Niger

9 It had yet to await him a while. Mungo, meti¬
culously note-taking amid the sour heat and
sourer mosquitoes, was congratulating himself that
he had escaped the fever which generally attacked
newcomers to the Gambia. But his immunity was
only temporary. On the 31st of July he went out
to observe an eclipse of the moon ; next day he was
down with fever, and passed into delirium.
For nearly a month he lay in this condition ; hot
and stifling the days in the Pisania hut, with little
to read and few to speak to, for Laidley appears to
have been gone here and there on various com¬
mercial concerns, and the Ainslies were busied with
their own affairs. Probably they thought of Mungo
as an interfering amateur, and his cold, chill manner
repulsed them.
He lay in bed and longed for recovery and the
interior.
By the first week in September sufficient strength
had returned for him to emerge from the hut and
take short walks in and around Pisania. His
hunger for knowledge of everything on the fringes
of the land of his exploration was again moving him
to activity. It moved him too soon. On the 10th
he rambled too far under the midday sun, and
returned home swaying in an apparent condition
that would certainly have been misinterpreted in
46