Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851

No. CCCCXXXI. SEPTEMBER, 1851. Vol. LXX.
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No. CCCCXXXI. SEPTEMBER, 1851. Vol. LXX.
It was early in 1840, and Mr Werne and his youngest brother Joseph had been resident for a whole year at Chartum, chief town of the province of Sudan, in the country of Sennaar. Chartum, it will be remembered by the readers of the Expedition for the Discovery of the Sources of the White Nile, is situated at the confluence of the White and Blue streams, which, there uniting, flow northwards through Nubia and Egypt Proper to Cairo and the Mediterranean; and at Chartum it was that the two Wernes had beheld, in the previous November, the departure of the first expedition up Nile, which they were forbidden to join, and which met with little success. The elder Werne, whose portrait—that of a very determined-looking man, bearded, and in Oriental costume—is appended to the present volume, appears to have been adventurous and a rambler from his youth upwards. In 1822 he had served in Greece, and had now been for many years in Eastern lands. Joseph Werne, his youngest and favourite brother, had come to Egypt at his instigation, after taking at Berlin his degree as Doctor of Medicine, to study, before commencing practice, some of the extraordinary diseases indigenous in that noxious climate. Unfortunately, as recorded in Mr Werne's former work, this promising young man, who seems to have possessed in no small degree the enterprise, perseverance, and fortitude so remarkable in his brother, ultimately fell a victim to one of those fatal maladies whose investigation was the principal motive of his visit to Africa. The first meeting in Egypt of the two brothers was at Cairo; and of it a characteristic account is given by the elder, an impetuous, we might almost say a pugnacious man, tolerably prompt to take offence, and upon whom, as he himself says at page 67, the Egyptian climate had a violently irritating effect.