pervaded the encampment. Dr. Heughlin relates how, after the death of
Madame Tinne, he went daily from the zeribah to Alexina's own residence,
situated at a considerable distance, to inquire after her health, and
console her in her affliction. To drag himself to and fro was all he
could do; and frequently his strength failed him on the way, so that he
had to sit down and rest. Sometimes he did not reach home till midnight,
and at other times was seized on the road with an attack of fever. A
Dutch girl, Alexina's maid-servant, was often almost mad with
home-sickness, lamenting her unhappy fate to die so young, so lonely,
and so far from home.

Eventually Miss Tinne found herself compelled to abandon her scheme of
penetrating into the land of the Nyam-Nyam, and carrying with her the
bodies of Madame Tinne and her maid, who had also fallen a victim to the
pestilence, she returned to Khartum, after an absence of a year and a
half. In the interval, her aunt, the Baroness van Capellan, had died
(May, 1864). Alexina, to recover from the shock of so many misfortunes,
retired to a village a short distance from Khartum, and gave herself up
to solitude and silence. When she had recruited her physical and mental
energies, she returned to Cairo.

There she took up her residence on a splendid scale. She furnished her
villa in the Oriental style; would have none but Arabs and negroes to
wait upon her, and, finally, she adopted the Arab dress. For four years
she continued to be a foremost figure in the semi-European, semi-Asiatic
society of Cairo; but her roving and adventurous spirit was not
quenched, her love of new things and new places was not checked. The
arrival of some vast caravans from the Sahara while she was on a
yachting voyage at Tripoli, fired her imagination anew with visions of
African discovery. She resolved upon an expedition which in boldness of
enterprise and romantic interest should exceed all previous adventures;
proposing to travel from Tripoli to the capital of Fezzan, thence to
Kuka in Bornu, and, westward, by way of Wadai, Darfur, and Kordofan, to
the Nile. To carry out this plan she would have to cross the country of
the Towaregs, the treacherous "pirates of the Desert," the cruellest and
falsest, and at the same time the bravest and handsomest, of the African
tribes; and she provided herself, therefore, with a strong escort,
consisting of three Europeans and forty-seven Arabs, well armed. On the
29th of Jan