364 BENGAZI.

which characterized the city of Ptolemeta when we visited it, and the busy scene which a spectator of its former wealth and magnificence would have witnessed under the Ptolemies and the Cmsars, afforded a striking and, we must say, a melancholy example of the uncertainty of all human greatness.

If the exuberant vegetation we have mentioned appeared to be rather out of its place, it was not less a source of inconvenience than regret, for we had the pleasure of being obliged to wade through it up to our arm-pits in making our way to the different buildings ; and it may readily be imagined that this tiresome operation, after the heavy rains which fell occasionally at night, was no treat on a cool cloudy morning. The brushing through a turnip field, or one of mangel-wurzel, which many of our readers have no doubt often tried with a double-barrelled gun upon their shoulders, is nothing to the tramping we have mentioned; for not only our boots and trowsers were quickly wet through with the heavy drops which we brushed from their lodgments, but our shirt-sleeves and jackets, and sometimes even our turbans, were also well soaked on these occasions. A very different scene presented itself on our return from Cyrene, when the summer heat had begun to exert its influence. Not a leaf or a stalk remained of all the impediments we have alluded to, and the prevailing colour of the place, which we had left a bright green, had been succeeded by a dusky brown. The corn had been cut and carried, leaving scarcely any traces of its having been formerly growing ; and the ruins were left exposed, in all their naked desolation, glaring on the eye of the spectator. W e had now to encounter inconveniences of a