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Two or three mounted on saddled Maharees accompanied the caravan a day's journey. I have many offers of the people, as in The Mountains, to accompany me to Ghat: a strange infatuation for such rigid Moslems as the Ghadamseeah!
We are to continue ten days in the route of Fezzan, then turn into that of Ghat, thus describing a sort of semicircle to get out of the forays of the Shânbah. Course south-east. On the right ranges of low dull hills, with the same on the left, but at a greater distance. The road very good, fit for carriages, through the broad bed of a valley.
A little later, in the ghat between Siva's temple and the building, where the dead Afghan used to keep his camels, Mukhum Dass, smiling as he rode, was struck down by a knife-blow from behind and pitched off his mule head-foremost. The mule ran away.
In achieving the ascent of these gigantic stairs all the expedients of road-makers have been resorted to: the zigzag, the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have been pushed to their utmost applications; for five continuous miles on the Thull Ghát Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven, involving many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Ghát Incline there are thirty tunnels.
Afterwards we visited the Treasurer, who also gave us coffee, and was very civil; and finally called upon the brother of the Governor of Ghât, who was writing letters for us to-day. I feel in better health than when I left Tripoli. Yet we are all a little nervous about the climate of Mourzuk, which is situated in a slight depression of the plain, in a place inclined to be marshy.
It is, perhaps, for the better, for we are all knocked up. By preserving the body we preserve the mind. Our party consists of four merchants, the rest being servants and slaves. My friend Haj Ibrahim is the principal one. We have the Medina Shereef, who is in charge of a male and two female slaves, the property of the Governor of Ghat.
Continued north-east. We now caught a glimpse of the palms of The Wady. But here we overtook our Tripoline friends, who had left Ghat ten days before us and were waiting for our arrival. They conducted us to their encampment. The party consisted of Mustapha, an Alexandrian merchant of Tripoli, and another merchant, having with them some sixty slaves.
Coja Solomon looked on helplessly as Desmond exchanged his meaner garments for the richer clothes of his unwilling host. "Now we will go. You will tell the darwan that you have gone down to the ghat, so that if a question is asked he will be at no loss for an answer." In the faint light of the rising moon the barrel of the pistol gleamed as they came into the open.
Spent the evening with Haj Ibrahim. The Haj surprised me by saying, "All my slaves, even the youngest of not more than four or five years' old, must walk to Tripoli as they have walked from Kanou to Ghat." I found Kandarka with him. The camel-driver is a right-jolly fellow, quite a new species of being from the Touaricks of Ghat.
Fezzan, Ghat, and other oases, contain many families of free Negroes, some perhaps settled formerly as merchants, and others the descendants of freed slaves. I do not think the real black population begins until we reach the Tibboos, although Ghatroun is mostly inhabited by Negroes. Certainly, the Negroes have never emigrated farther north in colonies. Mr.
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