because I
was glad to come home to 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 h