us; the stay in Kúkawa during the rainy season being very unhealthy. Mr. Overweg had returned on the 9th to Maduwári from his interesting voyage on the Tsád, of which everyone will deeply regret that he himself was not able to give a full account.[3] Traversing that shallow basin in the English boat, which we had carried all the way through the unbounded sandy wastes and the rocky wildernesses of the desert, he had visited a great part of the islands, which are dispersed over its surface, and which, sometimes reduced to narrow sandy downs, at others expanding to wide grassy lowlands, sustain a population in their peculiar national independence, the remnant of a great nation which was exterminated by the Kanúri. It was a little world of its own with which he had thus come into contact, and into which we might hope to obtain by degrees a better insight. He enjoyed excellent health, far better than when I saw him before, on his first rejoining me in Kúkawa; and as he was well aware of the strong reasons which our friend the vizier had for wishing us not to stay in the swampy lowlands round the capital during the latter part of the rainy season, he agreed to join me on this adventurous expedition to the north-east. Those regions had, from the very beginning of our setting out from Múrzuk, attracted Mr. Overweg’s attention, and while as yet unacquainted with the immense difficulties that attend travelling in these inhospitable tracts, he had indulged in the hope of being able, at some future time, to ramble about with our young Tébu lad, Mohammed el Gatróni, among the fertile and picturesque valleys of Búrgu and Wajánga. For this reason, as well as on account of my debility, which left me, during the following expedition, the exercise of only a small degree of my natural energy, it is greatly to be regretted that my unfortunate companion, who seemed never fully aware that his life was at stake, did not take into consideration the circumstance that he himself might not be destined to return home, in order to elaborate his researches. If all the information which he occasionally collected were joined to mine, those countries would be far better known than they now are; but instead of employing his leisure hours in transcribing his memoranda in a form intelligible to others, he left them all on small scraps of paper, negligently written with lead pencil, which after the lapse of some time would become unintelligible even to himself. It is a pity that so much talent as my companion possessed was not allied with practical habits, and concentrated upon those subjects which he professed to study.