rite anon to the rest.
Let Mutter have this. I was very poorly till I got above Siout, and then
gradually mended--constant blood spitting and great weakness and I am
very thin, but, by the protection of Abu-l-Hajjaj I suppose I am already
much better, and begin to eat again. I have not been out yet since the
first day, having much to do in the house to get to rights. I felt very
dreary on Christmas-day away from you all, and Omar's plum-pudding did
not cheer me at all, as he hoped it would. He begs me to kiss your hand
for him, and every one sends you salaam, and all lament that you are not
the new Consul at Cairo.

Kiss my chicks, and love to you all. Janet, I hope is in Egypt ere this.

January 3, 1866: Maurice Duff Gordon

_To Maurice Duff Gordon_.

LUXOR,
_January_ 3, 1866.

MY DARLING MAURICE,

I was delighted to get your note, which arrived on New Year's day in the
midst of the hubbub of the great festival in honour of the Saint of
Luxor. I wish you could have seen two young Arabs (real Arabs from the
Hedjaz, in Arabia) ride and play with spears and lances. I never saw
anything like it--a man who played the tom-fool stood in the middle, and
they galloped round and round him, with their spears crossed and the
points resting on the ground, in so small a circle that his clothes
whisked round with the wind of the horses' legs. Then they threw jereeds
and caught them as they galloped: the beautiful thing was the perfect
mastery of the horses: they were 'like water in their hands,' as Sheykh
Hassan remarked. I perceived that I had never seen _real_ horsemanship
in my life before.

I am now in the 'palace' at Luxor with my dahabieh, 'Arooset er-Ralee'
(the Darling Bride), under my windows; quite like a Pasha.

In coming up we had an alarm of robbers. Under the mountain called Gebel
Foodah, we were entangled in shoals, owing to a change in the bed of the
river, and forced to stay all night; and at three in the morning, the
Reis sent in the boy to say he had seen a man creeping on all
fours--would I fire my pistol? As my revolver had been stolen in Janet's
house, I was obliged to beg him to receive any possible troop of armed
robbers very civilly, and to let them take what they pleased. However,
Omar blazed away with your father's old cavalry pistols (