The Shekh of Beyla was an implicit believer in medicine. Seeing me take some drops of the tincture before coffee, he insisted upon pledging me, and I believe would have willingly emptied the whole bottle. After having suffered great agony with his own complaint, he had passed some small stones, and was greatly better, as he said, for the soap-pills. I put him in a way to prepare these, as also his lime-water. It was impossible to have done any favour for him equal to this, as his agony had been so great. He told me our Moullah was arrived from Teawa, and had left Shekh Fidele still repining at our departure, without leaving him the piastres. As for the eclipse, he said he did not care a straw, nor for what they did or knew at Mecca, for he had no interest there. I understood our friend Mahomet, Shekh of Beyla, had been under great uneasiness at the eclipse, when it advanced in the immersion, and became total. Some time before this, as he said, there had been another, but not so great, on the day the Daveina burnt Imgededema, with above thirty other villages, and dispersed or destroyed about two thousand inhabitants of Atbara. It was now the time to give the Shekh a present, and I had prepared one for him, such as he very well deserved; but no intreaty, nor any means I could use, could prevail upon him to accept of the merest trifle. On the contrary, he solemnly swore, that if I importuned him further he would get upon his horse and go into the country. All that he desired, and that too as a favour, was, that, when I had rested at Sennaar, he might come and consult me further as to his complaints, for which he promised he should bring a recompence with him. We then settled to give his present to the Moullah, with which he was very well pleased, and which he took without any of those difficulties the Shekh of Beyla had started when it was offered to him.