of a duty than a diversion, and I have endeavored to impart as much instruction as amusement to the reader. While seeking to give correct pictures of the rich, adventurous life into which I was thrown, I have resisted the temptation to yield myself up to its more subtle and poetic aspects. My aim has been to furnish a faithful narrative of my own experience, believing that none of those embellishments which the imagination so readily furnishes, can equal the charm of the unadorned truth.

There are a few words of further explanation which I wish to say. The journey was undertaken solely for the purpose of restoring a frame exhausted by severe mental labor. A previous experience of a tropical climate convinced me that I should best accomplish my object by a visit to Egypt, and as I had a whole winter before me, I determined to penetrate as far into the interior of Africa as the time would allow, attracted less by the historical and geographical interest of those regions than by the desire to participate in their free, vigorous, semi-barbaric life. If it had been my intention, as some of my friends supposed, to search, for the undiscovered sources of the White Nile, I should not have turned back, until the aim was accomplished or all means had failed.

I am aware that, by including in this work my journey through Egypt, I have gone over much ground