Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Although the narrative of the homeward voyage is by no means
uninteresting, and contains details of the river's course valuable
to the geographer and to the future explorer, it has not the
attraction of the up-stream narrative. The freshness is worn off;
the waters sink, and the writer's spirits seem disposed to follow
their example; there is all the difference between attack and
retreat--between a cheerful and hopeful advance, and a retrograde
movement before the work is half done. But, vexed as an enthusiastic
and intrepid man might naturally feel at seeing his hopes frustrated
by the indolent indifference of his companions, Mr Werne could
hardly deem his five months thrown away. We are quite sure those
who read his book will be of opinion that the time was most
industriously and profitably employed.
A sorrowful welcome awaited our traveller, after his painful and
fatiguing voyage. There dwelt at Chartum a renegade physician, a
Palermitan named Pasquali, whose Turkish name was Soliman Effendi,
and who was notorious as a poisoner, and for the unscrupulous
promptness with which he removed persons in the slightest degree
unpleasing to himself or to his patron Achmet Bascha. In Arabia, it
was currently believed, he had once poisoned thirty-three soldiers,
with the sole view of bringing odium upon the physician and
apothecary, two Frenchmen, who attended them. In Chartum he was well
known to have committed various murders.
"Although this man," says Mr Werne, "was most friendly and sociable
with me, I had everything to fear from him on account of my brother,
by whom the Bascha had declared his intention of replacing him in
the post of medical inspector of Bellet-Sudàn. It was therefore in
the most solemn earnest that I threatened him with death, if upon
my return I found my brother dead, and learned that they had come
at all in contact. '_Dio guarde, che affronto!_' was his reply;
and he quietly drank off his glass of rum, the same affront having
already been offered him in the Bascha's divan; the reference being
naturally to the poisonings laid to his charge in Arabia and here."
At Chartum Mr Werne found his brother alive, but on the eleventh
day after his return he died in his arms. The renegade had had no
occasion to employ his venomous drugs; the work had been done as
surely by the fatal influence of the noxious climate.
ART AND ARTISTS IN SPAIN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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