t high-bred Arabs, he is so like
Don Quixote--only Don Quixote quite in his senses. The sort of innocent
sententiousness, and perfectly natural love of fine language and fine
sentiments is unattainable to any European, except, I suppose, a
Spaniard. It is quite unlike Italian fustian or French _sentiment_. I
suppose to most Europeans it is ridiculous, but I used to cry when the
carriers beat the most noble of all knights, when I was a little girl and
read Don Quixote; and now I felt as it were like Sancho, when I listened
to Osman reciting bits of heroic poetry, or uttering 'wise saws' and
'modern instances,' with the peculiar mixture of strong sense of
'exultation' which stamps the great Don. I may not repeat all I heard
from him of the state of things here, and the insults he had to endure--a
Shereef and an educated man--from coarse Turkish Pashas; it was the
carriers over again. He told me he had often cried like a woman, at
night in his own room, at the miseries he was forced to witness and could
do nothing to relieve; all the men I have particularly liked I find are
more or less pupils of the Sheykh el-Bagooree now dead, who seems to have
had a gift of inspiring honourable feeling. Our good Maohn is one; he is
no conjuror, but the honesty and goodness are heroic which lead a man to
starve on 15 pounds a month, when he is expected to grow rich on plunder.

The war in Crete saddens many a household here. Sheykh Yussuf's brother,
Sheykh Yooris, is serving there, and many more. People are actually
beginning to say 'We hope the English and French won't fight for the
Sultan if the Moscovites want to eat him--there will be no good for us
till the Turks are driven out.' All the old religious devotion to the
Sultan seems quite gone.

Poor Mustapha has been very unwell and I stopped his Ramadan, gave him
some physic and ordered him not to fast, for which I think he is rather
grateful. The Imaam and Mufti always endorse my prohibitions of fasting
to my patients. Old Ismaeen is dead, aged over a hundred; he served
Belzoni, and when he grew doting was always wanting me to go with him to
join Belzoni at Abu Simbel. He was not at all ill--he only went out like
a candle. His grandson brought me a bit of the meat cooked at his
funeral, and begged me to eat it, that I might live to be very old,
according to the superstition here. When they killed the buffalo for the
Sheykh Abu-l-Hajjaj, the man who had a right to the f