I FOLLOWED my husband to Egypt, where he had returned, in command at Wady Halfa on the expiration of his leave, on November 14th, 1885. I went with our eldest little boy and girl. A new experience for me—the East! One of my longings in childhood was to see the East. There it was for me.

Cairo in 1885 still retained much of its Oriental aspect in the European quarter. (I don’t suppose the old, true Cairo will ever change.) I was just in time. The Shepheard’s Hotel of that day had a terrace in front of it where we used to sit and watch the life of the street below, an occupation very pleasing to myself. The building was overrun with a wealth of flowering creepers of all sorts of loveliness, and surrounded with a garden. When next we visited Cairo the creepers were being torn down, and the terrace demolished. Then a huge hotel was run up in avaricious haste to reap the next season’s harvest from the thronging visitors, and now stands flush with the street to echo the trams.

It is difficult for me now to revive in memory the exquisite surprise I felt when first I saw the life of the East. I could hardly believe the thing was real, everyday life. Though I have often returned to Egypt since, that first-time feeling never was renewed, though my enjoyment of Oriental beauty and picturesqueness never, I am glad to say, faded in the least. Oh, you who enjoy the zest of life, be thankful that you possess it! It is a thing not to be acquired, but to be born with. I think artists keep it the longest, for it enters the heart by the eye. The long letters I wrote to my mother on the spot and at the moment I incorporated later in the little book already referred to. Oh, the pleasures of memory, streaked with sadness though they must be, and with ugly things of all kinds, too! Still, how intensely precious a possession they are when weeded. To me, after Italy and, of course, the Holy Land, give me the Nile.

I and the children remained in Cairo till I got my husband’s message from the front that the way was clear enough for our journey as far as Luxor. There I and the children remained until the fight at Giniss was won and all danger was over further up stream. At Luxor began the most enjoyable of all modes of travel—by houseboat. The dahabiyeh Fostat was sent down from Wady Halfa to take us up to Assouan, where my husband awaited us. We had reached Luxor from Cairo by the commonplace post boat. The Assouan Dam was, of course, not in existence, and our dahabiyeh had to be hauled in the old way through the first cataract, while we transferred ourselves to another dahabiyeh moored off the now submerged island of PhilÆ.

This cut-and-dried chronicle includes one of the most enchanting experiences of my life. Above PhilÆ we entered Nubia, before whose intensified colouring the lower desert pales. Time being very precious to my husband, our slow, dreamy sailing houseboat had to be towed by a little steamer for the rest of the way to Wady Halfa, where we lived till the heat of March warned us that I and the children must prudently go into northern coolness. And to Plymouth we returned, leaving the General to drag out the burning summer at Wady Halfa in such heat as I never had had to suffer. While at Halfa I made many sketches in oil for my picture, “A Desert Grave,” out in the desert across the river. It is very trying painting in the desert on account of the wind, which blows the sand perpetually into your eyes. With that and the glare, I took two inflamed eyes back with me to Europe. The picture should have been more poetical than it turned out to be, and I wish I could repaint it now. It was well placed at the Academy. The Upper Nile had these graves of British officers and men all along its banks during that terrible toll taken in the course of the Gordon Expedition and after, some in single loneliness, far apart, and some in twos and threes. These graves had to be made exactly in the same way as those of the enemy, lest a cross or some other Christian mark should invite desecration.

The World War has thrown a dreadful cloud between us and those old war days, but the cloud in time will spread out thinner and let us look through to those past times.

My next experience was Brittany. Thither we went for a rest, and to give the children the habit of talking French. At Dinan, in an old farmhouse, we ruralised amidst orchards and amongst the Breton peasantry. Very nice and quiet and healthy. There our youngest boy was born, Martin William, who was immediately inscribed on the army books as liable for service in the French Army if he reached the age of eighteen on French soil. During that part of our stay at Dinan I painted the 24th Dragoons, who were stationed there, leaving the town by the old Porte St. Malo for the front, a great crowd of people seeing them off. I had mounted dragoons and peasants for the asking as models.

My husband was knighted—K.C.B.—in this interval, at Windsor. We went to live in Ireland from Dinan, in 1888, under the Wicklow Mountains, where the children continued their healthy country life in its fulness. The picture I had painted of the departing dragoons went to the Academy in 1889, and in 1890 I exhibited “An Eviction in Ireland,” which Lord Salisbury was pleased to be facetious about in his speech at the banquet, remarking on the “breezy beauty” of the landscape, which almost made him wish he could take part in an eviction himself. How like a Cecil!

The ‘eighties had seen our Government do some dreadful things in the way of evictions in Ireland. Being at Glendalough at the end of that decade, and hearing one day that an eviction was to take place some nine miles distant from where we were staying for my husband’s shooting, I got an outside car and drove off to the scene, armed with my paints. I met the police returning from their distasteful “job,” armed to the teeth and very flushed. On getting there I found the ruins of the cabin smouldering, the ground quite hot under my feet, and I set up my easel there. The evicted woman came to search amongst the ashes of her home to try and find some of her belongings intact. She was very philosophical, and did not rise to the level of my indignation as an ardent English sympathiser. However, I studied her well, and on returning home at Delgany I set up the big picture which commemorates a typical eviction in the black ‘eighties. I seldom can say I am pleased with my work when done, but I am complacent about this picture; it has the true Irish atmosphere, and I was glad to turn out that landscape successfully which I had made all my studies for, on the spot, at Glendalough. What storms of wind and rain, and what dazzling sunbursts I struggled in, one day the paints being blown out of my box and nearly whirled into the lake far below my mountain perch! My canvas, acting like a sail, once nearly sent me down there too. I did not see this picture at all at the Academy, but I am very certain it cannot have been very “popular” in England. Before it was finished my husband was appointed to the command at Alexandria, and as soon as I had packed off the “Eviction,” I followed, on March 24th, and saw again the fascinating East.

My journey took me vi Venice, where the P.& O. boat Hydaspes was waiting. Can any journey to Egypt be more charming than this one, right across Italy?

Oh! you who do not think a journey a mere means of getting to your destination as quickly as possible, say, if you have taken the Milan-Verona-Padua line, is there anything in all Italy to surpass that burst on the view of the Lago di Garda after you emerge from the Lonato tunnel? On a blue day, say in spring? If you have not gone that way yet, I beg you to be on the look-out on your left when you do go. This wonderful surprise is suddenly revealed, and almost as quickly lost. Waste not a second. I put up at the “Angleterre” at Venice, on the Riva, because from there one sees the lagunes and glimpses of the open sea beyond, and the air is open and fresh.

“March 28th.—Took gondola for the big P. & O. S.S. which is to be my home for the next six days. I at once saw the ship was one of their smartest boats, and all looked very festive on board. Luncheon was served immediately after my arrival, and I found a bright company thereat assembled, with Sir Henry and Lady Layard at their head; some come to see friends off and others to go on. We amalgamated very pleasantly, and great was the waving of handkerchiefs as we slowly steamed past the Dogana and the Riva, our returning friends having gone on shore in gondolas whose sable sides were hidden in brilliant draperies. The sashes of the gondoliers’ liveries flashed in coloured silks and gold fringes; the sea sparkled. I rejoiced. The Montalba girls gave us a salvo of pocket handkerchiefs from their balcony on the Giudecca. What a gay scene! Lady Layard, on leaving, introduced Mrs. H. M., who was to join her husband at Brindisi for a long trip in the big liner from England, and I was very happy at the prospect of her pleasant and intellectual companionship thus far.”

And so we passed out into the early night on the dim Adriatic, after a sunset farewell to Venice, which remains to me as one of the tenderest visions of the past. That voyage to Alexandria is more enjoyable, given fair weather, than most voyages, because one is hardly ever out of sight of land, and such classic land, too! The Ionian Islands, “Morea’s Hills,” Candia. But what a pleasure it is to see on the day before the arrival the signs that the landing is near at hand. The General in Command will be waiting at sunrise on the landing stage, perhaps the light catching the gold lace on his cap, appearing above the turbans of the native crowd. Of course every one who has been to Egypt knows the feeling of disappointment at the first sight of its shores, low-lying and fringed with those incongruous windmills which the Great Napoleon vainly planted there to teach the natives how better to make flour. In vain. And so were his wheelbarrows. The natives preferred carrying the mud in their hands. And the city, how it fails to give you the Oriental impression you are longing for, with its pseudo-Italian architecture, its hard paved streets, and dusty boulevards and squares. Government House on the Boulevard de Ramleh was comfortable, roomy and airy, but I missed the imagined garden and palm trees of the Cairo official residence.

“April 3rd.—We have a view of Cleopatra’s Tomb (so called) to the right, jutting out into the intensely blue sea, but the other arm of the bay (the old Roman harbour) to our left, covered with native houses and minarets, is partly hidden by an abomination which hurts me to exasperation, one of those amorphous buildings of tenth-rate Italian vulgarity and dreariness which are being run up here in such quantities, and rears its gaunt expanse close behind this house. To cap this erection it has received the title of ‘Bombay Castle.’ Never mind, I shall soon, in my happy way, cease to notice what I don’t like to see, and shall enjoy all that is left here of the original East and its fascinating barbaric beauty. Will took me for a most interesting drive, first to Ras-el-Tin, during which we threaded a conglomeration of East and West which was bewildering. There were nightmarish Italian ‘palazzi’ loaded with cheap, bluntly-moulded stucco; glaring streets, cafÉs, dusty gardens, over-dressed Jewish and Levantine women driving about in exaggerated hats, frocks and figures; and there also appeared the dark narrow bazaars and original streets, the latticed windows, the finely-coloured robes of the natives, the weird goats, the wolfish dogs, straying about in all directions. Mounds of rubbish everywhere; some only the leavings of newly-built houses, some the remains of the bombardment’s havoc, others the dust of a once beautiful city whose loveliness in old Roman times must have been supreme.

“Only here and there was I reminded of the charm of Cairo—a tree by a yellow wall, a group of natives eating sugar cane, a water-seller with his tinkling brass cups and a rose behind his ear, and so on. We then had a really enjoyable drive along the Mahmoudieh Canal, which was balm to my mind and eyes. All along the placid water on the opposite bank ran Arab villages with their accompaniments of palms, buffaloes, goats, water jars, native men and women in scriptural robes; water wheels; square-shaped, almost window-less mud dwellings, so appropriate under that intense light. On our bank were the remnants of Pashadom in the shape of gimcrack palaces closed and let go to ruin, on account of fashion having betaken itself to the suburb of Ramleh. These dwellings were, however, so hidden in deep tropical gardens of great and rich beauty that they did not offend.

“Beyond the Arab villages on the other bank appeared Lake Mareotis, and there was a poetical feeling about all that region. It was so strange to have on one side of a narrow band of water old Egypt and the life of the East going on just as it has been for ages past, and on the other the ephemeral tokens of the sham and fleeting life of to-day, and this all the way along a drive of some two miles. This is the fashionable drive, and to see young Egypt on horseback, and old Jewry in carriages, passing and repassing up and down this cosmopolitan Rotten Row is decidedly trying. My admired friends, the running syces, though, redeem the thing to me. Their dress is one of the most perfect in shape, colour and material ever devised. The air was rich with the scent of strange flowers, some of which billowed over entrance gates in magnificent purple masses.”

I must be excused for having shown irritation in my Diary at starting. I soon adapted myself to the entourage, and I hope I “did my manners” as became my official responsibilities. I liked the Greeks best of all—nay, I got very fond of these handsome, sunny people.

It was a curiously cosmopolitan society, and I, who am never good at remembering the little feuds that are always simmering in this kind of mixed company, must have sometimes made mistakes. I heard a Greek woman, who had dined with us the previous evening, informing her friends in a voice fraught with meaning, ”Imaginez, hier au soir chez le GÉnÉral Monsieur Gariopulo a donnÉ le bras À Madame Buzzato!” The recipients of this information were filled with mirth. What had I done in pairing off these two for the procession to dinner?

The British were entrenched at Ramleh. The little stations on the railway there gave me quite a turn at first sight. One was “Bulkley,” the next “Fleming,” then “Sydney O. Schutz,” and finally San Stefano at railhead, and a casino with a corrugated iron roof under that scorching sun. Oh, that I should see such a thing in Egypt! Cheek by jowl with the little villas one saw weird Bedouin tents and wild Arabs and their animals, carrying on their existence as if the Briton had never come there.

The incongruities of Alexandria became to me positively enjoyable; and the desert air, as ever, was life-giving. My little Syrian horse, “Minnow,” carried me many a mile alongside my husband’s charger, over that pleasant desert sand. But an occasional khamseen wind gave me a taste of the disagreeable phase of Egyptian weather. I name, with the vivid recollection of the khamseen’s irritating qualities, the experience of paying calls (in a nice toilette) under its suffocating puffs. And how the flies swarm; how they settle in black masses on the sweetmeats sold in the streets, and hang in tassels from the native children’s eyes. Oh, yes, there is a seamy side to all things, but it isn’t my way to turn it up more than is necessary. Here may follow a bit of Diary:

“May 22nd.—We had a memorable picnic at Rosetta to-day, with thirty of the English colony. I had long wished to visit this ancient city, brick-built and half deserted, a once opulent place, but now mournful in its decay. I longed to see old Nile once more. We chartered a special train and left Moharram Bey Station at 8 a.m. I was much pleased with the seaside desert and the effects of mirage over Aboukir Bay. The ancient town of Edkou struck me very much. It was built of the small brown Rosetta brick, and was placed on a hill, giving it a different aspect from the usual Arab pale-walled villages which are usually built on level ground. It had thus a peculiar character. Shortly before reaching Rosetta the land becomes richly cultivated. There is a subtle beauty about the cultivated regions of this fascinating land of Egypt which I feel very much. It is the beauty of abundance and richness as well as of vivid colour.

“At Rosetta dense crowds of natives awaited us and some police were detailed to escort us through the town. I heard some of the women of our party wishing they could pick the blue tiles off the minarets, but for my part I prefer them under their lovely sky and sunshine, rather than ornamenting mantelpieces in a Kensington fog. A little musharabieh lattice is still left here in the windows and has not yet been taken to grace the British drawing-rooms of Ramleh. We strolled about the bazaars and into the old ramshackle mosques, and, altogether, exhausted the sights. Everywhere in Rosetta you see beautiful little Corinthian marble columns incorporated with the Arab buildings, and supporting the ceilings and pulpits of the mosques. They are daubed over with red plaster. Very often a rich Corinthian capital is used as a base to a pillar by being turned upside down, so that the shaft, crowned with its own capital, possesses two—one at each end—an arrangement evidently satisfactory to the barbarian Arabs who succeeded the classic builders of the old city. Almost every angle of a house has a Greek column acting as corner stone. But the brown brickwork is very dismal, and but for the vivid colours of the people’s dresses the monotony of tone would be displeasing. This is Bairam, and the people during the three days’ feast succeeding the dismal Ramadan Fast are in their most radiant dresses, and revelry and feasting are going on everywhere. Such a mass of moving colour as was the market place of Rosetta to-day these eyes, that have seen so much, never looked upon before.

“At last, when we had climbed into enough mosques and poked about into houses, and through all the bazaars (the fish bazaar was trying), we went down to the landing stage and took boat for the trysting place, about a mile up the broad, wind-lashed Nile. Will and the Bishop of Clifton, sole remaining straggler from the late pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and half our party had gone on before us; and, after a quick sail along the palm-fringed bank, we arrived at the pretty landing place chosen for our picnic. We found a tent pitched and the servants busy laying the cloth under a dense sycamore, close to an old mosque whose onion-shaped dome and Arab minaret gave me great pleasure as we came in sight of them. I was impatient to make a sketch. I lost no time, and went off and established myself in a palm grove with my water colours. The usual Egyptian drawbacks, however, were there—flies, and puffs of sand blown into one’s eyes and powdering one’s paints. On the Mahmoudieh Canal I am exempt from the sand nuisance, and nothing can be pleasanter than my experience there, sitting in an open carriage with the hood up, and not a soul to bother me.

“Our return to Rosetta was lively. As we were then going against the wind, we had to be towed from the shore, and it was very interesting to watch the agility of our crew dodging in and out of the boats moored under the bank and deftly disengaging the tow-rope from the spars and rigging of these vessels. A tall Circassian effendi of police cantered on his little Arab along the bank to see that all went well with us. The other half of our party chose to sail and progress by laborious tacking from one side of the wide river to the other, and arrived long after we did. We all met at the house of the Syrian postmaster, where he and his pretty little wife received us with native politeness, and gave us coffee and sweets. Our return journey was most pleasant, and we got to Alexandria at 8 p.m. Twelve charming hours.

“May 24th.—The Queen’s birthday. Trooping of the colour at 5 p.m. on the Moharrem Bey Ground. Most successful. Will, mounted on a powerful chestnut, did look a commanding figure as he raised his plumed helmet and led the ringing cheers for the Queen which brought the pretty ceremony to a close. The sun was near setting behind the height of Komeldik, and lit up the roses in the men’s helmets and garlanded round the standard. In the evening a dull and solemn dinner to the heads of departments and their wives. A difficult function. We had the band of the Suffolks playing outside the windows, which were wide open on the sea. I went out sketching in the morning, very early. I should have been at my post all day on such an occasion, I confess. Will said I was like Nero, fiddling while Rome was burning.

“May 29th.—The Mediterranean Fleet is here. Great interchange of cards, firing of salutes, etc., etc. All very ceremonious, but productive of picturesqueness and colour and effect, so I like it very much. The Khedive Tewfik, too, has arrived, with the Khediviah, for the hot season from Cairo. Will, of course, had to be present at the station this morning for the reception of our puppet, and it was not nice to see the Union Jack down in the dust as the guard of honour of the Suffolks gave the salute. Our dinner to-night was to the admiral and officers of the newly-arrived British squadron.

“June 2nd.—To the Khediviah’s first reception at the harem of the Ras-el-Tin Palace. I had two Englishwomen to present, rather an unmanageable pair, as seniority appeared to be claimed erroneously at the last moment by the junior. This reception has become a most dull affair now that Oriental ways are done away with. Dancing girls no longer amuse the guests, nor handmaidens cater to them with sweetmeats during the audience, and there is nothing left but absolute emptiness. The Vice-Reine sits, in European dress, on a divan at the end of a vast hall, and the visitors sit in a semi-circle before her on hard European chairs reflected in a polished parquet, speaking to each other in whispers and furtively sipping coffee. She addresses a few remarks to those nearest her, and the pauses are articulated by the click of the ever-moving fans of the assembly. The ladies-in-waiting and girl slaves move about in a mooning way in the funniest frocks, supposed to be European, but some of them absolutely frumpish. Melancholy eunuchs of the bluest black, in glossy frock coats, rise and bow as one passes along the passages to or from the presence, and it is a relief to get out through the jealously-walled garden into the outer world.

“I find it difficult to converse in a harem, being so bad at small talk. I upset the Vice-Reine’s equanimity by telling her (which was quite true) that I had heard she was taking lessons in painting. ‘Moi, madame?!! Oh! je n’aurais pas le courage!’ It was as bad as when I told her, in Cairo, how much I liked poking about the bazaars. ‘Vous allez dans les bazaars, madame?!!’ So I relapsed into talking of illnesses, which subject I have always found touches the proper note in a harem. They say the Vice-Reine delights in these audiences, as they are amongst the great events of her days. She is a beautiful woman, a Circassian, and of lovely whiteness.

“Finished the delicate sketch of the loveliest bit of the canal, where the pink minaret and the black cypress are. I wish I could do just one more reach of that lovely waterway before I leave! There is a particular group of oleanders nodding with heavy pink blossom by the water’s edge against a soft blurred background of tamarisk, where women and girls in dark blue, brilliant orange, and rose-coloured robes come down to fetch water in their amphorÆ. There is another reach lined for the whole length of the picture with tall waving canebrakes, above whose tender green tops appears the delicate distance of the lagoons of Mareotis; there is—but ah! each bend of that canal reveals fresh beauties, and often as Will has driven me there, I am as eager as ever to miss no point in the lovely sequence.

“June 14th.—All my days now I am sketching more continuously, as the arduous work of paying calls has relaxed greatly. This evening we drove again far beyond Ramleh on the old route followed by Napoleon to reach Aboukir, and I finished the sketch there.”

And so on, till my departure a few days later. I had wisely left my oils at home at Delgany, and thus got together a much larger number of subjects, the handier medium of water-colour being better suited to the official life I had to attend to.