Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo and Across the Great Desert to Morocco performed in the Year 1824 - 1828 Vol I (ePub)

Excerpt: ?I offer, at length, to the public the narrative of my travels in the interior of Africa, which should have appeared long since; several causes have, however, concurred during the fifteen months that have elapsed since my return to my native soil, to retard its publication till the present time. I have brought home, from the regions I have traversed, only fugitive and very laconic notes, written in haste and trepidation: they would have been inexorable evidences against me, had I been surprised tracing unknown characters, and unveiling as it were to the Whites the mysteries of these countries. In Africa, especially in those districts occupied by the Foulahs and the Moors, religious hypocrisy in a stranger is the most flagrant of outrages, and it were a hundred times better to pass there for a Christian, than for a false Mahometan; so that if my mode of travelling had its advantages, which its success has proved, it was also attended with terrible inconveniences. I carried always in my wallet a sentence of death, and how often was that wallet necessarily confided to the hands of enemies! On my arrival in Paris, the notes, written mostly in pencil, were found so faint and so much effaced by time, my wanderings, and my ill fortune, that it required all the tenacity and the scrupulous fidelity of my memory to restore and reproduce them as the basis of my observations and the materials of my narrative.