to come.  I therefore rode to the young doctor’s residence.  After experiencing some little difficulty in finding where to look for him, I ascended a flight or two of stairs and knocked at his door.  No one came immediately, but after some little delay the medico himself opened the door, and admitted me.  I of course made him understand that I had come to consult him, but before entering upon my throat grievance I accepted a chair, and exchanged a sentence or two of commonplace conversation.  Now the natural commonplace of the city at this season was of a gloomy sort, “Come va la peste?” (how goes the plague?) and this was precisely the question I put.  A deep sigh, and the words, “Sette cento per giorno, signor” (seven hundred a day), pronounced in a tone of the deepest sadness and dejection, were the answer I received.  The day was not oppressively hot, yet I saw that the doctor was perspiring profusely, and even the outside surface of the thick shawl dressing-gown, in which he had wrapped himself, appeared to be moist.  He was a handsome, pleasant-looking young fellow, but the deep melancholy of his tone did not tempt me to prolong the conversation, and without further delay I requested that my throat might be looked at.  The medico held my chin in the usual way, and examined my throat.  He then wrote me a prescription, and almost immediately afterwards I bade him farewell, but as he conducted me towards the door I observed an expression of strange and unhappy watchfulness in his rolling eyes.  It was not the next day, but the next day but one, if I rightly remember, that I sent to request another interview with my doctor.  In due time Dthemetri, who was my messenger, returned, looking sadly aghast—­he had “Met the medico,” for so he phrased it, “coming out from his house—­in a bier!”

It was of course plain that when the poor Bolognese was looking at my throat, and almost mingling his breath with mine, he was stricken of the plague.  I suppose that the violent sweat in which I found him had been produced by some medicine, which he must have taken in the hope of curing himself.  The peculiar rolling of the eyes which I had remarked is, I believe, to experienced observers, a pretty sure test of the plague.  A Russian acquaintance, of mine, speaking from the information of men who had made the Turkish campaigns of 1828 and 1829, told me that by this sign the officers of Sabalkansky’s force were able to make out the plague-stricken soldiers with a good deal of certainty.

It so happened that most of the people with whom I had anything to do during my stay at Cairo were seized with plague, and all these died.  Since I had been for a long time en route before I reached Egypt, and was about to start again for another long journey over the Desert, there were of course many little matters touching my wardrobe and my travelling equipments which required to be attended to whilst I remained in the city.  It happened so many times that