's brother, and a good man, clean and careful
and quiet, better than my Reis even--they are a respectable family. Big
stout Hazazin owes me 200 piastres which he is to work out, so I have
still five men and a boy to get. I hope a nice boy, called Hederbee (the
lizard), will come. They don't take pay till the day before we sail,
except the Reis and Abdul Sadig, who are permanent. But Hassan and
Hoseyn are working away as merrily as if they were paid. People growl at
the backsheesh, but they should also remember what a quantity of service
one gets for nothing here, and for which, oddly enough, no one dreams of
asking backsheesh. Once a week we shift the anchors, for fear of their
silting over, and six or eight men work for an hour; then the mast is
lowered--twelve or fourteen men work at this--and nobody gets a farthing.

The other day Omar met in the market an 'agreeable merchant,' an
Abyssinian fresh from his own country, which he had left because of the
tyranny of Kassa, alias Todoros, the Sultan. The merchant had brought
his wife and concubines to live here. His account is that the mass of
the people are delighted to hear that the English are coming to conquer
them, as they hope, and that everyone hates the King except two or three
hundred scamps who form his bodyguard. He had seen the English
prisoners, who, he says, are not ill-treated, but certainly in danger, as
the King is with difficulty restrained from killing them by the said
scamps, who fear the revenge of the English; also that there is one woman
imprisoned with the native female prisoners. Hassan the donkeyboy, when
he was a _marmiton_ in Cairo, knew the Sultan Todoros, he was the only
man who could be found to interpret between the then King of Abyssinia
and Mohammed Ali Pasha, whom Todoros had come to visit. The merchant
also expressed a great contempt for the Patriarch, and for their
_Matraam_ or Metropolitan, whom the English papers call the _Abuna_.
_Abuna_ is Arabic for 'our father.' The man is a Cairene Copt and was a
hanger-on of two English missionaries (they were really Germans) here,
and he is more than commonly a rascal and a hypocrite. I know a
respectable Jew whom he had robbed of all his merchandise, only Ras Alee
forced the _Matraam_ to disgorge. Pray what was all that nonsense about
the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem writing to Todoros? what could he
have to do with it? The Coptic Patriarch, whose place is Cairo, could do
it