Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851

Mitkenàb, pleasantly situated amongst lofty trees, seemed to invite the wanderers to cool shelter from the mid-day sun. They were parched with thirst when they entered it, but not one of the inquisitive Arabs who crowded around them would attend to their request for a draught of milk or water. Here, however, was Mohammed Din, and with him a party of Schaïgiës under Melek Mahmud, whom they found encamped under a great old tree, with his fifty horsemen around him. After they had taken some refreshment, the Din came to pay them a visit. He refused to take the place offered him on an angarèb , but sat down upon the ground, giving them to understand, with a sneering smile, that that was now the proper place for him. "We had excellent opportunity to examine the physiognomy of this Schech, who is venerated like a demigod by all the Arabs between the Atbara and the Red Sea. 'He is a brave man,' they say, 'full of courage; there is no other like him!' His face is fat and round, with small grey-brown, piercing, treacherous-looking eyes, expressing both the cunning and the obstinacy of his character; his nose is well-proportioned and slightly flattened; his small mouth constantly wears a satirical scornful smile. But for this expression and his thievish glance, his bald crown and well-fed middle-sized person would become a monk's hood. He goes with his head bare, wears a white cotton shirt and ferda , and sandals on his feet… We told him that he was well known to the Franks as a great hero; he shook his head and said that on the salt lake, at Souakim, he had seen great ships with cannon, but that he did not wish the help of the Inglèb (English;) then he said something else, which was not translated to us. I incautiously asked him, how numerous his nation was. 'Count the trees,' he replied, glancing ironically around him; (a poll-tax constituted a portion of the tribute.) Conversation through an interpreter was so wearisome that we soon took our leave." At Mitkenàb they were upon the borders of the great forest (Chaaba) that extends from the banks of the Atbara to the shores of the Red Sea. It contains comparatively few lofty trees – most of these getting uprooted by hurricanes, when the rainy season has softened the ground round their roots – but a vast deal of thicket and dense brushwood, affording shelter to legions of wild beasts; innumerable herds of elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, tigers, giraffes, various inferior beasts, and multitudes of serpents of the most venomous description. For fear of these unpleasant neighbours, no Arab at Mitkenàb quits his dwelling after nightfall. "When we returned to the wells, a little before sundown, we found all the Schaïgiës on the move, to take up their quarters in an enclosure outside the village, partly on account of the beasts of prey, especially the lions, which come down to drink of a night, partly for safety from the unfriendly Arabs. We went with them and encamped with Mammud in the middle of the enclosure. We slept soundly the night through, only once aroused by the hoarse cries of the hyenas, which were sneaking about the village, setting all the dogs barking. To insure our safety, Mohammed Din himself slept at our door – so well-disposed were his people towards us." A rumour had gained credit amongst the Arabs, that the two mysterious strangers were, sent by Achmet to reconnoitre the country for the Bascha's own advance; and so incensed were they at this, that, although their beloved chief's son was a hostage in the Turkish camp, it was only by taking bypaths, under guidance of a young relative of Schech Mussa's, that the Wernes were able to regain their camp in safety. A few days after their return they were both attacked by bad fever, which for some time prevented them from writing. They lost their reckoning, and thenceforward the journal is continued without dates.

The Bascha grew weary of life in camp, and pined after action. In vain did the Schaïgiës toss the djereed, and go through irregular tournaments and sham fights for his diversion; in vain did he rattle the dice with Topschi Baschi; vain were the blandishments of an Abyssinian beauty whom he had quartered in a hut surrounded with a high fence, and for whose amusement he not unfrequently had nocturnal serenades performed by the band of the 8th regiment; to which brassy and inharmonious challenge the six thousand donkeys assembled in camp never failed to respond by an ear-splitting bray, whilst the numerous camels bellowed a bass: despite all these amusements, the Bascha suffered from ennui. He was furious when he saw how slowly and scantily came in the tribute for which he had made this long halt. Some three hundred cows were all that had yet been delivered; a ridiculously small number contrasted with the vast herds possessed by those tribes. Achmet foamed with rage at this ungrateful return for his patience and consideration. He reproached the Schechs who were with him, and sent for Mohammed Din, Shech Mussa, and the two Shechs of Mitkenàb. Although their people, foreboding evil, endeavoured to dissuade them from obedience, they all four came and were forthwith put in irons and chained together. With all his cunning Mohammed Din had fallen into the snare. His plan had been, so Mr Werne believes, to cajole and detain the Turks by fair words and promises until the rainy season, when hunger and sickness would have proved his best allies. The Bascha had been beforehand with him, and the old marauder might now repent at leisure that he had not trusted to his impenetrable forests and to the javelins of his people, rather than to the word of a Turk. On the day of his arrest the usual evening gun was loaded with canister, and fired into the woods in the direction of the Haddendas, the sound of cannon inspiring the Arab and negro tribes with a panic fear. Firearms – to them incomprehensible weapons – have served more than anything else to daunt their courage. "When the Turks attacked a large and populous mountain near Faszogl, the blacks sent out spies to see how strong was the foe, and how armed. The spies came back laughing, and reported that there was no great number of men; that their sole arms were shining sticks upon their shoulders, and that they had neither swords, lances, nor shields. The poor fellows soon found how terrible an effect had the sticks they deemed so harmless. As they could not understand how it was that small pieces of lead should wound and kill, a belief got abroad amongst them, that the Afrite, Scheitàn, (the devil or evil spirit,) dwelt in the musket-barrels. With this conviction, a negro, grasping a soldier's musket, put his hand over the mouth of the barrel, that the afrite might not get out. The soldier pulled the trigger, and the leaden devil pierced the poor black's hand and breast. After an action, a negro collected the muskets of six or seven slain soldiers, and joyfully carried them home, there to forge them into lances in the presence of a party of his friends. But it happened that some of them were loaded, and soon getting heated in the fire, they went off, scattering death and destruction around them." Most of the people in Taka run from the mere report of a musket, but the Arabs of Hedjàs, a mountainous district near the Red Sea, possess firearms, and are slow but very good shots.

In the way of tribute, nothing was gained by the imprisonment of Mahommed Din and his companions. No more contributions came in, and not an Arab showed himself upon the market-place outside the camp. Mohammed Din asked why his captors did not kill rather than confine him; he preferred death to captivity, and keeping him prisoner would lead, he said, to no result. The Arab chiefs in camp did not conceal their disgust at the Bascha's treatment of their Grand-Shech, and taxed Achmet with having broken his word, since he had given him the Amàhn – promise of pardon. Any possibility of conciliating the Arabs was destroyed by the step that had been taken. At night they swarmed round the camp, shrieking their war-cry. The utmost vigilance was necessary; a third of the infantry was under arms all night, the consequent fatigue increasing the amount of sickness. The general aspect of things was anything but cheering. The Wernes had their private causes of annoyance. Six of their camels, including the two excellent dromedaries given to them by the Bascha before quitting Chartum, were stolen whilst their camel-driver slept, and could not be recovered. They were compelled to buy others, and Mr Werne complains bitterly of the heavy expenses of the campaign – expenses greatly augmented by the sloth and dishonesty of their servants. The camel-driver, fearing to face his justly-incensed employers, disappeared and was no more heard of. Upon this and other occasions, Mr Werne was struck by the extraordinary skill of the Turks in tracing animals and men by their footsteps. In this manner his servants tracked his camels to an Arab village, although the road had been trampled by hundreds of beasts of the same sort. "If these people have once seen the footprint of a man, camel, horse, or ass, they are sure to recognise it amongst thousands of such impressions, and will follow the trail any distance, so long as the ground is tolerably favourable, and wind or rain has not obliterated the marks. In cases of loss, people send for a man who makes this kind of search his profession; they show him a footprint of the lost animal, and immediately, without asking any other indication, he follows the track through the streets of a town, daily trodden by thousands, and seldom falls to hunt out the game. He does not proceed slowly, or stoop to examine the ground, but his sharp eye follows the trail at a run. We ourselves saw the footstep of a runaway slave shown to one of these men, who caught the fugitive at the distance of three days' journey from that spot. My brother once went out of the Bascha's house at Chartum, to visit a patient who lived far off in the town. He had been gone an hour when the Bascha desired to see him, and the tschansch (orderly) traced him at once by his footmarks on the unpaved streets in which crowds had left similar signs. When, in consequence of my sickness, we lingered for some days on the Atbara, and then marched to overtake the army, the Schaïgiës who escorted us detected, amidst the hoof-marks of the seven or eight thousand donkeys accompanying the troops, those of a particular jackass belonging to one of their friends, and the event proved that they were right." Mr Werne fills his journal, during his long sojourn in camp, with a great deal of curious information concerning the habits and peculiarities of both Turks and Arabs, as well as with the interesting results of his observations on the brute creation. The soldiers continued to bring to him and his brother all manner of animals and reptiles – frogs, whole coils of snakes, and chameleons, which there abound, but whose changes of colour Mr Werne found to be much less numerous than is commonly believed. For two months he watched the variations of hue of these curious lizards, and found them limited to different shades of grey and green, with yellow stripes and spots. He made a great pet of a young wild cat, which was perfectly tame, and extraordinarily handsome. Its colour was grey, beautifully spotted with black, like a panther; its head was smaller and more pointed than that of European cats; its ears, of unusual size, were black, with white stripes. Many of the people in camp took it to be a young tiger, but the natives called it a fagged , and said it was a sort of cat, in which Mr Werne agreed with them. "Its companion and playfellow is a rat, about the size of a squirrel, with a long silvery tail, which, when angry, it swells out, and sets up over its back. This poor little beast was brought to us with two broken legs, and we gave it to the cat, thinking it was near death. But the cat, not recognising her natural prey – and moreover feeling the want of a companion – and the rat, tamed by pain and cured by splints, became inseparable friends, ate together, and slept arm in arm. The rat, which was not ugly like our house rats, but was rather to be considered handsome, by reason of its long frizzled tail, never made use of its liberty to escape." Notwithstanding the numerous devices put in practice by the Wernes to pass their time, it at last began to hang heavy, and their pipes were almost their sole resource and consolation. Smoking is little customary in Egypt, except amongst the Turks and Arabs. The Mograbins prefer chewing. The blacks of the Gesira make a concentrated infusion of this weed, which they call bucca ; take a mouthful of it, and roll the savoury liquor round their teeth for a quarter of an hour before ejecting it. They are so addicted to this practice, that they invite their friends to "bucca" as Europeans do to dinner. The vessel containing the tobacco juice makes the round of the party, and a profound silence ensues, broken only by the harmonious gurgle of the delectable fluid. Conversation is carried on by signs.