_Saturday, 14th._--Got up early to finish a couple of sketches, and started at half-past eleven amidst salutes and salaams. To my great relief, the letters which I very rashly sent for from Cairo three weeks ago have just turned up at the last moment--fewer than I had expected, but a great delight: the first and only news I have received since leaving home--such are Egyptian posts! Weather divine: the Nile like an opal mirror, reflecting without a break the faint, sleeping, sultry hills on the horizon: a lovely, drowsy scene. Arrived shortly after three at the village at which one lands for Keneh; a very cheery town about a mile inland. It is generally separated from the landing place on the river during the floods by a vast sheet of water; this year, however, owing to the calamitous lowness of the Nile, a narrow, shallow strip of water, only, intercepts the road, and a large tract of country remains untilled and unfruitful from the want of the quickening flood. Keneh is a very pretty sample of an Egyptian town; it is animated and full of colour, has some pretty minarets, some charming gardens, and more than the usual allowance of ornamental doorways: the effect of the mosaic of black and white bricks is most satisfactory, and has the charm which always accompanies a considerable result produced by very sober and simple means. Great relief is frequently obtained by a band or frieze of carved wood, running across the decorated surface at the springing of the arch; this band is generally carved in circles enclosing patterns and picked out with green and red. In the jambs of the door of one of the mosques, a very beautiful effect was produced by alternate bands of brickwork and minutely carved wood, _not_ coloured (three courses of brick to one band of wood). Visited a pottery, and for the first time in my life saw a pattern-wheel and the artist at work--a most fascinating sight: the bottles and jugs flow into the most graceful forms as if by magic, and look incomparably prettier than when they are baked. I could hardly get away. A little boy scratches a pattern on them as they leave the wheel. The Consul's white donkey, on which I ride about here, is as fleet as the wind and as oily in his movements as a two-oared gondola. _À propos_ of consuls, Mustafa at Thebes showed me his travellers' book--in it I saw an entry of the names of Speke and Grant, with the numbers of their regiments, and the dates of their departure from Zanzibar and their arrival at Khartoum and Thebes. A simple conventional travellers' entry, as if they had returned from an ordinary journey--nothing to hint at the great achievement which brought them such honour and lasting fame.