2110-1-8-11

[pencil date: 1901?] [note in blue pen: John Edgar family friend of the Buchans]

Turf Club Cairo

14th Dec

My dearest John

I am writing you under a cloud of the direst Celtic melancholy. I have eaten nothing for 2 days through a fit of indigestion, & have just been filled [failed?] in the Arabic Exam. After 18 months hard work at the fornicating language, for the last 6 hours I have been acting the common drudge correcting examinations in analysis & parsing! God help us. I am shivering with cold have no fire, and I see no prospect of ever retiring to my native land. Egypt at present stinks in my nostrils, its vey stones are an offence to me! I see myself

dwelling for ever in this joyless place, drudging at the basest of all trades, living on a mere pittance, with no hope and no prospect in this world or the next. Also I have distressing visions of the only country, of great hills piled with snow, of holly and mistletoe, and fires roaring up the chimney, of honest Scots faces, and the company of old friends. Truly I think I shall journey again thither, were it only to break stones on the Moffat road.

But seriously I have had a great deal of heart searching lately. I don't know that I was altogether wise in coming out here. As you say about administrative work generally it is an excellent thing if you begin at the top but for a poor devil like myself

when I may have the luck to crawl home and solicit, not in vain I hope, the position of lodgekeeper to your Highland shooting box. It's curious how one's ambitions, or rather the hopes of realising them, dwindle as the years go on. Mine are now narrowed down to a grave in the Irongray Kirkyard.

I believe great things have been going on in Cairo lately. The Duke & Duchess of Connaught have been opening the Aswan Dam, Lord Kitchener and Chamberlain have been and gone, but I have not been able to take much interest in these things lately. When you feel you have drifted hopelessly out of the current, you cease to take much interest in what floats down it.

in the lowest stages it is poor fare indeed. The work is mere drudgery; anyone could do it just as well or just as badly as yourself, and unless you have a Joseph in the land of Egypt the prospect of promotion is a delusion and a snare. For myself, my actual outlook is this: If I remain here, and am not kicked out for incompetence, I shall continue doing work in which I have not a scrap of interest for say 10 years, when I shall reach the princely salary of £31 a month. After that comes a blank wall; I shall have reached the high summit of my earthly hopes. The only thing I can then look forward to if I can stave off the temptation of suicide, is a pension of £100 a year after 25 years service,

Turf Club, Cairo.

And now I am going to bed. I may get up a little more cheerful in the morning. But at present I remain

Your melancholy friend

J Edgar