at Sofi. There was a delightful calm and a sense
of rest, a total estrangement from the cares of the world, and an
enchanting contrast in the soft green verdure of the landscape before
us, to the many hundred weary miles of burning desert through which we
had toiled from Lower Egypt.

Time glided away smoothly until the fever invaded our camp. Florian
became seriously ill. My wife was prostrated by a severe attack
of gastric fever, which for nine days rendered her recovery almost
hopeless. Then came the plague of boils, and soon after a species
of intolerable itch, called the coorash. I adopted for this latter
a specific I had found successful with the mange in dogs, namely,
gunpowder, with one fourth sulphur added, made into a soft paste with
water, and then formed into an ointment with fat. It worked like a charm
with the coorash.

Faith is the drug that is supposed to cure the Arab; whatever his
complaint may be, he applies to his Faky or priest. This minister is not
troubled with a confusion of book-learning, neither are the shelves of
his library bending beneath weighty treatises upon the various maladies
of human nature; but he possesses the key to all learning, the talisman
that will apply to all cases, in that one holy book, the Koran. This is
his complete pharmacopoeia: his medicine chest, combining purgatives,
blisters, sudorifies, styptics, narcotics, emetics, and all that
the most profound M.D. could prescribe. With this "multum in parvo"
stock-in-trade the Faky receives his patients. No. 1 arrives, a barren
woman who requests some medicine that will promote the blessing of
childbirth. No. 2, a man who was strong in his youth, but from excessive
dissipation has become useless. No. 3, a man deformed from his birth,
who wishes to become straight as other men. No. 4, a blind child. No.
5, a dying old woman, carried on a litter; and sundry other impossible
cases, with others of a more simple character.

The Faky produces his book, the holy Koran, and with a pen formed of
a reed he proceeds to write a prescription--not to be made up by an
apothecary, as such dangerous people do not exist; but the prescription
itself is to be SWALLOWED! Upon a smooth board, like a slate, he rubs
sufficient lime to produce a perfectly white surface; upon this he
writes in large characters, with thick glutinous ink, a verse or verses
from the Koran that he considers applicable to the case; this completed,
he washes off the holy