I Thought Also That I Might Escape The Disease, Shut Up In My Insulated Room, And Indulged Moreover The Hope Of A Speedy Passage To Egypt; In The Latter, However, I Was Deceived.

By making a few presents, and a little bribery, I might perhaps have found means to embark forthwith; but

The vessels now ready to sail were crowded to excess, and full of diseased soldiers, so that a stay in the infected town was to be preferred to a departure by such a conveyance. Some days after, I learnt that a small open boat, free from troops, was ready to sail for Cosseir, and I immediately agreed for a passage on board it; but its sailing was delayed from day to day, until the fifteenth of May, when I finally left Yembo, after a stay of eighteen days in the midst of the plague.

It was, perhaps, my own bad state of health, and the almost uninterrupted low fever under which I laboured, that preserved me; for, notwithstanding all my care, I was many times exposed to infection. The great street of Yembo was lined with sick, in the very agonies of death, asking for charity; in the yard of the okale where I lived, an Arab was dying; the master of the okale lost a sister and a son in his own family, and related to me, as he sat on my carpet, how his son died the preceding night in his arms. The imprudence of my slave likewise counteracted all my measures of precaution. Having missed him for several days early in the morning, I inquired the cause of his absence, when he told me that he had gone to assist in washing the dead bodies. The poor who died during

[p.413] the night were exposed in the morning upon biers, on the sea- shore, to be washed before the ceremony of praying over them in the mosque; and my slave thought it meritorious to join in this office, which had devolved upon several negro pilgrims, who happened to be at Yembo. I desired him to remain at home, for the future, at that hour, to prepare my breakfast; but I was as little able to prevent his walking out at other times, as I could myself dispense with that duty; and one could scarcely pass the bazar without touching infected people, or at least those who had been in close contact with them.

The sense of the danger which then threatened me is much greater, now that I find myself far removed from it, than I felt it at the time. After the first four or five days, I became tolerably familiarized with the idea of the plague, and compared the small numbers who died every day with the mass of the remaining inhabitants. The great many cases of persons remaining in full health, notwithstanding the closest connexion with the deceased, considerably removed the apprehensions of the malady being communicated by infection; and example works so powerfully on the mind, that when I saw the number of foreigners then in the town quite unconcerned, I began to be almost ashamed of myself for possessing less courage than they displayed.

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