I call my crew black, don't think of negroes. They are
elegantly-shaped Arabs and all gentlemen in manners, and the black is
transparent, with amber _reflets_ under it in the sunshine; a negro looks
_blue_ beside them. I have learned a great deal that is curious from
Omar's confidences, who tells me his family affairs and talks about the
women of his family, which he would not to a man. He refused to speak to
his brother, a very grand dragoman, who was with the Prince of Wales, and
who came up to us in the hotel at Cairo and addressed Omar, who turned
his back on him. I asked the reason, and Omar told me how his brother
had a wife, 'An old wife, been with him long time, very good wife.' She
had had three children--all dead. All at once the dragoman, who is much
older than Omar, declared he would divorce her and marry a young woman.
Omar said, 'No, don't do that; keep her in your house as head of your
home, and take one of your two black slave girls as your Hareem.' But
the other insisted, and married a young Turkish wife; whereupon Omar took
his poor old sister-in-law to live with him and his own young wife, and
cut his grand brother dead. See how characteristic!--the urging his
brother to take the young slave girl 'as his Hareem,' like a respectable
man--that would have been all right; but what he did was 'not good.'
I'll trouble you (as Mrs. Grote used to say) to settle these questions to
everyone's satisfaction. I own Omar seemed to me to take a view against
which I had nothing to say. His account of his other brother, a
confectioner's household with two wives, was very curious. He and they,
with his wife and sister-in-law, all live together, and one of the
brother's wives has six children--three sleep with their own mother and
three with their _other_ mother--and all is quite harmonious.

SIOUT,
_December_ 10.

I could not send a letter from Minieh, where we stopped, and I visited a
sugar manufactory and a gentlemanly Turk, who superintended the district,
the Moudir. I heard a boy singing a _Zikr_ (the ninety-nine attributes
of God) to a set of dervishes in a mosque, and I think I never heard
anything more beautiful and affecting. Ordinary Arab singing is harsh
and nasal, but it can be wonderfully moving. Since we left Minieh we
have suffered dreadfully from the cold; the chick