Nature seems herself to be dead! This is, nevertheless, the paradise of a wayward poet:

Oh! that the desert were my dwelling place,

With one sweet spirit for my minister;

That I might all forget the human race,

And hating no one, love but only her a.

In deserts we have true personifications of silence. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, paid divine honours to silence. Nature is never more awful than in its exemplification: whether in a convent; in a cathedral; in a retired glen; in a forest; or in a starless night. In woman it is affecting; in man dignified.

The inhabitants of deserts have, for the most part, been always, as much separated from the pleasures, as from the habits of civilized life. The Mauritanians and Gætulians b knew little or nothing of husbandry: they roved after the manner of the Scythians; sleeping on their garments; and using poisoned arrows for the purposes of guarding themselves from the wild beasts, that infested them on all sides. Like the Nigritiæ, living near the Niger, they carried bottles of

water under the bellies of their horses.

The deserts of Zara were once peopled with a nation, who had all things in common. They are mentioned by Lucan, Pliny, and Silius Italicus. The picture, sketched of the ancient inhabitants of the country beyond the Numidian deserts, exhibits, also, a contrast to the intervening regions, highly agreeable to the imagination; since Leo Africanus assures us, that they lived in a partial state of equality, hunting wild animals; tending their flocks and herds; and preserving the honey of bees: the natural fertility of their soil enabling them to live without toil, ambition, or any other violent passion. They never went to war; and never travelled out of their own country.

a Childe Harold, canto iv. st. xxvi.

c Phars. iv. v. 334.

d Lib. v. c. 8.

b Lucan. Phars. lib. iv.
e Lib. i. v. 142; ii. v. 181.

a

The inhabitants of the Arabian deserts are descendants of Ismael, the son of Abraham and Hagar; of whom Moses relates, that the God of the Jews declared, before his birth, that "he should be a wild man; that his hand should be against every man, and that every man's hand should be against him "." Ismael became an archer, and dwelt in the wilderness, where his descendants remain even to this day; living in clans or tribes. As Ismael was an archer, so were his descendants, in the age of Isaiah; and, till the time when fire-arms were introduced, they were the most skilful archers in the world. From age to age have these Ismaelites been in perpetual hostility with the surrounding nations; and yet they occupy the same wilderness still. They retain the same manners, habits, and customs. Savage in character, they are social only to those of their own tribe. Intractable, they wander from spring to spring; subsisting chiefly on their herds of cattle and camels; and living in tents covered with skins. Like the Jews, they refer to twelve original tribes ; they practise circumcision; marry only among themselves; and retain with equal pertinacity their peculiar manners and prejudices. In one remarkable circumstance, however, they differ: the Jews still adhere to the dispensations of Moses; the Ismaelites have adopted those of Mahomet :-and while all the countries, which surround them, have been subject to storms and revolutions beyond those of any other quarter of the globe, and while the Jews are scattered through all the nations of the earth, they have subsisted through every species of vicissitude. And though Sesostris, the Persians, Alexander, Pompey, Gallus, Trajan, and Severus, raised large armies, and in part executed designs of extirpation against them, yet were they never able to do them any very serious injury. They rode without bridles or saddles ; and in the hottest of

a Gen. xvi. v. 12.

b Gen. xxii. v. 20.

c Isaiah, xx. v. 17.

d Two passages in Livy seem to contradict this: lib. xxi. c. 44. 46; also Sallust, in Jugurtho.

engagements managed their horses only with their whips a; charging their enemies generally in the night. They were a healthy, long-lived people; they clad themselves in loose garments; had a plurality of wives; and seldom indulged in meat; living chiefly on herbs, roots, milk, cheese, and honey.

66

If the Numidians were superior to the Nigritiæ, Getulians, and Mauritanians, the inhabitants of the deserts of Petra seem as much to have surpassed the Numidians. When Demetrius, by order of his father, Antigonus, sate down before Petra with an army, and began an attack upon it, an Arab accosted him after the following manner: King Demetrius: what is it you would have? What madness can have induced you to invade a people, inhabiting a wilderness, where neither corn, nor wine, nor any other thing, you can subsist upon, are to be found? We inhabit these desolate plains for the sake of liberty; and submit to such inconveniences, as no other people can bear, in order to enjoy it. You can never force us to change our sentiments, nor way of life; therefore, we desire you to retire out of our country, as we have never injured you; to accept some presents from us; and to prevail with your father to rank us among his friends.” Upon hearing this, Demetrius accepted their presents, and raised the siege.

In the great desert of Sahara, so extensive and so waste is the prospect, that Adams travelled with the Moors nine-and-twenty days, without seeing a single plant;-not even a blade of grass! and Sidi Hamet reported to Riley, that he journeyed over the same desert twenty-eight days, in another direction, with the same aspect of sterility. During ten days of this journey, the ground was as hard, as the floor of a house. He was on his way to Timbuctoo, in a caravan, consisting of eight hundred men, and three thousand camels.

a Oppian de Venat., lib. iv. Herodian, lib. vii.

b Vide Nic. Damascene, in Excerpt. Vales., p. 518.

Appian, in Lybic., c. vi. 39. 64.

d Plut. in Vit. Demet.

In a subsequent journey, with a thousand men and four thousand camels, they encountered the burning blast of the desert. For two days they lay down with their faces to the ground. Two hundred camels, and upwards of three hundred men perished.

This desert is equal in extent to the one-half of Europe: it is the largest in the world. Here Nature presents herself in characters of frightful sterility. Gloomy, barren, and void, uniformity here produces sensations of the most distressing and disconsolate melancholy. A heat prevails, too, under which Nature herself seems to sink; the mind experiences no delight from the imagination; the soul feels no inspiration of poetry: even Tasso would be read in repulsive silence: curiosity is entombed, as it were; and the imagination pictures nothing to animate the dreadful waste, but wild boars, panthers, lions, and serpents .

In boundless seas, impenetrable forests, and in vast savannahs, there resides grandeur, heightened by an awful repose. Here the imagination pauses for materials, wherewith to heighten the desolation and despair. This silence, this soli

a

Scott, Lord of the Isles.

b Vide Rennell's Appendix, p. lxxxiii.

In the midst of the great desert between Mourzuk and Bornon, towns, villages, wandering tribes, and caravans, sometimes occur to break the solitude of this dismal belt, which seems to stretch across Northern Africa, and, in many parts of which, not a living creature, even an insect, enlivens the scene. Still, however, the halting-places at the wells, and wadeys, or valleys, afford an endless source of amusement to the traveller, in witnessing the manners, and listening to the conversation, of the various tribes of natives, who, by their singing and dancing, their story-telling, their quarrelling and fighting, make him forget, for a time, the ennui and fatigue of the day's journey.-Denham's Narrative of Travels in Northern and Central Africa, Pref. vii.

tude,-more horrific are they to the imagination, than the perspective of whole ages of action, difficulty, and labour. Napoleon, in crossing the desert, to inspect the forts of Suez, and to reconnoitre the shores of the Red Sea, passed only one tree in all the journey; the whole of which was tracked with bones and bodies of men and animals. The night was cold, and there was no fuel. His attendants gathered the dry bones and bodies of the dead, that lay bleaching in the desert of these they made fires; and the Conqueror of Egypt laid himself down upon cloaks and slept in the warmth. “My friend," said Denon to Desaix, as they were one day contemplating the same deserts, "is not this an error of Nature? Nothing here receives life; every thing inspires melancholy, or fear. It seems as if Providence, after haying provided abundantly for the other portions of the globe, suddenly desisted, for want of materials; or abandoned it to its original sterility." "Or is it," replied Desaix, "the anciently inhabited part of the world, in age and decrepitude? Men have so abused the gifts of Nature, that, as a punishment for their ingratitude, Nature may have sterilized their soil!"

The sands of the deserts were, probably, once the sands of the sea. While surveying Nature under these aspects, where all is inanimation and mystery, in the midst of a profound and frightful silence, the mind bends beneath the weight of an oppression, like that of a nightmare. No quadruped, no bird, no insect, gives relief to a circular horizon of unvaried aspect. A boundless view, like that of the

a Vide Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire des Expéditions en Egypte et en Syrie, par J. Miot.

The Emperor remarked, that the desert always had a peculiar influence on his feelings. He had never crossed it without being subject to a certain emotion. It seemed to him, he said, "the image of Immensity :-it showed no boundaries, and had neither beginning nor end :-it was an ocean on terra firma." His imagination was delighted at the sight; and he took pleasure in drawing our attention to the observation, that "Napoleon" meant "Lion of the Desert."-Las Cases.