U2 MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN 



III 



The next extracts, and I am sorry to say the last, 

 are from Fleeming's letters of 1860, when he was 

 back at Bona and Spartivento and for the first time 

 at the head of an expedition. Unhappily these 

 letters are not only the last, but the series is quite 

 imperfect ; and this is the more to be lamented 

 as he had now begun to use a pen more skilfully, 

 and in the following notes there is at times a touch 

 of real distinction in the manner. 



' Cagliari, October 5, 1860. 

 'All Tuesday I spent examining what was on 

 board the Elba, and trying to start the repairs of 

 the Spartivento land line, which has been entirely 

 neglected, and no wonder, for no one has been paid 

 for three months, no, not even the poor guards 

 who have to keep themselves, their horses and their 

 families, on their pay. Wednesday morning, I 

 started for Spartivento and got there in time to try 

 a good many experiments. Spartivento looks more 

 wild and savage than ever, but is not without a 

 strange deadly beauty : the hills covered with 

 bushes of a metallic green with coppery patches of 

 soil in between; the valleys filled with dry salt 

 mud and a little stagnant water ; where that very 

 morning the deer had drunk, where herons, curlews 

 and other fowl abound, and where, alas ! malaria 



