bread.

An idiot of a woman has written to me to get her a place as governess in
an 'European or Arabian family in the neighbourhood of Thebes!'
Considering she has been six years in Egypt as she says, she must be well
fitted to teach. She had better learn to make _gilleh_ and spin wool.
The young Americans whom Mr. Hale sent were very nice. The Yankees are
always the best bred and best educated travellers that I see here.

December 31, 1886: Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

_To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon_.

LUXOR,
_December_ 31, 1886.

DEAREST ALICK,

I meant to have sent you a long yarn by a steamer which went the other
day, but I have been in my bed. The weather set in colder than I ever
felt it here, and I have been very unwell for some time. Dr. Osman
Ibraheem (a friend of mine, an elderly man who studied in Paris in
Mohammed Ali's time) wants me to spend the summer up here and take sand
baths, _i.e._ bury myself up to the chin in the hot sand, and to get a
Dongola slave to rub me. A most fascinating derweesh from Esneh gave me
the same advice; he wanted me to go and live near him at Esneh, and let
him treat me. I wish you could see Sheykh Seleem, he is a sort of
remnant of the Memlook Beys--a Circassian--who has inherited his master's
property up at Esneh, and married his master's daughter. The master was
one of the Beys, also a slave inheriting from his master. Well after
being a terrible _Shaitan_ (devil) after drink, women, etc. Seleem has
repented and become a man of pilgrimage and prayer and perpetual fasting;
but he has retained the exquisite grace and charm of manner which must
have made him irresistible in his _shaitan_ days, and also the
beautifully delicate style of dress--a dove-coloured cloth _sibbeh_ over
a pale blue silk _kuftan_, a turban like a snow-drift, under which flowed
the silky fair hair and beard, and the dainty white hands under the long
muslin shirt sleeve made a picture; and such a smile, and such ready
graceful talk. Sheykh Yussuf brought him to me as a sort of doctor, and
also to try and convert me on one point. Some Christians had made Yussuf
quite miserable, by telling him of the doctrine that all unbaptized
infants went to eternal fire; and as he knew that I had lost a child very
young, it weighed on his mind that perhaps I fre