It was on the 17th of July that Major Laing left Tripoli in company of the Sheik Babani, a highly respectable man who had resided in Timbuctoo twenty-two years, and whose wife and children were there still. This Sheik engaged to conduct our traveller thither in two months and a half; and there, or at his neighbouring residence, to deliver him over to the great Marabout Mooktar, by whose influence he would be able to proceed farther in any direction that might be required, according to information received as to the course of the river. This Babani is stated by the Consul of Tripoli, to be “one of the finest fellows, with the best tempered and most prepossessing countenance that he ever beheld; Laing, in all his letters, speaks of him in the highest terms of respect and approbation. As the Gharan mountains were rendered impassable by the defection of a rebellious chief of the Bashaw, who had taken possession of all the passes, the small koffila of Babani took the route of Beneoleed. On the 21st of August they reached Shaté, and, on the 13th of September, arrived safely at Ghadamis, after a “tedious and circuitous journey of nearly a thousand miles.” In the course of this journey, Laing reports the destruction of all his instruments from the heat of the weather, and the jolting of the camels; his barometers broken; his hygrometers rendered useless from the evaporation of the ether; the tubes of most of his thermometers snapt by the warping of the ivory; the glass of the artificial horizon so dimmed by the friction of sand which insinuated itself everywhere, as to render an observation difficult and troublesome; his chronometer stopt, owing, he says, to the extremes of heat and cold, but more probably to the jolting, or the insinuation of sandy particles; and to wind up the catalogue of his misfortunes, the stock of his rifle broken by the great gouty foot of a camel treading upon it. The range of the thermometer in the desert, was from 120° about the middle of the day, to 75°-68°, and once or twice to 62° an hour or two before sunrise, at which time was observable a great incrustation of nitre on the ground, which is the common appearance on the surface of all the known deserts of Africa, from Tripoli to the Cape of Good Hope.