rs were excited and pleased with the
novelty and romantic grandeur of the scene. The desert has, in some
degree, the sublimity of the ocean. There is the same boundless
expanse, the same vast, unbroken curve of the horizon, the same
tracklessness, the same solitude. There is, in addition, a certain
profound and awful stillness and repose, which imparts to it a new
element of impressiveness and grandeur. Its dread and solemn silence
is far more imposing and sublime than the loudest thunders of the
seas.

The third day the soldiers began to be weary of such a march. They
seemed afraid to penetrate any further into such boundless and
terrible solitudes. They had been obliged to bring water with them in
goat-skins, which were carried by camels. The camel is the only beast
of burden which can be employed upon the deserts. There is a
peculiarity in the anatomical structure of this animal by which he can
take in, at one time, a supply of water for many days. He is formed,
in fact, for the desert. In his native state he lives in the oases and
in the valleys. He eats the herbage which grows among the rocks and
hills that alternate with the great sandy plains in all these
countries. In passing from one of his scanty pasturages to another, he
has long journeys to make across the sands, where, though he can find
food here and there, there is no water. Providence has formed him with
a structure adapted to this exigency, and by means of it he becomes
extremely useful to man.

The soldiers of Alexander did not take a sufficient supply of water,
and were reduced, at one time, to great distress. They were relieved,
the story says, by a rain, though rain is extremely unusual in the
deserts. Alexander attributed this supply to the miraculous
interposition of Heaven. They catch the rain, in such cases, with
cloths, and afterward wring out the water; though in this instance, as
the historians of that day say, the soldiers did not wait for this
tardy method of supply, but the whole detachment held back their heads
and opened their mouths, to catch the drops of rain as they fell.

There was another danger to which they were exposed in their march,
more terrible even than the scarcity of water. It was that of being
overwhelmed in the clouds of sand and dust which sometimes swept over
the desert in gales of wind. These were called sand-storms. The fine
sand flew, in such cases, in driving clouds, which filled the eyes and
stopped the breath