Lady Lucie Duff Gordon

“ She was one of those rare characters that see the best in every nationality without aping cosmopolitanism, simply because they are content everywhere to be human. Convention and prejudice vex them as little as pedantry can. Their clear eyes look out each morning on a fresh world, and their experiences are a perpetual school of sympathy and never the sad routine of disillusionment.
When Lady Duff Gordon came to the Cape in search of health in 1861, she brought with her, young though she was, a wealth of recollection and experience such as perhaps no other observer of South Africa has known. ”

“ If you have any power over any artists, send them to paint here. No words can describe either the picturesque beauty of Cairo or the splendid forms of the people in Upper Egypt, and above all in Nubia. I was in raptures at seeing how superb an animal man (and woman) really is. My donkey-girl at Thebes, dressed like a Greek statue—Ward es-Sham (the Rose of Syria) —was a feast to the eyes; and here, too, what grace and sweetness, and how good is a drink of Nile water out of an amphora held to your lips by a woman as graceful as she is kindly. ”

“ How I wish I could send you the fruit now on my table—amber-coloured grapes, yellow waxen apples streaked with vermillion in fine little lines, huge peaches, and tiny green figs! I must send dear old Klein a little present from England, to show that I don’t forget my Dutch adorer. I wish I could bring you the ‘Biltong ‘ he sent me—beef or bok dried in the sun in strips, and slightly salted; you may carry enough in your pocket to live on for a fortnight, and it is very good as a little ‘relish’. ”

“ He was a Turkish memlook and his condescension in wishing to serve a Christian woman is astounding. His fair face and clear blue eyes, and brisk, neat, soldier-like air contrast curiously with the brown fellaheen. He is like an Englishman only fairer and like them too fond of the courbash. What would you say if I appeared in Germany attended by a memlook with pistols, sword, dagger, carbine and courbash, and with a decided and imperious manner the very reverse of the Arab softness—and such a Muslim too—prays five times a day and extra fasts besides Ramadan. ”

“ If I could have dreamed of waiting here so long, I would have run up to Algoa Bay or East London by sea, and had a glimpse of Caffreland. Capetown makes me very languid—there is something depressing in the air—but my cough is much better. I can’t walk here without feeling knocked-up; and cab-hire is so dear; and somehow, nothing is worth while, when one is waiting from day to day. So I have spent more money than when I was most amused, in being bored. ”

“ Omar, the colour of new boxwood or old ivory, pale, with eyes like a cow, full lips, full chin and short nose, not the least negro, but perfectly Egyptian, the eyes wide apart—unlike the Arab—moustache like a woman’s eyebrow, curly brown hair, bad hands and feet and not well made, but graceful in movement and still more in countenance, very inferior in beauty to the pure Arab blood which prevails here, but most sweet in expression. ”

“ My old washerwoman sent me a fervent entreaty through Omar that I would dine with her one day, since I had made Cairo delightful with my presence. If one will only devour these people’s food, they are enchanted; they like that much better than a present. So I will honour her house some day. Good old Hannah, she is divorced for being too fat and old, and replaced by a young Turk whose family sponge on Hajjee Ali and are condescending. If I could afford it, I would have a sketch of a beloved old mosque of mine, falling to decay, and with three palm-trees growing in the middle of it. ”

“ The drive to Simon’s Bay was lovely, along the coast and across five beaches of snow-white sand, which look like winter landscapes; and the mountains and bay are lovely.
Living is very dear, and washing, travelling, chemist’s bills—all enormous. Thirty shillings a cart and horse from Rathfelder here—twelve miles; and then the young English host wanted me to hire another cart for one box and one bath! But I would not, and my obstinacy was stoutest. If I want cart or waggon again, I’ll deal with a Malay, only the fellows drive with forty Jehu-power up and down the mountains. ”

“ My kitchen was a pretty scene. Mohammed, in his ample brown robes and white turban, lay asleep on the floor with the baby’s tiny pale face and little eyelids stained with kohl against his coffee-brown cheek, both fast asleep, baby in her father’s arms. Omar leant against the fournaise in his house-dress, a white shirt open at the throat and white drawers reaching to the knees, with the red tarboosh and red and yellow kufyeh (silk handkerchief) round it turban-wise, contemplating them with his great, soft eyes. The two young men made an excellent contrast between Upper and Lower Egypt. ”

“ I am persecuted by the ugliest and blackest Mozambiquer I have yet seen, a bricklayer’s labourer, who can speak English, and says he was servant to an English Captain—‘Oh, a good fellow he was, only he’s dead!’ He now insists on my taking him as a servant. ‘I dessay your man at home is a good chap, and I’ll be a good boy, and cook very nice.’ He is thick-set and short and strong. Nature has adorned him with a cock eye and a yard of mouth, and art, with a prodigiously tall white chimney-pot hat with the crown out, a cotton nightcap, and a wondrous congeries of rags. ”

“ This country noblesse is more interesting to me by far than the town people, though Omar, who is quite a Cockney, and piques himself on being ‘delicate,’ turns up his nose at their beggarly pride, as Londoners used to do at bare-legged Highlanders. The air of perfect equality—except as to the respect due to the head of the clan—with which the villagers treated Mustapha, and which he fully returned, made it all seem so very gentlemanly. They are not so dazzled by a little show, and far more manly than the Cairenes. ”

“ The sea to-day is littered all round the ship with our floating rubbish, so we have not moved at all.
I constantly long for you to be here, though I am not sure you would like the life as well as I do. All your ideas of it are wrong; the confinement to the poop and the stringent regulations would bore you. But then, sitting on deck in fine weather is pleasure enough, without anything else. In a Queen’s ship, a yacht, or a merchantman with fewer passengers, it must be a delightful existence. ”

“ An acquaintance of mine, one Abdurachman, is Boaz, and as I sat with him on the threshing-floor and ate roasted corn, I felt quite puzzled as to whether I were really alive or only existing in imagination in the Book of Ruth. It is such a kief that one enjoys under the palm-trees, with such a scene. The harvest is magnificent here; I never saw such crops. There is no cattle disease, but a good deal of sickness among the people; I have to practise very extensively, and often feel very anxious, as I cannot refuse to go to the poor souls and give them medicine, with sore misgivings all the while. ”

“ She, poor soul, carries a bundle on her head, which few men could lift. If I admire the babies, the poor women are enchanted;—du reste, if you look at blacks of any age or sex, they must grin and nod, as a good-natured dog must wag his tail; they can’t help it. The blacks here (except a very few Caffres) are from the Mozambique—a short, thick-set, ugly race, with wool in huge masses; but here and there one sees a very pretty face among the women. The men are beyond belief hideous. There are all possible crosses—Dutch, Mozambique, Hottentot and English, ‘alles durcheinander’ ”

“ How then should her husband ever desire the coffee-shop? Wallahy! she can always amuse him at home. And as to my lady, the thing is not that she does not know. When I feel my stomach tightened, I go to the divan and say to her, ‘Do you want anything, a pipe, or sherbet, or so and so?’ and I talk till she lays down her book and talks to me, and I question her and amuse my mind, and, by God! if I were a rich man and could marry one English Hareem like that I would stand before her and serve her like her memlook. ”

“ The girls occupy the school in the morning, and the boys in the afternoon; half a day is found quite enough of lessons in this climate. The infant school was of both sexes, but a different set morning and afternoon. The missionaries’ children were in the infant school; and behind the little blonde German ‘Mädels’ three jet black niggerlings rolled over each other like pointer-pups, and grinned, and didn’t care a straw for the spelling; while the dingy yellow little bastaards were straining their black eyes out, with eagerness to answer the master’s questions. ”

“ Can you imagine a house without beds, chairs, tables, cups, glasses, knives—in short, with nothing but an oven, a few pipkins and water-jars, and a couple of wooden spoons, and some mats to sleep on? And yet people are happy and quite civilized who live so. An Arab cook, with his fingers and one cooking-pot, will serve you an excellent dinner quite miraculously. The simplification of life possible in such a climate is not conceivable unless one has seen it. The Turkish ladies whom I visit at Karnac have very little more. ”

“ They don’t give one the notion of human dwellings at all at first, but soon the eye gets used to the absence of all that constitutes a house in Europe, the impression of wretchedness wears off, and one sees how picturesque they are, with palm-trees and tall pigeon-houses, and here and there the dome over a saint’s tomb. The men at work on the river-banks are exactly the same colour as the Nile mud, with just the warmer hue of the blood circulating beneath the skin. ”

“ Then comes a cloud over Table Mountain, like the sugar on a wedding-cake, which tumbles down in splendid waterfalls, and vanishes unaccountably halfway; and then you run indoors and shut doors and windows, or it portends a ‘south-easter’, i.e. a hurricane, and Capetown disappears in impenetrable clouds of dust. But this wind coming off the hills and fields of ice, is the Cape doctor, and keeps away cholera, fever of every sort, and all malignant or infectious diseases. Most of them are unknown here. Never was so healthy a place ”

“ Hekekian had the honour of kissing his old slave’s hand. If anyone tries to make you believe any bosh about civilization in Egypt, laugh at it. The real life and the real people are exactly as described in the most veracious of books, the ‘Thousand and One Nights’; the tyranny is the same, the people are not altered—and very charming people they are. If I could but speak the language I could get into Arab society here through two or three different people, and see more than many Europeans who have lived here all their lives. ”

“ I shall enlarge his backsheesh. There are a lot of camels who sleep in the yard under my verandah; they are pretty and smell nice, but they growl and swear at night abominably. I wish I could draw you an Egyptian farm-yard, men, women and cattle; but what no one can draw is the amber light, so brilliant and so soft, not like the Cape diamond sunshine at all, but equally beautiful, hotter and less dazzling. There is no glare in Egypt like in the South of France, and, I suppose, in Italy. ”