DESERT OF KOROSKO. 121 



On closely examining the carcasses which he met at every step, he 

 was astonished to find them covered with their skin, and presenting 

 still their natural forms, as if the animals had been stuffed or em- 

 balmed. He readily distinguished horses, oxen, asses, camels. He 

 observed with no less surprise that these corpses exhaled no odour. 

 They had been dried by the heat before decomposition could com- 

 mence its frightful work. The skin had hardened ; the muscles and 

 internal organs had been reduced into dust and gradually blown away 

 by the wind through the yawning apertures at the two extremities 

 of the body. There remained nothing more, literally, but skin and bone. 

 "This skin had such a consistency," says our author, "such a 

 degree of solidity, that all my efforts to split it were without result. 

 The heaviest stones which I could raise rebounded upon their car- 

 casses with a loud noise, but did not pierce them. If a man dies 

 while a caravan is on its march, he is buried in the sand. I have 

 had no opportunity of examining whether the desert-heat produces 

 the same effect upon his body as upon the corpses of the animals just 

 mentioned ; but it ought not to be so, since the human skin has not 

 the same consistency." 



On issuing from these gorges, we enter upon the Desert proper 

 by a sandy plain which the Djellahs have named the " River without 

 Water," and which, very low at first, slowly rises into a plateau of 

 very slight elevation, intersected by some veins of a sandstone similar 

 to that of the conical mountains. Then the plain declines anew, and 

 we emerge upon the Sea of Sand, where the pulverized sandstone 

 alternates with fields of rotted or broken pebbles, and mounds of 

 porphyry and granite. At the foot of one of these mounds, the 

 Tallat-el-Guinde, flourish a few wretched vegetables, among others 

 some gum-trees and doum-palms. The latter trees are also found in 

 solitary mournfulness scattered about the plain. Otherwise the Desert 

 of Korosko is wholly deprived of vegetable life, of 



" The glory in the grass, and the splendour in the flower." 

 As for water, it must needs be content with that of a few brackish 



