Food.
197
Condiments.-The most portable and useful condiments for a traveller are-salt, red pepper, Harvey's sauce, lime juice, dried onions, and curry-powder. They should be bought at a first-rate shop ; for red pepper, lime juice, and curry-powder are often atrociously adulterated.
Salt.-The craving for salt (chloride of sodium) is somewhat satisfied by the potash salts, and, perhaps, by other minerals thus we often hear of people reduced to the mixing of gunpowder with their food, on account of the saltpetre that it contains. An impure salt is made widely in North Africa, from wood-ashes. They are put into a pot, hot water is poured over them and allowed to stand and dissolve out the salts they contain ; the ley is then decanted into another pot, where it is evaporated. The plants in use, are those of which the wetted ashes have a saline and not an alkaline taste, nor a soapy feel. As a general rule, trees that make good soap (p. 122), yield little saltpetre or other good equivalent for salt. Salt caravans are the chief sustainers of the lines of commerce in North Africa. In countries where salt is never used, as I myself have witnessed in South Africa, and among the Mandan North-American Indian tribes (Catlin, vol. i. p. 124), the soil and springs are "brick." Four Russian sailors who were wrecked on Spitzbergen, and whose wellknown adventures are to be found in Pinkerton's ` Voyages and Travels,' had nothing whatever for six years to subsist on -save only the animals they killed, a little moss, and melted snow-water. One of them died; the others enjoyed robust health. People who eat nothing but meat, feel the craving for salt far less strongly than those who live wholly on vegetables.
Buteher.-One man in every party should have learnt from a professed butcher, how to cut up a carcase to the best advantage.
Store-keeping.-All stores should be packed and securely lashed, that it may be impossible to pilfer from them. The packages of those that are in use, should be carried in one pair of saddle-bags, to be devoted to that purpose. These should stand at the storekeeper's bivouac, and nobody else should be allowed to touch them, when there. He should
