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