_Wednesday, 11th._--Got on with my sketches. Have begun two or three rough small studies of heads. Hate sketching heads rapidly; it is unavoidably and odiously free and easy, and nearly all that is worth escapes. But I have no time for more, and, I suppose, the sketches will be useful. One man, with a face like a camel, whom I drew in profile, was annoyed (though in a general way complimentary) at seeing only one eye in the picture. This struck me as quaint; for he was _blind_ of the other; he had not been defrauded of much. My delight, in the evening, is to watch the processions of women and girls coming down to the Nile to fetch water. The brown figures, clad in brown, coming, in long rows, along the brown bank in all the glow and glory of sunset, look very grand; very grand, too, returning up the steep bank, along the violet sky, with their long, flowing folds and the full pitchers now erect on their heads (when empty they carry them horizontally). They are neither handsome individually nor particularly well made, but their movements are good, and the repetition of the same "motive" many times in succession makes the whole scene impressive and stately. There is no more fruitful source of effect in Nature or Art than iteration. The suppleness of the limbs of the children here is extraordinary. I have seen little girls squatting like grasshoppers in the Nile drinking, _à même_, the water in which they were standing little more than ankle deep. An hour after nightfall the dahabieh, my neighbour, slipped her cables and began to drift down the river; but not till the rhapsodist had chanted his ditty to the approving murmurs of his little circle as on the preceding night. His singing has a great charm for me; I shall miss it. It reminds me much of Andalusian singing and moonlight nights in the Bay of Cadiz--there is about it a strangeness and a wayward melancholy that attach and charm me. It was a love song (I am told, for I could not hear the words, and should have understood very few if I had). "Ya leyl! ya leyl! ya leyl!"--the eternal refrain of Arab songs. "Oh night! oh night! oh night! you have left a fire in my heart, oh my beloved! Oh my beloved, do not forget me!" &c. &c. &c.