These lines are capital, and are a fine copy, which can only appear tame by the original having been before our eyes, painted by the great master, the Creator and Ruler of the world.
The simoom, with the wind at S. E. immediately follows the wind at N. and the usual despondency that always accompanied it. The blue meteor, with which it began, passed over us about twelve, and the rustling wind that followed it continued till near two. Silence, and a desperate kind of indifference about life, were the immediate effects upon us; and I began now, seeing the condition of my camels, to fear we were all doomed to a sandy grave, and to contemplate it with some degree of resignation. At half past eight in the evening we alighted in a sandy flat, where there was great store of bent grass and trees which had a considerable degree of verdure, a circumstance much in favour of our camels. We determined to stop here to give them an opportunity of eating their fill where they could find it.
On the 22d, at six o'clock we set out from the sandy flat, and one of the Tucorory was seized with a phrenzy or madness. At first I took it for a fit of the epilepsy, by the distortions of his face, but it was soon seen to be of a more serious nature. Whether he had been before afflicted with it I know not. I offered to bleed him, which he refused; neither, though we gave him water, would he drink, but very moderately. He rolled upon the ground, and moaned, often repeating two or three words which I did not understand. He refused to continue his journey, or rise from where he lay, so that we were obliged to leave him to his fortune. We went this day very diligently, not remarkably slow nor fast; but though our camels, as we thought, had fared well for these two nights, another of them died about four o'clock this afternoon, when we came to Umarack.
I here began to provide for the worst. I saw the fate of our camels approaching, and that our men grew weak in proportion; our bread, too, began to fail us, altho' we had plenty of camels flesh in its stead; our water, though in all appearance we were to find it more frequently than in the beginning of our journey, was nevertheless brackish, and scarce served the purpose to quench our thirst; and, above all, the dreadful simoom had perfectly exhausted our strength, and brought upon us a degree of cowardice and languor that we struggled with in vain; I therefore, as the last effort, began to throw away every thing weighty I could spare, or that was not absolutely necessary, such as all shells, fossiles, minerals, and petrefactions that I could get at, the counter-cases of my quadrant, telescopes, and clock, and several suchlike things.
Our camels were now reduced to five, and it did not seem that these were capable of continuing their journey much longer. In that case, no remedy remained, but that each man should carry his own water and provisions. Now, as no one man could carry the water he should use between well and well, and it was more than probable that distance would be doubled by some of the wells being found dry; and if that was not the case, yet, as it was impossible for a man to carry his provisions who could not walk without any burden at all, our situation seemed to be most desperate.
The Bishareen alone seemed to keep up his strength, and was in excellent spirits. He had attached himself, in a particular manner, to me, and with a part of that very scanty rag which he had round his waist he had made a wrapper, very artificially, according to the manner his countrymen the Bishareen practice on such occasions. This had greatly defended my feet in the day, but the pain occasioned by the cold in the night was really scarce sufferable. I offered to free him from the confinement of his left hand, which was chained to some one of the company night and day; but he very sensibly refused it, saying, "Unchain my hands when you load and unload your camels, I cannot then run away from you; for tho' you did not shoot me, I should starve with hunger and thirst; but keep me to the end of the journey as you began with me, then I cannot misbehave, and lose the reward which you say you are to give me."
At forty minutes past three o'clock we saw large stratas of fossile salt everywhere upon the surface of the ground. At five we found the body of Mahomet Towash, on the spot where he had been murdered, stript naked, and lying on his face unburied. The wound in the back-sinew of his leg was apparent; he was, besides, thrust through the back with a lance, and had two wounds in the head with swords. We followed some footsteps in the sand to the right, and there saw three other bodies, whom Idris knew to be his principal servants. These, it seemed, had taken to their arms upon the Aga's being first wounded, and the cowardly, treacherous Bishareens had persuaded them to capitulate upon promise of giving them camels and provision to carry them into Egypt, after which they had murdered them behind these rocks.
At six o'clock we alighted at Umarack, so called from a number of rack-trees that grow there, and which seem to affect a saltish soil; at Raback and Masuah I had seen them growing in the sea. When I ordered a halt at Umarack, the general cry was, to travel all night, so that we might be at a distance from that dangerous, unlucky spot. The sight of the men murdered, and fear of the like fate, had got the better of their other sensations. In short, there was nothing more visible, than that their apprehensions were of two sorts, and produced very different operations. The simoom, the stalking pillars of sand, and probability of dying with thirst or hunger, brought on a torpor, or indifference, that made them inactive; but the discovery of the Arab at Terfowey, the fear of meeting the Bishareen at the wells, and the dead bodies of the Aga and his unfortunate companions, produced a degree of activity and irritation that resembled very much their spirits being elevated by good news. I told them, that, of all the places in the desert through which they had passed, this was by far the safest, because fear of being met by troops from Assouan, seeking the murderers of Mahomet Towash would keep all the Bishareen at a distance. Our Arab said, that the next well belonged to the Ababdé, and not the Bishareen, and that the Bishareen had slain the Aga there, to make men believe it had been done by the Ababdé. Idris contributed his morsel of comfort, by assuring us, that the wells now, as far as Egypt, were so scanty of water, that no party above ten men would trust their provision to them, and none of us had the least apprehension from marauders of twice that number. The night at Umarack was excessively cold as to sensation; Fahrenheit's thermometer was however at 49° an hour before day-light.
On the 23d we left Umarack at six o'clock in the morning, our road this day being between mountains of blue stones of a very fine and perfect quality, through the heart of which ran thick veins of jasper, their strata perpendicular to the horizon. There were other mountains of marble of the colour called Isabella. In other places the rock seemed composed of petrified wood, such as we had seen in the mountains near Cosseir. At a quarter past eleven, going due N. we entered a narrow valley, in which we passed two wells on our left, and following the windings through this valley, all of deep sand, we came to a large pool of excellent water, called Umgwat, sheltered from the rays of the sun by a large rock which projected over it, the upper part of which was shaped like a wedge, and was composed all of green marble, without the smallest variety or spot of other colour in it.
Through this whole valley, to-day, we had seen the bodies of the Tucorory who had followed Mahomet Towash, and been scattered by the Bishareen, and left to perish with thirst there. None of them, however, as far as we could observe, had ever reached this well. In the water we found a bird of the duck kind called Teal, or Widgeon. The Turk Ismael was preparing to shoot at it with his blunderbuss, but I desired him to refrain, being willing, by its flight, to endeavour to judge something of the nearness of the Nile. We raised it therefore by sudden repeated cries, which method was likely to make it seek its home straight, and abandon a place it must have been a stranger to. The bird flew straight west, rising as he flew, a sure proof his journey was a long one, till at last, being very high and at a distance, he vanished from our sight, without descending or seeking to approach the earth; from which I drew an unpleasant inference that we were yet far from the Nile, as was really the case.