Slush Lamp is simply a pannikin full of fat, with a rag wrapped round a small stick planted as a wick in the middle of it.
Lantern.--A wooden box, a native bucket, or a calabash, will make the frame, and a piece of greased calico stretched across a hole in its side, will take the place of glass. A small tin, such as a preserved-meat case, makes a good lantern, if a hole is broken into the bottom, and an opening in the side or front. Horn (see p. 347) is easily to be worked by a traveller into any required shape. A good and often a ready makeshift for a lantern, is a bottle with its end cracked off. This is best effected by putting water into the bottle to the depth of an inch, and then setting it upon hot embers. The bottle will crack all round at the level of the top of the water. It takes a strong wind to blow out a candle stuck into the neck inside the broken bottle. Alpine tourists often employ this contrivance when they start from their bivouac in the cark morning.
ON CONCLUDING THE JOURNEY.
Complete your Collections.--When your journey draws near its close, resist restless feelings; make every effort before it is too late to supplement deficiencies in your various collections; take stock of what you have gathered together, and think how the things will serve in England to illustrate your journey or your book. Keep whatever is pretty in itself, or is illustrative of your every-day life, or that of the savages, in the way of arms, utensils, and dresses. Make careful drawings of your encampment, your retinue, and whatever else you may in indolence have omitted to sketch, that will possess an after-interest. Look over your vocabularies for the last time, and complete them as far as possible. Make presents of all your travelling gear and old guns to your native attendants, for they will be mere litter in England, costly to house and attractive to moth and rust; while in the country where you have been travelling, they are of acknowledged value, and would be additionally acceptable as keepsakes.
Memoranda, to arrange.--Paste all loose slips of MSS. into the pages of a blank book; and stitch your memoranda books where they are torn; give them to a bookbinder, at the first opportunity, to re-bind and page them, adding an abundance of blank leaves. Write an index to the whole of your MSS.; put plenty of cross-references, insert necessary explanations, and supplement imperfect descriptions, while your memory of the events remains fresh. It appears impossible to a traveller, at the close of his journey, to believe he will ever forget its events, however trivial; for after long brooding on few facts, they will seem to be fairly branded into his memory. But this is not the case; for the crowds of new impressions, during a few months or years of civilised life, will efface the sharpness of the old ones. I have conversed with men of low mental power, servants and others, the greater part of whose experiences in savagedom had passed out of their memories like the events of a dream.
Alphabetical Lists.--Every explorer has frequent occasion to draw up long catalogues in alphabetical order, whether of words for vocabularies, or of things that he has in store: now, there is a right and a wrong way of setting to work to make them. The wrong way is to divide the paper into equal parts, and to assign one of them to each letter in order. The right way is to divide the paper into parts of a size proportionate to the number of words in the English language which begin with each particular letter. In the first case the paper will be overcrowded in some parts and utterly blank in others, in the second it will be equally overspread with writing; and an ordinary-sized sheet of paper, if closely and clearly written, will be sufficient for the drawing up of a very extended catalogue. A convenient way of carrying out the principle I have indicated is to take an English dictionary, and after having divided the paper into as many equal parts as there are leaves in the dictionary, to adopt the first word of each leaf as headings to them. It may save trouble to my reader if I give a list of headings appropriate to a small catalogue. We will suppose the paper to be divided into fifty-two spaces--that is to say, into four columns and thirteen spaces in each column--then the headings of these spaces, in order, will be as follows:--
Verification of Instruments.--On arriving at the sea-level, make daily observations with your boiling-point thermometer, barometer, and aneroid, as they are all subject to changes in their index-errors. As soon as you have an opportunity, compare them with a standard barometer, compare also your ordinary thermometer and azimuth-compass with standard instruments, and finally, have them carefully re-verified at the Kew observatory on your return to England. A vast deal of labour has been wholly thrown away by travellers owing to their neglecting to ascertain the index-errors of these instruments at the close of their journey. A careful observer ought to have eliminated the effects of instrumental errors from his sextant observations; nevertheless it will be satisfactory to him, and it may clear up some apparent anomalies, to have his entire instrumental outfit re-verified at Kew.