364 
BENGAZI. 
which characterized the city of Ptolemeta when we visited it, and 
the busy scene which a spectator of its former wealth and magni- 
ficence would have witnessed under the Ptolemies and the Cmsars, 
afforded a striking and, we must say, a melancholy example of the 
uncertainty of all human greatness. 
If the exuberant vegetation we have mentioned appeared to be 
rather out of its place, it was not less a source of inconvenience than 
regret, for we had the pleasure of being obliged to wade through 
it up to our arm-pits in making our way to the different buildings ; 
and it may readily be imagined that this tiresome operation, after the 
heavy rains which fell occasionally at night, was no treat on a cool 
cloudy morning. The brushing through a turnip field, or one of 
mangel-wurzel, which many of our readers have no doubt often tried 
with a double-barrelled gun upon their shoulders, is nothing to the 
tramping we have mentioned; for not only our boots and trowsers 
were quickly wet through with the heavy drops which we brushed 
from their lodgments, but our shirt-sleeves and jackets, and sometimes 
even our turbans, were also well soaked on these occasions. A very 
different scene presented itself on our return from Cyrene, when the 
summer heat had begun to exert its influence. Not a leaf or a stalk 
remained of all the impediments we have alluded to, and the prevailing 
colour of the place, which we had left a bright green, had been suc- 
ceeded by a dusky brown. The corn had been cut and carried, leaving 
scarcely any traces of its having been formerly growing ; and the ruins 
were left exposed, in all their naked desolation, glaring on the eye 
of the spectator. W e had now to encounter inconveniences of a 
