TRIPOLY TO BENGAZI. 
39 
in deserts, from the time of the Psylli and Cambyses to the present, 
have died, as is usual, before they were buried, either from violence, 
thirst, or exhaustion *. 
The idea in question has, however, become very general ; and we 
can neither attribute much blame to the reader who believes what 
is related on respectable authority, or to the writer who simply 
informs us of what he himself considers to be true. To him whose 
only view is to excite interest by exaggeration, we may, at least, say 
it seems to be superfluous : for the hardships and dangers of a 
journey over the sandy desert may be fully sufficient to satisfy the 
most adventurous, and to exhaust the most robust, without calling 
up the airy forms of imaginary horrors, to lengthen out the hne of 
those which really present themselves -f-. 
But if the desert have terrors peculiar to itself, it has also its 
pecuhar pleasures. There is something imposing, we may say sub- 
lime, in the idea of unbounded space which it occasionally presents ; 
and every trifling object which appears above its untenanted surface, 
assumes an interest which we should not on other occasions attri- 
bute to objects of much greater importance. 
The little romance which its stillness and solitude encourage, is at 
* The Psylli inhabited the southern parts of the Greater Syrtis, and are said tp have 
been altogether destroyed by clouds of sand which overwhelmed them in their passage 
to the interior. The Nubian army of Cambyses is thought to have experienced a simi- 
lar fate.— -Fide Herodotus, lib. iv. 
* We would not here be thought to allude to any particular writer; but merely to 
the general practice, which has obtained in all ages, of exaggerating the effects of the 
sand-storm in desert travelling ; which, without amplification, is sufficiently obnoxious 
in its genuine native dangers and inconveniences. 
