There was a gymkhana one day, and it was very good fun; camel races and buffalo races and all varieties of donkey races; one very amusing race was for gentlemen riding one donkey and driving another with long reins in front of him. The leaders would seldom go straight, and they got hopelessly mixed up in the reins, and had to be disentangled several times. A favourite amusement here is to play hare and hounds on donkeys. They have quite a big meet of hounds near the hotel, and the hares (three of them) have a long start to give them time to ride out to Karnak, and then they have to try to ride back to the racecourse without being caught. The hounds are divided into three packs--the fast, the medium, and the slow; the master has to be a man of tact: he sends off with the fast pack the keen young tourists, many of them Americans, the men riding in their shirt sleeves, and they gallop out to the boundary to drive the hares in; then the medium pack trot out in a business-like way, ladies and gentlemen, who are probably very correct in their costume for riding in the Row, and who would not think of riding at home without a top-hat; and, lastly, the slow pack, consisting of people who (in some cases) hardly know a horse from a donkey, and who solemnly jog down to the racecourse and then loiter about to see the fun when the hares come in. The natives take a great interest in this sport, and call it "hunting the Mahdi," but their sympathies seem to be entirely with the hares, and they give them every assistance by scouting about for the hounds, and secreting the hares and their donkeys in their mud houses when there is danger about. Dr. R. and I were the hares one day, and we had a most exciting ride, but were caught at last just as we reached the racecourse. At one point I was hustled into a native house (just mud walls with no proper roof), and found a buffalo being milked in one corner and a baby lying on the ground in another, and from there I watched half-a-dozen hounds gallop past, thinking they were close on my heels, and when they got out of sight I doubled off in another direction. The donkeys seem quite to enter into the fun of the thing, and do their best, but sometimes they get excited and bray--inexcusable behaviour, which is most disconcerting when you are trying to hide in a patch of sugar-cane! XXI LUXOR, UPPER EGYPT, _January 1898_. It was difficult for us to realise the snow and cold that you had for Christmas, while we were enjoying perpetual sunshine here. My patient is now established in his little mud house, just across the road from this hotel. I am thankful to say his mother and brother have arrived, so we share the nursing between us. It has been downhill work lately, and now he seldom leaves his bedroom, a large "upper chamber" with a nice view over the palm-trees to the Nile.