PREFACE.
a suspension of the usual commercial intercourse with the interior ¬
of Africa, and was thus, during the ensuing five years, placed
under the necessity of employing his time in Egypt and the adjacent
countries in the same manner as he had done in Syria. After the
journeys in Egypt, Nubia, Arabia, and Mount Sinai, which have been
briefly described in the Memoir prefixed to the former volume of
his travels, his death at Cairo, at the moment when he was preparing ¬
for immediate departure to Fezzan, left the Association in possession ¬
of a large collection of manuscripts concerning the countries
visited by their traveller in these preparatory journeys, but of nothing ¬
more than oral information as to those to which he had been
particularly sent. As his journals in Nubia, and in the regions
adjacent to the Astaboras, although relating only to an incidental
part of his mission to Africa, were descriptive of countries coming
strictly within the scope of the African Association, these, together
with all his collected information on the interior of Africa, were
selected for earliest publication. The present volume contains his
observations in Syria and Arabia Petræa; to which has been added
his tour in the Peninsula of Mount Sinai, although the latest of all
his travels in date, because it is immediately connected, by its subject, ¬
with his journey through the adjacent districts of the Holy
Land. There still remain manuscripts sufficient to fill two volumes ;
one of these will consist of his travels in Arabia, which were confined ¬
to the Hedjaz, or Holy Land of the Musulmans, the part
least accessible to Christians; the fourth volume will contain very
copious remarks on the Arabs on the Desert, and particularly the
Wahabys.
The two principal maps annexed to the present volume have been
constructed under the continued inspection of the Editor, by Mr.
John Walker, junior, by whom they have been delineated and
engraved.
