Our journey, for the first seven hours, was through a barren, bare, and sandy plain, without finding a vestige of any living creature, without water, and without grass, a country that seemed under the immediate curse of Heaven. At twelve o'clock at night we turned a little to the eastward of south, to enter through very broken ground into a narrow defile, between two hills of no considerable height. This pass is called Mattina. One of our camel-drivers declared that he saw two men run into the bushes before him, upon which our people took all to their slings, throwing many stones before them into the bushes, directed nearly to a man's height. At their earnest desire I ordered Ismael to fire our large ship-blunderbuss, with fifty small bullets in it, among the bushes, in the direction of the road-side; but we neither saw nor heard any thing of those people thereafter, if there really were any, nor did I, at the time, indeed, believe the camel-driver had seen any one but through the medium of his own fears; for the Arabs never attack you till near sun-set, if they are doubtful of their own superiority, or at dawn of day, if they think they have the advantage, that they may have time to pursue you.
We, however, all continued on foot, from four till the grey of the morning of the 19th of April. Indeed, so violent an inclination to sleep had fallen upon me, that I was forced to walk, for fear of breaking my neck by a fall from my camel, till eight o'clock, when we halted in a wood of ebony bushes, growing like the birch tree in many shoots from the old stems, which had been cut down for fear of harbouring the fly, and totally deprived of their leaves afterwards, by the burning of grass, from the same reason. This place is called Abou Jehaarat, and is the limit between the government of Teawa and Beyla. After such a very fatiguing journey, we rested at Abou Jehaarat till the afternoon. The sun was very hot, but fortunately some shepherds caves were dug in the bank, and to these we fled for shelter from the intense heat of the sun, where the ebony trees, though in a very thick wood, could afford us no shade, for the reasons already given.
At three o'clock in the afternoon we set out from Abou Jehaarat, in a direction west, and at eight in the evening we arrived at Beyla. There is no water between Teawa and Beyla. Once, Imgededema, and a number of villages, were supplied with water from wells and had large crops of Indian corn sown about their possessions. The curse of that country, the Arabs Daveina, have destroyed Imgededema, and all the villages about it, filled up their wells, burnt their crops, and exposed all the inhabitants to die by famine.
We found Beyla to be in lat. 13° 42´ 4´´; that is, about eleven miles west of Teawa, and thirty-one and a half miles due south. We were met by Mahomet, the Shekh, at the very entrance of the town. He said, he looked upon us as risen from the dead; that we must be good people, and particularly under the care of Providence, to have escaped the many snares the Shekh of Atbara had laid for us. Mahomet, the Shekh, had provided every sort of refreshment possible for us; and, thinking we could not live without it, he had ordered sugar for us from Sennaar. Honey for the most part hitherto had been its substitute. We had a good comfortable supper; as fine wheat-bread as ever I ate in my life, brought from Sennaar, as also rice; in a word, everything that our kind landlord could contribute to our plentiful and hospitable entertainment.
Our whole company was full of joy, to which the Shekh greatly encouraged them; and if there was an alloy to the happiness, it was the seeing that I did not partake of it. Symptoms of an aguish disorder had been hanging about me for several days, ever since the diarrhœa had left me. I found the greatest repugnance, or nausea, at the smell of warm meat; and, having a violent headach, I insisted upon going to bed supperless, after having drank a quantity of warm water by way of emetic. Being exceedingly tired, I soon fell sound asleep, having first taken some drops of a strong spirituous tincture of the bark which I had prepared at Gondar, resolving, if I found any remission, as I then did, to take several good dozes of the bark in powder on the morrow, beginning at day-break, which I accordingly did with its usual success.
On the 20th of April, a little after the dawn of day, the Shekh, in great anxiety, came to the place where I was lying, upon a tanned buffaloe's hide, on the ground. His sorrow was soon turned into joy when he found me quite recovered from my illness. I had taken the bark, and expressed a desire of eating a hearty breakfast of rice, which was immediately prepared for me.
The Shekh of Beyla was an implicit believer in medicine. Seeing me take some drops of the tincture before coffee, he insisted upon pledging me, and I believe would have willingly emptied the whole bottle. After having suffered great agony with his own complaint, he had passed some small stones, and was greatly better, as he said, for the soap-pills. I put him in a way to prepare these, as also his lime-water. It was impossible to have done any favour for him equal to this, as his agony had been so great. He told me our Moullah was arrived from Teawa, and had left Shekh Fidele still repining at our departure, without leaving him the piastres. As for the eclipse, he said he did not care a straw, nor for what they did or knew at Mecca, for he had no interest there. I understood our friend Mahomet, Shekh of Beyla, had been under great uneasiness at the eclipse, when it advanced in the immersion, and became total. Some time before this, as he said, there had been another, but not so great, on the day the Daveina burnt Imgededema, with above thirty other villages, and dispersed or destroyed about two thousand inhabitants of Atbara.
It was now the time to give the Shekh a present, and I had prepared one for him, such as he very well deserved; but no intreaty, nor any means I could use, could prevail upon him to accept of the merest trifle. On the contrary, he solemnly swore, that if I importuned him further he would get upon his horse and go into the country. All that he desired, and that too as a favour, was, that, when I had rested at Sennaar, he might come and consult me further as to his complaints, for which he promised he should bring a recompence with him. We then settled to give his present to the Moullah, with which he was very well pleased, and which he took without any of those difficulties the Shekh of Beyla had started when it was offered to him.
All being friends now, and contented, the day was given to repose and joy. The king's servant came and told me, by way of secret, that we could not do less to please the Shekh than stay with him a week at Beyla, and I believe it would not have displeased him; but after so much coming and going, so much occasion for talk relative to me, I was resolved to follow Hagi Belal's advice, and press on to Sennaar before affairs there were in a desperate situation, or some scheme of mischief should be contrived by Fidele. One thing Shekh Adelan's servant told us, that he had, by his master's orders, taken from Fidele the present I had given him, though he had already made it up into a gown, or robe, for himself. "He is a poor wretch, says the Shekh of Beyla; he has spent two years of the king's revenues from Atbara, and nobody has supported him except Shekh Adelan, whose daughter he married, but he now has given him up since he has fully known him; and, if our troubles do not follow quickly, I suppose one of these days I shall have him here in his way to Sennaar, never to return; for everybody knows now that it was in hatred to him, and for the many faithless and bad actions he was guilty of, that the Arabs have destroyed all that part of the country, though they have not burnt a straw about Beyla."
We had again a large and plentiful dinner, and a quantity of bouza; venison of several different species of the antelope or deer-kind, and Guinea-fowls, boiled with rice, the best part of our fare, for the venison smelled and tasted strongly of musk. This was the provision made by the Shekh's two sons, boys about fourteen or fifteen years old, who had got each of them a gun with a match-lock and whose favour I secured to a very high degree, by giving them some good gunpowder, and plenty of small leaden bullets.