The time I was constrained to devote to this patient afforded me an opportunity of remarking the _True believer’s practice of physic_. No mummery, that ever was invented by human imbecility to banish the puny fears of mortality, was forgotten to be put in practice. The disease was sometimes exorcised as a malignant spirit, at others deprecated as the just visitation of the Deity: two or three thousand _fathas_ were to be uttered, and numbered at the same moment on a chaplet; and sentences of the Koran were then written on a board, which being washed off, the inky water was offered to the sick man to drink, when he was no longer able to open his mouth. But though this puerile anxiety prevailed so long as the man remained alive, the moment he was dead, all sunk into undisturbed composure, except a few of the women, who officiously disquieted the living, with vociferations of affected sorrow for the dead. Near the end of the year 1795, a body of troops was mustered and reviewed, who were to replace those that had died of the small-pox in Kordofân, which it was said amounted to more than half the army. The spoils which had been taken from Hashem, were also on this occasion ostentatiously displayed. They consisted of eighty slaves, male and female, but the greater proportion of the latter, many of them were very beautiful, nor the less interesting, that though the change in their situation could not be very important, their countenances were marked with despondency. To these succeeded five hundred oxen and two hundred large camels; the whole procession concluded with eighty horses, and many articles of less value borne by slaves. Shouts rent the air, of “Long live el Sultan Abd-el-rachmân el rashîd! May God render him always victorious!”