1889] Building Adventures 15 



and by general advice he was cut up at once into four portions and 

 thrust down the throat of a sick camel they had with them, for a cure. 1 

 Four other smaller snakes were also killed, but these were of a harm- 

 less kind. They tell me a horned viper was also seen in the garden, 

 a fortnight before I came, but this is unusual except in the extreme 

 heat of summer. Lizards, of course, are plentiful. I have seen one 

 with rudimentary legs only, making its way along the ground as snakes 

 do, its feet hardly helping it. 



" 22nd Jan. — We have begun a new wing to the house, building with 

 the ordinary sun-dried bricks, contracted for at the rate of 8 piastres 

 to the cubic metre. There will be three rooms upstairs and three down- 

 stairs, and the whole will cost about £80. Also I bought a new engine 

 for irrigation, and I am restocking the garden with young orange 

 plants, and in two or three years, if things go well, it will be a better 

 property than when I bought it seven years ago. I could be quite 

 content to spend the rest of my days in this pleasant work. 



" 2qth Jan. — To-day two three-year-old colts and a filly arrived at 

 the garden, which I have bought of AH Pasha Sherif, all three of the 

 Viceroy Abbas I's stock, one colt and a filly, a Jellabi, the other a 

 Seglawi Ibn Soudan. This last ought to be valuable some day for 

 our stud in England. [This was ' Mesaoud,' so celebrated afterwards 

 as our most successful sire.] AH Pasha's horses are the only ones of 

 pure Arabian breed in Egypt, and there are certain points about them 

 superior to all others, perhaps. He has an old one-eyed Seglawi 

 named Ibn Nadir, which I consider the finest horse, taking him all 

 round, I ever saw, white, with immense strength and breeding com- 

 bined, long and low, with splendid legs and hocks, a fine head and 

 neck, tail always carried. Our colts arrived as the noonday gun was 

 being fired from the citadel at Cairo. They had been brought round 

 by the desert entrance through Zeyd's precaution to avoid the evil 

 eye. He also sacrificed a lamb on the threshold of the garden and 

 sprinkled their foreheads with blood. I like these old Mosaic rites and 

 superstitions. Similarly on Friday the first stone of our new house 

 was laid, and another lamb was slaughtered on the corner-stone, and 

 the blood made to flow over it with a Bismillah errahman errahim. Bfc 

 is possible that the blood of bulls and of goats do not wash away sin, 

 but it must be pleasing still, at any rate more so than the godless rites 

 of our own stone-laying with a champagne bottle. The work-people 

 were then feasted, and a heavy shower of rain came down to bless the 

 building. Zeyd is in the seventh heaven at all these high doings, and 

 is encamped with the horses under the great fig tree. The work- 

 people have a merry time here, men and women working together, and 



1 N.B. — The camel recovered. 



