APPENDIX A. 
139 
parison between this treatment and that received at the hands of 
the authorities at the British Museum^ to whose kindness I owe 
Appendices B and C of this work. 
Unlike Speke, I could procure no particulars of my plants ; and 
it is the more vexatious inasmuch as I believe my party to be the 
only one that ever culled and preserved the desert Flora of Aboo 
Flamad. The district on the confines of the tropics is so seldom 
favoured with rain that it is perhaps the most scorched and barren 
desert it has ever been my fate to traverse. On the eve of our 
crossing the desert from Korosko, in August, 1861, it had not 
been moistened by rain for nine years, when two days^ heavy 
thunder-storms thoroughly drenched it, and not only cooled the 
almost intolerable heat, but produced a delightful vegetation, 
covering the immense plains with a refreshing tint, and giving all 
a pleasant occupation in gathering and preserving the newly grown 
flowers. These, instead of being enumerated in the present work, 
it appears to me, adorned another's collection. 
After a succession of fevers and a variety of illnesses that 
fastened upon my wife and myself during our return voyage and 
residence at Khartoum, as a substitute for the excitement of travel, 
1 was laid up with a series of guinea-worms revelling in the fleshy 
part of my right leg and foot. Whilst in this state, a paragraph 
from the Overland MaiU'’ was placed in my hands, descriptive of 
a banquet in honour of Captain Speke on his return to Taunton. 
In that portion of his address touching upon the slave trade, he 
(as it was broadly stated in another paper) obviously referred to me 
when saying, ^Anen with authority emanating from our Govern- 
ment, who are engaged with the native kings in the diabolical 
slave trade.'’^ My experience of Speke at Gondokoro, and also 
the tone of his last letter, written under my roof at Khartoum, 
