These eighty, days, at the rate of twenty miles per day, make 1600 miles. I walked every day, one day with another, about two hours, which, at the rate of two and a half miles per hour, makes the distance of four hundred miles that I went on foot through the Great Desert.
I wore out two or three pairs of shoes, but not one suit of clothes. My Moorish articles of dress I gave to Said, except the burnouse, which I gave away afterwards in Algeria. My whole expenses, including servant, camel, provisions, lodging, Moorish clothes, &c., &c., for the nine months' tour, did not exceed fifty pounds' sterling, and nearly half of this was given away in presents to the people and the various chieftains, who figure in the journal. I am sure, for I did not keep an exact account, my expenses did not exceed the round number of fifty by more than half a dozen pounds. I hope, therefore, I shall not be blamed for want of economy in Saharan travelling, especially when it is seen that the Messrs. Lyon and Ritchie expedition cost Government three thousand (3000) pounds' sterling, whose journey did not extend further south than mine, nor did they, indeed, penetrate so completely into The Sahara as I have done. Capt. Lyon likewise writes, that without "additional pecuniary supplies," he could not think of proceeding farther into the Interior, and accordingly returned. But were a person to ask me these questions, "Did you spend enough? Did you supply all your necessary wants? Could you safely recommend others to follow your example?" I must reply negatively to them all. This tour, to have been performed properly, as undertaken only by a private individual, ought to have cost at least one hundred pounds. The reader will, perhaps, be inquisitive to know, at whose expense the journey was accomplished. On this score, I am also disposed to be as communicative as on other points, for I do not wish this or that patronage to be suspected, although certainly the spending of fifty or sixty pounds' sterling is not a very mighty business. Well, then, the expenses were paid out of the funds of a salary granted for correspondence by one of the London newspapers. So much for the aid supplied by the Fourth Estate for the prosecution of philanthropic objects and discoveries in Africa. Let our printers' devils have their due in these days of universal patronage and pretension.
I now lay down and stretched myself at full length upon the fresh herbage under a sheltering palm, watching with a silent melancholy the last departing rays of the sun. I then thought over all my journey, beginning with the beginning and ending with the end, all the incidents of the route from first to last, and all the privations and sufferings I had undergone—praying to and thanking the Almighty for having delivered me from every ill and every danger.
Postscript.—Said, on my leaving Tripoli, was committed to the care of Signor Merlato, the Austrian Consul, who promised to find him employment, or keep him in his own service. My poor camel, for which, were I a poet, I would chant a plaintive strain of adieu! I was obliged to sell. The Bengazi Arab who bought her promised me, however, to treat her lightly, and only to use her to ride upon.
"The world and I fortuitously met, I owed a trifle, and have paid the debt."
Footnotes:
[58] On the plains of Angadda the French troops, at the battle of Isly, passed two or three days together through fields of barley.