violent pain in your head, while the spirits are filtering through the vessels of your brains, shew the difference? and when did any ever feel a like sensation from black pepper, or any pepper ate to excess in every meal?
I lay down, then, as a positive rule of health, that the warmest dishes the natives delight in, are the most wholesome strangers can use in the putrid climates of the Lower Arabia, Abyssinia, Sennaar, and Egypt itself; and that spirits, and all fermented liquors, should be regarded as poisons, and, for fear of temptation, not so much as be carried along with you, unless as a menstruum for outward applications.
Spring, or running water, if you can find it, is to be your only drink. You cannot be too nice in procuring this article. But as, on both coasts of the Red Sea you scarcely find any but stagnant water, the way I practiced was always this, when I was at any place that allowed me time and opportunity—I took a quantity of fine sand, washed it from the salt quality with which it was impregnated, and spread it upon a sheet to dry; I then filled an oil-jar with water, and poured into it as much from a boiling kettle as would serve to kill all the animalcula and eggs that were in it. I then sifted my dried sand, as slowly as possible, upon the surface of the water in the jar, till the sand stood half a foot in the bottom of it; after letting it settle a night, we drew it off by a hole in the jar with a spigot in it, about an inch above the sand; then threw the remaining sand out upon the cloth, and dried and washed it again.
This process is sooner performed than described. The water is as limpid as the purest spring, and little in-ferior
