rricane abates. Unless these precautions are taken,
men and beasts inevitably perish." (_Palladius_, l.c. p. 4.)

A friend writes to me that he thinks that the accounts of strange noises
in the desert would find a remarkable corroboration in the narratives of
travellers through the central desert of Australia. They conjecture that
they are caused by the sudden falling of cliffs of sand as the temperature
changes at night time.--H. C.]

Hiuen Tsang, in his passage of the Desert, both outward and homeward,
speaks of visual illusions; such as visions of troops marching and halting
with gleaming arms and waving banners, constantly shifting, vanishing, and
reappearing, "imagery created by demons." A voice behind him calls, "Fear
not! fear not!" Troubled by these fantasies on one occasion, he prays to
Kwan-yin (a Buddhist divinity); still he could not entirely get rid of
them; but as soon as he had pronounced a few words from the _Prajna_ (a
holy book), they vanished in the twinkling of an eye.

These Goblins are not peculiar to the Gobi, though that appears to be
their most favoured haunt. The awe of the vast and solitary Desert raises
them in all similar localities. Pliny speaks of the phantoms that appear
and vanish in the deserts of Africa; Aethicus, the early Christian
cosmographer, speaks, though incredulous, of the stories that were told of
the voices of singers and revellers in the desert; Mas'udi tells of the
_Ghuls_, which in the deserts appear to travellers by night and in lonely
hours; the traveller, taking them for comrades, follows and is led astray.
But the wise revile them and the Ghuls vanish. Thus also Apollonius of
Tyana and his companions, in a desert near the Indus by moonlight, see an
_Empusa_ or Ghul taking many forms. They revile it, and it goes off
uttering shrill cries. Mas'udi also speaks of the mysterious voices heard
by lone wayfarers in the Desert, and he gives a rational explanation of
them. Ibn Batuta relates a like legend of the Western Sahara: "If the
messenger be solitary, the demons sport with him and fascinate him, so
that he strays from his course and perishes." The Afghan and Persian
wildernesses also have their _Ghul-i-Beaban_ or Goblin of the Waste, a
gigantic and fearful spectre which devours travellers; and even the Gael
of the West Highlands have the _Direach Ghlinn Eitidh_, the Desert
Creature of Glen Eiti, which, one-handed, one-eyed, one-legged, seems
exactly to answer to the Ar