668 THE UNIVERSE. 



The aspect of the desert is more monotonous. With the 

 exception of the oases which it displays here and there, it is, 

 in Africa, completely arid. In one of the deserts of Upper 

 Egypt, situated between the Nile and the Red Sea, the eye 

 only perceives an unbroken sheet of burning sand. And 

 yet upon its borders I found, to my great surprise, braving 

 the heat of the sun, and never refreshed by a single drop of 

 water, numerous tufts of an asclepiad (Asdepias procera, 

 Willd.), the large, moist, and velvety leaves of which glis- 

 tened with freshness. It was an inexplicable problem ! 



But this last effort of life soon disappears, and we see be- 

 fore us only an ocean of sand and a horizon of death. Not 

 a cry, not a murmur, is heard, and scarce even a loitering 

 vulture devours the last fragments of some camel which 

 has fallen on the sand, and the bleached skeleton of which 

 will soon be added to so many others now marking out the 

 desert routes. Not a cloud tarnishes the azure of the sky, 

 not a breath refreshes the air ; a sun, the ardor of which 

 nothing moderates, pours down its sparkling light and fiery 

 rays, burning even through one's clothes. The motionless 

 and heated atmosphere tortures the face with its fiery 



rection. These Gymnoti (the name they are known by in science) are five to six 

 feet long; they are strong enough to kill the most robust animals when they put in 

 action all their organs, armed as they are with an apparatus of numerous nerves, at 

 the same time and in a suitable direction. At Uritucu it had become necessary to 

 change the road across the steppe, owing to the eels having so increased in a little 

 river that every year many horses, struck with paralysis, were drowned in pass- 

 ing the ford. All the fish fly before the approach of these formidable eels. They 

 even assail unawares men fishing with a rod, the moistened line often forming a 

 medium for communicating the fatal shock. In this case the electric fluid is dis- 

 charged even from the bottom of the water. Humboldt, Tableaux de la Nature, 

 t. i., p. 45. 



