FOOTNOTES:
[1]In the morning it emits a perfume, which is delicious in the open air, but in a closed space I should think stupifying, like the Circean enchantments; it is said to be that with which Circe fumigated her grotto.
[2]At all the wells many Arabs were to be seen; and occasionally horsemen were met with, but generally two or three together; for though the country is now peaceful enough, the associations of other days seemed to deter them from venturing out singly. In no part of the road did we see a trace of an encampment, and the whole country seemed deserted excepting in the neighbourhood of the wells. On my remarking this to my guide, he said that the country was filled with inhabitants, but that they pitch their tents in the places least likely to be visited by passers by, to avoid too frequent calls on their hospitality. The Arabs here have a great reputation for this virtue, but it appears that they are not ambitious of exercising it.
[3]When at Derna I was unable to obtain information concerning the origin of the American battery which seemed here so strangely out of place. I am indebted to Edwin De Leon, Esq., Consul-General for the U.S. in Egypt, for the following account of it. Achmed, Pasha of Tripoli, having been deposed by his brother Yusuf in 1801, took refuge in Tunis. Before long the new pasha found himself embroiled with the U.S., through capturing some vessels bearing their flag. Determined to punish him, they offered the ex-pasha the means of recovering his throne, but after long negotiations he left Malta without effecting anything, and retired to Egypt. His American allies had not, however, lost sight of him, and they induced him, by a grant of supplies and the nomination of an officer in their service, General Eaton, who took the command of his forces, to march upon Derna. Of this place he easily got possession, and it was then that this battery was erected. After a few months, being deserted by his allies, who made a treaty with Yusuf Pasha, in which his interests seem to have been little cared for, he retired to Malta, and thence to Syracuse, where he lived, partly supported by occasional sums granted by the Government of the U.S., partly by a small pension which their representative obtained for him from his brother. After various vicissitudes, he returned to Egypt, where, as the guest of Mohammed Ali, he enjoyed a liberal income. On his death a part of this was transferred to his only son, but was suppressed by Abbas Pasha. I found the son, now an old man, bedridden with palsy, in a state of frightful destitution, dependent for his support on the charity of servants. Mr. De Leon applied to the present Viceroy to obtain a restoration of the pension the son had so long enjoyed, and by his recommendation induced the Minister of the U.S. at Constantinople to ask the Porte to restore a small property in Tripoli, once belonging to his father, and of which he had enjoyed the revenue during the late Pasha’s reign, but which the Ottoman Government seized for its own benefit after his deposition. Hussein Bey Caramanly, the surviving son of Achmed Pasha, is, as his father was before him, an American protégé, up to the present time a very useless title, but from which he is now, thanks to Mr. De Leon’s energy, likely to obtain some advantage. His father’s story, in all its details, is told in the Acts of Congress, 1807-8.
[4]Johan. von Müller.
[5]Since writing this I have learned that a recent decree gives to the evidence of Christians the same force as that of a Moslem.
[6]Since these lines were written (in 1853), a decree is said to have been published, abolishing the trade in slaves throughout the Ottoman Empire. In Cairo, in Alexandria, it is at this moment as active as ever.—Cairo, 15th July, 1855.
[7]On referring to Beechey’s Narrative, since these pages were written, I find that he speaks of Ras Sem as a name unknown to the Arabs to designate the promontory marked thus in our maps. The coast, from a few miles west of Apollonia, has a very gradual inclination southwards, but so slight that it is impossible to designate even the place from which it begins to turn as a headland. Shaw and Bruce’s account of the well five or six days south of Benghazi agrees perfectly with the place called by the Arabs R’sam; and although the very bitter well is eight hours further on, there can be no doubt it is to this place that they allude. The petrified city, with its inhabitants, does not exist; its magnificent castle is only the Saracenic building, now called Sheikh Es-saby; but the ground is to some distance strewed with petrified wood. The dream of the city where “men are conspicuous in different attitudes, some of them exercising their trades and occupations, and women giving suck to their children,” is due, of course, to Arab imagination, and not to those truthful travellers.
[8]A description of Waday has been published in French, translated from a MS. of the Shiekh Mohammed El Tounsy, who was there about 1814, and who still lives in Cairo attached to one of the mosques.
[9]How to make the Djin descend.
Write in the right palm of a boy or girl, below the age of puberty, the seal which is here given, and fumigate with coriander seed, which among the Djin are counted apples, and conjure them with the Surah “and the Sun” to the end, until they come down. Then ask them what you desire to know, and they will answer you with the permission of God (be he exalted!); and this is what you write on the forehead of the child:—
فكشفنا عنك عطاك
فبصرك اليوم صحچ
And then you write the seal, and in the midst of it make a spot of ink; and when you wish to dismiss the kings, conjure them with the verse of the throne, and they will depart by permission of God. This is the seal as you see it here, and there is no power and no strength but in God.
[10]I am inclined to suppose that after the dead had undergone the process of mummifying, and had been wrapped in their casements, they were covered with a coating of stucco: I have a piece of fine white plaster which I picked in one of the tombs, one-third of an inch thick, in which are the impression of a limb and fragments of cloth.
[11]The taxes in Siwah are levied on the date and olive trees, at the rate of 2½ piastres on each tree, yielding an annual revenue of 10,000 dollars. From this tax the waddy date-trees, whose fruit is used for feeding the cattle, and which amount to 90,000, are excepted.