

I am a 'stupid, lazy Arab' now, as Omar says, having lain on a mat in a
dark stone passage for six weeks or so, but my chest is no worse--better
I think, and my health has