BENGAZI. 319 The soil at the bottom of these chasms appears to have been washed down from the plain above by the heavy winter rains, and is frequently cultivated by the Arabs ; so that a person, in walking over the country where they exist, comes suddenly upon a beautiful orchard or garden, blooming in secret, and in the greatest luxuriance, at a considerable depth beneath his feet, and defended on all sides by walls of solid rocks, so as to be at first sight apparently inaccessible.

The effect of these secluded little spots, protected, as it were, from the intrusion of mankind by the steepness and the depth of the barriers which inclose them, is singular and pleasing in the extreme : they reminded us of some of those secluded retreats which we read of in fairy legends and tales, and we could almost fancy ourselves, as we looked down upon them, in the situation of some of those favoured knights and princes, the heroes of our earlier days, who have been permitted to wander over the boundaries of reality into regions shut out from the rest of mankind.

It was impossible to walk round the edge of these precipices, looking everywhere for some part less abrupt than the rest, by which we might descend into the gardens beneath, without calling to mind the description given by Scylax of the far-famed garden of the Hesperides.

This celebrated retreat is stated by Scylax to have been an inclosed spot of about one-fifth of a British mile * across, each way, filled with * Two stadia is the length and breadth given by Scylax, which, taken as the mean Grecian stades of Major Rennell, of about ten to a British mile, would give the measurement here stated.