74 MENTAL EFFECTS OF FEVEE. Chap. III. 



minds. Cheerfulness vanishes, and the whole mental 

 horizon is overcast with black clouds of gloom and sadness. 

 The liveliest joke cannot provoke even the semblance of a 

 smile. The countenance is grave, the eyes suffused, and the 

 few utterances are made in the piping voice of a wailing 

 infant. An irritable temper is often the first symptom of 

 approaching fever. At such times a man feels very much 

 like a fool, if he does not act like one. Nothing is right, 

 nothing pleases the fever-stricken victim. He is peevish, 

 prone to find fault and to contradict, and think him- 

 self insulted, and is exactly what an Irish naval surgeon, 

 before a court-martial defined a drunken man to be : "a man 

 unfit for society." If a party were all soaked full of malaria 

 at once, the life of the leader of the expedition would be made 

 a burden to him. One might come with lengthened visage, 

 and urge as a good reason for his despair, if further progress 

 were attempted, that " he had broken the photograph of his 

 wife ; " another, " that his proper position was unjustly with- 

 held because special search was not directed towards ' the ten 

 lost tribes.' " It is dangerous to rally such a one, for the 

 irate companion may quote Scripture, and point to their 

 habitat "beyond the rivers of Ethiopia." When a man 

 begins to feel that everything is meant to his prejudice, — 

 he either takes a dose of " rousers," or writes to the news- 

 papers, according to the amount of sense with which nature 

 has endowed him. 



Finding that it was impossible to take our steamer of only 

 ten-horse power through Kebrabasa, and convinced that, in 

 order to force a passage when the river was in flood, much 

 greater power was required, due information was forwarded 

 to Her Majesty's Government, and application made for a 

 more suitable vessel. Our attention was in the mean time 



