Martini

“I had another companion of my voyage, M. Martini, a young Tuscan physician who had been long waiting for a safe opportunity to visit the ruins of Thebes. He was acute and learned in his profession, besides being correctly versed in Italian and French literature. I divided with him a little cabin, pompously named the chamber, where we could only enter by crouching low, and we did not find our accomodations for sleeping in it to be much more convenient.”

[...]

“I halted at Deyrout [...] The cachef’s people provided us with horses as far as to goussyeh, the most dreary country village I had seen in Egypt.
I was for sleeping in the open air, but M. Martini being indisposed, insisted on our taking up the deserted house thath the Cheykh-el-Beled had intended for us, and in which the rats and polecats were ranging all night.”

[...]

“We rested in the evening at Tahta, the ancient Aphroditopolis, in a Latin convent of the fathers of the Propaganda.
Some Italian religious offered us refreshment; their monastery is in ruins; the monks, covered with dust, and groping their way, up the chin in the rayless gloom of poverty, see nothing around them but the fragments of confusion. M. Martini, finding himself still worse, thought fir to tarry with these religious, till the arrival of our kanje at Tatta, which, however, had halted by the way, under the directions of Rechouân.”

[...]

“We descent the Nile, with a contrary wind, for my kanje had at lenght arrived, but it was only the evening before. In it came Dr. Martini, but so much an invalid, that scarcely could he drag his slow body along the lengthened shore, to snarch a few glimpses of Thebes. This young Italian died soon after. To the inhabitants of Cairo he had given a sample of his talents, and they will have to lament, with unaffected sorrow, the loss of a skilful physicianm of a man distinguished for his erudition, wit, assiduity, and very honourable moral sentiments.”

From Travels in Egypt
by Count de Forbin, 1817-18