TRIPOLY TO BENGAZI. 39 in deserts, from the time of the Psylli and Cambyses to the present, have died, as is usual, before they were buried, either from violence, thirst, or exhaustion *.

The idea in question has, however, become very general ; and we can neither attribute much blame to the reader who believes what is related on respectable authority, or to the writer who simply informs us of what he himself considers to be true. To him whose only view is to excite interest by exaggeration, we may, at least, say it seems to be superfluous : for the hardships and dangers of a journey over the sandy desert may be fully sufficient to satisfy the most adventurous, and to exhaust the most robust, without calling up the airy forms of imaginary horrors, to lengthen out the hne of those which really present themselves -f-.

But if the desert have terrors peculiar to itself, it has also its pecuhar pleasures. There is something imposing, we may say sublime, in the idea of unbounded space which it occasionally presents ; and every trifling object which appears above its untenanted surface, assumes an interest which we should not on other occasions attribute to objects of much greater importance.

The little romance which its stillness and solitude encourage, is at * The Psylli inhabited the southern parts of the Greater Syrtis, and are said tp have been altogether destroyed by clouds of sand which overwhelmed them in their passage to the interior. The Nubian army of Cambyses is thought to have experienced a similar fate.— -Fide Herodotus, lib. iv.

* We would not here be thought to allude to any particular writer; but merely to the general practice, which has obtained in all ages, of exaggerating the effects of the sand-storm in desert travelling ; which, without amplification, is sufficiently obnoxious in its genuine native dangers and inconveniences.