Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
trotted out of a thicket beside us, not a hundred paces off. She
seemed quite fearless, for she did not quicken her pace at sight
of the army. The next minute a monstrous lion showed himself at
the same spot, roaring frightfully, and apparently in great fury;
his motions were still slower than those of his female; now and
then he stood still to look at us, and after coming to within sixty
or seventy paces--we all standing with our guns cocked, ready to
receive him--he gave us a parting scowl, and darted away, with great
bounds, in the track of his wife. In a moment both had disappeared."
Soon after this encounter, which startled and delighted Dr Werne,
and made his brother's little dromedary dance with alarm, they
reached the banks of the great _gohr_, (the bed of a river, filled
only in the rainy season,) known as El Gasch, which intersects
the countries of Taka and Basa. With very little daring and still
less risk, the Haddendas, who are said to muster eighty thousand
fighting men, might have annihilated the Bascha's army, as it wound
its toilsome way for nearly a league along the dry water-course,
(whose high banks were crowned with trees and thick bushes,) the
camels stumbling and occasionally breaking their legs in the deep
holes left by the feet of the elephants, where the cavalry could
not have acted, and where every javelin must have told upon the
disorderly groups of weary infantry. The Arabs either feared the
firearms, or dreaded lest their attack should be the signal for
the instant slaughter of their Grand-Shech, who rode, in the midst
of the infantry, upon a donkey, which had been given him out of
consideration for his age, whilst the three other prisoners were
cruelly forced to perform the whole march on foot, with heavy chains
on their necks and feet, and exposed to the jibes of the pitiless
soldiery. On quitting the Gohr, the march was through trees and
brushwood, and then through a sort of labyrinthine swamp, where
horses and camels stumbled at every step, and where the Arabs again
had a glorious opportunity, which they again neglected, of giving
Achmet such a lesson as they had given to his predecessor in the
Baschalik. The army now entered the country of the Hallengas, and a
six days' halt succeeded to their long and painful march.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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