Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/228

 have beheld, he says, with pleasure, supposing that such an eruption would diminish the force of the disease, but that some of his neighbours regarded them as signs of the plague. This created a general alarm, and they were about to exclude him from their quarter, when he confidently asserted that the fever of the plague always produced its crisis in three days, whereas his had now continued seven; which, together with the conduct of Bagdasir, who never deserted him, somewhat assuaged their terrors, and induced them to suffer his presence. His disorder continued three weeks, and at length, when it disappeared, left him so weak that he could with difficulty crawl about the streets.

The religious toleration which prevailed at Kabul, where Turk, Jew, and Christian lived equally unmolested, induced him in an evil hour to throw off his Mohammedan disguise and profess himself a Christian; not considering, that however tolerant the Afghans of this capital might be, the remainder of his road, until he should reach the Caspian, lay among bigots of the most desperate stamp, who regarded the professors of all heterodox religions with abhorrence, and reckoned it a merit to revile and persecute them.

Having remained a full month at Kabul, he hired one side of a camel, on which a pannier was suspended for his accommodation, and on the 1st of September joined a party proceeding to Kandahar. The mode of travelling which he had now adopted is peculiar to that part of the world, and deserves to be particularly described. The camel appropriated to the service of passengers, he observes, carries two persons, who are lodged in a kind of pannier laid loosely on the back of the animal. The pannier, in Persian kidjahwah, is a wooden frame, with the sides and bottom of netted cords, of about three feet long and two broad. The depth likewise is generally about two feet. The provisions of the passengers