[Here terminates Mr. Park's own narrative. The following chapters contain an account of his life from his return to England, in 1797, to his death on the Niger, in 1805; and also of the discoveries and adventures of succeeding travellers.]

CHAPTER XXVII.

_Attempts of Horneman, Nicholls, Roentgen, and Adams._

During the interval which elapsed between Park's first and second journey, several attempts were made to explore Central Africa. The first traveller was Frederick Horneman, a student of Gottingen, who was recommended by Professor Blumenbach to the patronage of the African Association. After spending some time in the study of Natural History, and the Arabic language, he went to Cairo, intending to join some caravan, under the assumed character of an Arab or Moslem. It was not till the following year, 1798, that he was enabled to find a caravan proceeding westward, and bound for Fezzan. On the 8th September, they left Egypt, entering upon a wide expanse of sandy desert, resembling what might be supposed to be the bed of the ocean after the waters had left it. It was covered with fragments of petrified wood, of a lightish grey colour and bearing a strong resemblance to natural wood. The Arabs travelled all day, and when they halted at night, each gathered a few sticks and prepared his own victuals. There were a few _oases_ in this waste. In ten days they came to Ummesogeir, a village containing one hundred and twenty inhabitants, who lived on a rock, subsisting on dates, and separated by immense tracts of sand from all intercourse with the rest of the world. In twenty-four hours they came to Siwah, an extensive oasis, about fifty miles in circumference, and the only inhabited spot of any considerable extent on the route to Fezzan. Here there were found some curious remains of antiquity; among the rest a monument, called by the natives Ummebeda, a large mass of dilapidated ruins, which some suppose to have been the celebrated shrine of Jupiter Ammon. Thence they travelled through sandy regions, diversified with numerous limestone rocks. Here Horneman was in considerable danger; for the caravan was met by several hundred inhabitants of Siwah, mounted on asses, who pointed to him and insisted that he and another of the caravan were Christians from Cairo, against whom they cherished a deadly enmity. But Horneman's coolness and courage disarmed their hostility; he insisted that he was a Moslem, took out the Koran and read passages from it aloud, and even challenged them to answer him on points of the Mahommedan faith.