FEVER IN CHARTUM. 3

were the last friends to wish us a happy return. "With outfit for

some years that had cost us much money, 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

Dahabie*, our thoughts were turned back to our distant fatl)erland ;

but no fears 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 cotip de soleil, 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 fancied 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, tliere 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 viands, as to fall back nearly unconscious on the

divan, where more than likely we had then met our fate, had not two Italian doctors seen us through the window, and, coming to our aid, bled us freely. Our fears, therefore, of being at last

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

fluence of a climate that slowly snps 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 was little wonder our

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

nesses, despondency, and increasing dislike to an unbearable

* Native boat.

B 2