BENGAZI. 
319 
The soil at the bottom of these chasms appears to have been washed 
down from the plain above by the heavy winter rains, and is fre- 
quently cultivated by the Arabs ; so that a person, in walking over 
the country where they exist, comes suddenly upon a beautiful 
orchard or garden, blooming in secret, and in the greatest luxuriance, 
at a considerable depth beneath his feet, and defended on all sides by 
walls of solid rocks, so as to be at first sight apparently inaccessible. 
The effect of these secluded little spots, protected, as it were, from 
the intrusion of mankind by the steepness and the depth of the bar- 
riers which inclose them, is singular and pleasing in the extreme : 
they reminded us of some of those secluded retreats which we read 
of in fairy legends and tales, and we could almost fancy ourselves, as 
we looked down upon them, in the situation of some of those fa- 
voured knights and princes, the heroes of our earlier days, who have 
been permitted to wander over the boundaries of reality into regions 
shut out from the rest of mankind. 
It was impossible to walk round the edge of these precipices, look- 
ing everywhere for some part less abrupt than the rest, by which 
we might descend into the gardens beneath, without calling to mind 
the description given by Scylax of the far-famed garden of the Hes- 
perides. 
This celebrated retreat is stated by Scylax to have been an inclosed 
spot of about one-fifth of a British mile * across, each way, filled with 
* Two stadia is the length and breadth given by Scylax, which, taken as the mean 
Grecian stades of Major Rennell, of about ten to a British mile, would give the mea- 
surement here stated. 
