Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 4.djvu/609

Rh no sooner got into the plain than we felt great symptoms of the simoom, and about a quarter before twelve, our prisoner first, and then Idris, cried out, The Simoom! the Simoom! My curiosity would not suffer me to fall down without looking behind me. About due south, a little to the east, I saw the coloured haze as before. It seemed now to be rather less compressed, and to have with it a shade of blue. The edges of it were not defined as those of the former, but like a very thin smoke, with about a yard in the middle tinged with those colours. We all fell upon our faces, and the simoom passed with a gentle rustling wind. It continued to blow in this manner till near three o'clock, so we were all taken ill that night, and scarcely strength was left us to load the camels and arrange the baggage. This day one of our camels died, partly famished, partly overcome with extreme fatigue, so that, incapable as we were of labour, we were obliged, for self-preservation's sake, to cut off thin slices of the fleshy part of the camel, and hang it in so many thongs upon the trees all night, and after upon the baggage, the sun drying it immediately, so as to prevent putrefaction.

At half past eight in the evening we alighted at a well called Naibey, in a bare, sandy plain, where there were a few straggling acacia-trees. We had all this day seen large blocks of fossile salt upon the surface of the earth where we trod. This was the cause, I suppose, that both the spring at Terfowey, and now this of Naibey, were brackish to the taste, and especially that of Naibey. We found near the well the corpse of a man and two camels upon the ground. It was apparently long ago that this accident happened, for the moisture of the camel was so exhaled that it seemed to