ing the
serenest contemplation, with the great moon thrice magnified as it rose,
and I recall an evening when I was supremely content.

Piloted by the carcasses of decayed camels, we took up our route in the
morning, led by our guide, and soon emerged on the sublimest scenery of
the desert. Our line of travel lay through the center of grand
elliptical amphitheaters, which called to mind the Coliseum at Rome and
the exhumed arena at Pompeii. These eroded structures, wrought by the
hand of nature at some remote period, were floored over by hard,
gravelly sand, inclosed by lofty, semi-circular sides, and vaulted only
by the blue sky, and are among the grandest primitive formations I have
ever seen. From the maroon shade of the sand to the dark, craggy
appearance of the terraced rocks, there is as much variety as can be
found in landscape without verdure and in solitude without civilization.
These amphitheaters are linked together by narrow passages; and so
perfect were the formations, that four doorways, breaking the view into
quadrants, were often seen. The view broadened and lengthened day by
day, until our journey lay through a plain of billowing sand. Then the
sun grew fierce and intolerable. The lips began to crack, the eyebrows
and mustache were burned to a light blonde, the skin peeled, and the
tongue became parched, while the fine sand, ever present in the hot
wind, left its deposits in the delicate membranes of the eye. It is thus
that a period of ten hours in the saddle, day after day, under the
scorching sun, takes the edge off the romance of travel, and calls to
one's mind the green lawn, the sparkling fountain, and the beauties of a
more tolerable zone.

We were making about thirty miles a day, sleeping soundly at night, when
the ever-watchful hyena, and occasionally a troop of wild asses, would
pay us their nocturnal visits, and upon the fourth morning we began to
approach the shores of the Mirage Seas. These atmospheric phenomenas on
the Nubian Desert are not only very perfect imitations of real lakes,
but have on many occasions inveigled expeditions away, to perish of heat
and thirst. A little time before my expedition to Central Africa a body
of Egyptian troops crossing this desert found their water almost at a
boiling point in the skins, and nearly exhausted. They beheld, a few
miles distant, an apparent lake overshadowed by a forest, and bordered
with verdure and shrubbery. Although told by the guide th