Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo: And Across the Great Desert, to Morocco, Performed in the Years 1824-1828

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H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830 - Africa, Central - 1005 pages
 

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Page 62 - The inhabitants of Timbuctoo are exceedingly neat in their dress and in the interior of their dwellings. Their domestic articles consist of calabashes and wooden platters. They are unacquainted with the use of knives and forks, and they believe that, like them, all people in the world eat with their fingers. Their furniture merely consists of mats for sitting on ; and their beds are made by fixing four stakes in the ground at one end of the room, and stretching over them some mats or a cow-hide.
Page 115 - One of the largest of these pillars of sand," says a modern traveller, Caillie, " crossed our camp, overset all the seats, and whirling us about like straws, threw one of us on the other in the utmost confusion. We knew not where we were, and could not distinguish anything at the distance of a foot. The sand wrapped us in darkness like a fog, and the sky and the earth seemed confounded and blended in one. Whilst this frightful tempest lasted we remained stretched on the ground motionless, dying of...
Page 62 - Timbuctoo are not veiled like those of Morocco: they are allowed to go out when they please, and are at liberty to see any one. The people are gentle and complaisant to strangers. In trade they are industrious and intelligent ; and the traders are generally wealthy and have many slaves. The men are of the ordinary size, well made, upright, and walk with a firm step. Their colour is a fine deep black. Their noses are a little more aquiline than those of the Mandingoes, and like them they have thin...
Page 50 - The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth.
Page 81 - Arabia, whose creed maintains that there is but one God, and that Mahomet is his prophet, and teaches ceremonies by prayer, with washings, Ac., almsgiving, fasting, sobriety, pilgrima^f to Mecca, Ac.
Page 71 - that if I should return by the way of Sego, Sansanding, and our establishments at Galam, those who might envy the success of my enterprise, the very undertaking of which had created for me many enemies, would pretend to doubt the fact of my journey, and of my residence at Timbuctoo ; whereas, by returning through the Barbary States, the mere mention of the point at which I had arrived would reduce the most envious to silence.
Page 76 - des esquisses nai'ves.' 1 hen the ' sort of triangle' in the text, is a parallelogram in this thing called ' a view.' He sketched it, he says, from two heaps of dirt or rubbish. ' Many a time have I ascended to the tops of these hills, to obtain a complete view of the town and to make my sketch.
Page 116 - ... at the distance of a foot. The sand wrapped us in darkness like a fog, and the sky and the earth seemed confounded and blended in one. Whilst this frightful tempest lasted we remained stretched on the ground motionless, dying of thirst, burned by the heat of the sand, and buffeted by the wind. We suffered nothing, however, from the sun, whose disk, almost concealed by the clouds of sand, appeared dim and deprived of its rays.

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