June 17.—­We have had four or five days of such fearful heat with a Simoom that I have been quite knocked up, and literally could not write.  Besides, I sit in the dark all day, and am now writing so—­and at night go out and sit in the verandah, and can’t have candles because of the insects.  I sleep outside till about six a.m., and then go indoors till dark again.  This fortnight is the hottest time.  To-day the drop falls into the Nile at its source, and it will now rise fast and cool the country.  It has risen one cubit, and the water is green; next month it will be blood colour.  My cough has been a little troublesome again, I suppose from the Simoom.  The tooth does not ache now. Alhamdulillah! for I rather dreaded the muzeyinn (barber) with his tongs, who is the sole dentist here.  I was amused the other day by the entrance of my friend the Maohn, attended by Osman Effendi and his cawass and pipe-bearer, and bearing a saucer in his hand, wearing the look, half sheepish, half cocky, with which elderly gentlemen in all countries announce what he did, i.e., that his black slave-girl was three months with child and longed for olives, so the respectable magistrate had trotted all over the bazaar and to the Greek corn-dealers to buy some, but for no money were they to be had, so he hoped I might have some and forgive the request, as I, of course, knew that a man must beg or even steal for a woman under these circumstances.  I called Omar and said, ’I trust there are olives for the honourable Hareem of Seleem Effendi—­they are needed there.’  Omar instantly understood the case, and ’Praise be to God a few are left; I was about to stuff the pigeons for dinner with them; how lucky I had not done it.’  And then we belaboured Seleem with compliments.  ‘Please God the child will be fortunate to thee,’ say I. Omar says, ’Sweeten my mouth, oh Effendim, for did I not tell thee God would give thee good out of this affair when thou boughtest her?’ While we were thus rejoicing over the possible little mulatto, I thought how shocked a white Christian gentleman of our Colonies would be at our conduct to make all this fuss about a black girl—­’he give her sixpence’ (under the same circumstances I mean) ’he’d see her d—–­d first,’ and my heart warmed to the kind old Muslim sinner (?) as he took his saucer of olives and walked with them openly in his hand along the street.  Now the black girl is free, and can only leave Seleem’s house by her own good will and probably after a time she will marry and he will pay the expenses.  A man can’t sell his slave after he has made known that she is with child by him, and it would be considered unmanly to detain her if she should wish to go.  The child will be added to the other eight who fill the Maohn’s quiver in Cairo and will be exactly as well looked on and have equal rights if he is as black as a coal.