Throughout the journey they found that they got on as well, if not better than their companions, who looked to them both for safety and protection, as well as for the direction of the route. They had upwards of fifty miles to cross, over a frightful waste of movable sand-hills, to Zow; many of the poor children, panting with thirst, scarcely able to creep along.
At Bilma they laid in a stock of dates for the next fourteen days, during which man and beast nearly subsisted upon them, the slaves for twenty days together mostly getting no other food.
Then came the stony desert, which the camels, already worn-out by the heavy sand-hills, had to cross for nine days. El Wahr is of surpassing dreariness, the rocks a dark sandstone of the most gloomy and barren appearance; the wind whistles through the narrow fissures, where not a blade of grass finds nourishment, and, as the traveller creeps under the lowering crags to take shelter for the night, he stumbles over the skeleton of some starved human being.
On the day they made El Wahr, and the two following, camels in great numbers dropped down and died, or were quickly killed and the meat brought in by the hungry slaves.
Such are some of the ordinary events of a journey across the desert.
On the 21st of January, 1825, they reached Tripoli, and soon after embarked for Leghorn. Before leaving, however, Major Denham obtained the freedom of a Mandara boy, whose liberation from slavery he had paid for some months before. He now got the pacha to put his seal on the necessary document, the only way in which a Christian can give freedom to a slave in a Mahommedan country.
The travellers were long detained by quarantine at Leghorn, so that the three survivors of the expedition did not teach England till the 1st of June.