Sudan Archiveالعربية

TEVEK IN CHARTUM. •>

were tlie last, friends lo wish us a liappy return. AVith outfit for

some years that had cost us much monej'-, and in our lately

assumed Turkish dress and arms, we looked boldly and firmly

towards the future and its unknown dangers ; and now and then,

by the Prussian flags flying from the mast-head and stern of our

Daliabie*, our thoughts were turned back to our distant fatlierland ;

but no f<'ars of home-sickness—never could this overtake us ! The

powerful impressions of this splendid voyage, and the responses

of our minds to these most magnificent views of the world's

wonders, I must for the present drive forcibly from my recol-

lection, and will only mention how my poor brother, near the

cataracts of Ariman, in Upper Nubia, where our bark was nearly

dashed to pieces on the rocks, received a cou^^ejoleil, and that

after ten days of delirium, during which his sufferings tortured my anxious mind, I cured him by the application of blisters. I

then fmcied him as not yet acclimated ; but I, too, who had already

passed many years in the East, was, after a few days' residence at

Chartum, a sufferer under a similar attack of this dreadful malady,

which, alas ! after my return from the White Nile, was the disease

that put an end to my brother's young and promising life.

During our whole residence in Chartum, we were ever in a

most pitiable state, suffering almost continually from attacks of

intermittent and other fevers, there so malignant. Gracious

Heaven, however, so ordered it, that we were always laid up at

different times, once only excepted, when, as about to sit down

to dinner, we both felt so overpowered, as we fancied by the

smell of the vjancls, as to fall back nearly unconscious on the

divan, where more than likely we had then met our fate, liad not

two Italian doctors seen us through the window, and, coming to

our aid, bled_ iis^freely. Our fears, therefore, of being at last

compelled, straggle as we might against it, to sink under the in-

fluence of a climate that slowly saps man's health, and even de-

stroys his mind, could not be looked on as cowardly, or founded

on improbable grounds.

Under such uncomfortable circumstances, it Avas little wonder our

departure from Ciiartufn for Egypt was determined on ; eternal ill-

nesses, despondency, and increasing dislike to an unbearable

* Xiitive boat.

B 2

Text produced by OCR — report an error