Travels in Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, and across the desert into Egypt ...

14,6
TRAVELS IN ASIATIC TURKEY,
the villages bordering on Jerusalem, he had at length been obliged
to retreat towards Hebron.
The English sloop of war the Camelion, Captain Maitland, ar-
rived at Jaffa in the night of the 2d of December ; and, on the
following morning, Colonel Murray, deputy quarter-master-generai
to the forces under the command of Sir Ralph Abercrombie,
came to the camp, with the
very satisfactory intelligence of the ap-
of a considerable British force. From this information we
proach
were encouraged to hope that the painful situation of the mission
would be speedily alleviated by the adoption of more active mea-
sures, which would bring the affairs in this part of the world to a
speedy conclusion.
Captait Maitland, of the Camelion, having been advised that a
suspicious brig had been observed for several days past hovering off
El-Arish, sailed on the evening of the 3d, in hopes of falling in
with her.
The plague
continued to make great ravages
in the Turkish camp,
and was not, as before, confined to the Mamelukes and Albanians,
but had become general among every description of the troops. It
was impossible to form a precise idea of the mortality it occasioned ;
but from what we witnessed, we had reason to conjecture that an
hundred individuals perished daily from this complaint. The Turkish
r"apks were also greatly thinned by the desertions, which were
effected in
large bodies to prevent the passage from being disputed
by a small guard purposely
stationed about three miles from the
camp, on the road leading
to Acre and Damascus.
General Koehler, Colonel Murray, and all the officers of the
mission, were invited to be present at a Turkish field-day, on the
4th. The troops, consisting of about six thousand, went through
nearly the same manoeuvres with those which have been already described.
The Camelion, having on board Major Fletcher and Qaptain
Leake, arrived on the afternoon of the 7th, from El-Arish, with-
out having fallen in with the suspicious brig, in quest of which she
had sailed from Jaffa.
I am compelled here to interrupt the order of my narrative of
o-eneral occurrences, to -
speak particularly
of the situation of the
mission at the period on which 1 am entering. On the 5th of the
present month, December, Geary, a military artificer, was attacked
by symptoms of malignant fever, to which he fell a victim on
the 10th in the afternoon. His death was soon followed by other