The doomed party left Suez on August 8th.  On the 10th at midnight they were attacked by the Bedawin.  “Palmer expostulated with his assassins; but all his sympathetic facility, his appeals to Arab honour and superstition, his threats, his denunciations, and the gift of eloquence which had so often prevailed with the wild men, were unheeded.”  As vainly, Matr Nassar[FN#371] covered his proteges with his aba[FN#372] thus making them part of his own family.  On the evening of August 11th the captives were led to the high bank of the Wady Sudr, where it received another and smaller fiumara yet unnamed, and bidden to prepare for death.  Boldly facing his enemies, Palmer cursed them[FN#373] in Biblical language, and in the name of the Lord.  But while the words were in his mouth, a bullet struck him and he fell.  His companions also fell in cold blood, and the bodies of all three were thrown down the height[FN#374]—­ a piteous denouement—­and one that has features in common with the tragic death scene of another heroic character of this drama—­ General Gordon.

The English Government still believed and hoped that Palmer has escaped; and on October 17th it sent a telegram to Burton bidding him go and assist in the search for his old friend.

Like the war horse in the Bible, the veteran traveller shouted “Aha!” and he shot across the Mediterranean like a projectile from a cannon.  But he had no sooner reached Suez than he heard—­his usual luck—­that Sir Charles Warren, with 200 picked men, was scouring the peninsula, and that consequently his own services would not be required.  In six weeks he was back again at Trieste and so ended Viator’s[FN#375] last expedition.  The remains of Palmer and his two companions were discovered by Sir Charles and sent to England to be interred in St. Paul’s Cathedral.  To Palmer’s merits as a man Burton paid glowing tributes; and he praised, too, Palmer’s works, especially The Life of Harun Al Raschid and the translations of Hafiz,[FN#376] Zoheir and the Koran.  Of the last Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole says finely:  It “has the true desert ring in it; .. the translator has carried us among the Bedawin tents, and breathed into us the strong air of the desert, till we fancy we can hear the rich voice of the Blessed Prophet himself as he spoke to the pilgrims on Akabah.”

In his letter to Payne of 23rd December 1882, Burton adumbrates a visit eastward.  “After January,” he says, “I shall run to the Greek Islands, and pick up my forgotten modern Greek.”  He was unable, however, to carry out his plans in their entirety.  On January 15th he thanks Payne for the loan of the “Uncastrated Villon,"[FN#377] and the Calcutta and Breslau editions of the Nights, and says “Your two vols. of Breslau and last proofs reached me yesterday.  I had written to old Quaritch for a loan of the Breslau edition.  He very sensibly replied by ignoring the loan and sending me a list of his prices.  So then the thing dropped.  What is the use of paying (pounds)3 odd for a work that would be perfectly useless to me. ...  But he waxes cannier every year.”