he little creatures run along under one as easy as
possible, and they have no will of their own. I rode mine out to Karnac
and back, and he did not seem to think me at all heavy. When they are
overworked and overgalloped they become bad on the legs and easily fall,
and all those for hire are quite stumped up, poor beasts--they are so
willing and docile that everyone overdrives them.

February 19, 1864: Mrs. Austin

_To Mrs. Austin_.

LUXOR,
_February_ 19, 1864.

DEAREST MUTTER,

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