OF THE MARSH POISON. 277 



in fact ceased to be streams, and were no more than lines of de- 

 tached pools in the courses that had formerly been rivers ; and 

 there they suffered from remittent fevers of such destructive 

 malignity, that the enemy, and all Europe believed, that the 

 British host was extirpated ; and the superstitious natives, 

 though sickly themselves, unable to account for disease of such 

 uncommon type amongst the strangers, declared they had all 

 been poisoned by eating the mushrooms, (a species of food they 

 hold in abhorrence,) which sprung up after the first autumnal 

 rains, about the time the epidemic had attained its height. 

 The aggravated cases of the disease differed little or nothing 

 from the worst yellow fevers of the West Indies ; and in all 

 the subsequent campaigns of the Peninsula, the same results 

 uniformly followed, whenever, during the hot seasons, any 

 portion of the army was obliged to occupy the arid encamp- 

 ments of the level country, which at all other times were heal- 

 thy, or at least unproductive of endemic fever. 



To save further narrative, I shall finish this part of the sub- 

 ject, by adducing some topographical illustrations. 



The bare hilly country near Lisbon, where the foundation 

 of the soil, and of the beds of the streams is rock, with free open 

 water-courses amongst the hills, as I have said before, is a very 

 healthy one ; but the Alentejo land, on the other side of the 

 Tagus, though as dry superficially, being perfectly flat and 

 sandy, is as much the reverse as it is possible to conceive. 

 The breadth of the river, which at Lisbon does not exceed two 

 miles, is all that separates the healthy from the unhealthy re- 

 gion ; and the villages or hamlets that have been placed along 

 the southern bank of the Tagus, for the sake of the navigation, 

 are most pestiferous abodes. The sickly track, however, is 

 not confined to the immediate shore of the river. Salvaterra, 



for 



