Note (return) — FAS TO TIMBUCTOO,

The nails and palms of the hands are stained red with henna 70, cultivated there: the Arabs tatoo their hands and arms, but not the people of Timbuctoo. These people are real negroes; they have a slight mark on the face, sloping from the eye; the Foulans have a horizontal mark; the Bambarrahees a wide gash from the forehead to the chin. Tombs are raised over the dead; they are buried in a winding-sheet and a coffin: the relations mourn over their graves, and pronounce a panegyric on the dead. The men and women mix in society, and visit together with the same freedom as in Europe. They sleep on mattresses, with cotton sheets and a counterpane; the married, in separate beds in the same room. They frequently bathe the whole body, their smell would otherwise be offensive; they use towels brought from India. At dinner they spread their mats and sit as in Barbary. They smoke a great deal, but tobacco is dear; it is the best article of trade. Poisoning is common; they get the poison from the fangs of snakes, but, he says, most commonly from a part of the body near the tail, by a kind of distillation. Physic, taken immediately after the poison, may cure, but not always; if deferred two or three days, the man must die: the poison is slow, wastes the flesh, and produces a sallow, morbid appearance. It causes great pain in the stomach, destroys the appetite, produces a consumption, and kills in a longer or shorter time, according to the strength of constitution. Some who have taken remedies, soon after the poison, live 8 or 10 years; otherwise the poison kills in 4 or 5 days. Physicians prescribe an emetic, the composition of which he does not know.