Small offences are punished by the bastinado: but those of a greater magnitude subject the convict, according to the different degrees of guilt, to the penalty of a fine, of imprisonment, or of death.—Shereefs, like the Nobility of other States, are sometimes punished, as was mentioned before, by the pain of dishonour; in which class of punishments, the most dreaded, because the most reproachful, is the indignity of having dust heaped upon their heads. To their insulated and remote situation, and to their natural barrier of desolate mountains and dreary wastes of sand, much more than to military strength, the people of Fezzan are indebted for their security. Trusting to this natural defence, their towns are without guards, and, their capital excepted, are also without walls; nor have they any regular standing force: yet the Shereef conceives that 15 or 20,000 troops might, upon an emergency, be raised. The only expedition of a military nature that has happened within his remembrance, was undertaken on the following account:— South-East of the capital, at the distance of 150 miles, is a wide and sandy desart, entirely barren, and oppressed with a suffocating heat. Immediately beyond this desart, the width of which is about 200 miles, the mountains of Tibesti, inhabited by a wild and savage people of that name, begin to take their rise. Ferocious in their manners, free-booters in their principles, and secure, as they thought, in the natural defences of their situation, these independent mountaineers became the terror of the caravans which traded from Fezzan to Bornou, and which are obliged to pass the Western extremity of the Desart. But at length, having plundered a caravan which belonged to the King himself, and having killed about twenty of his people, their conduct provoked his resentment, and determined him to revenge the insult. With this view he immediately raised a small army of from 3 to 4,000 men, the command of which he gave to an able and active _Magistrate_, announcing, by that appointment, that he sent them, not to subdue a respectable enemy, but to punish an assemblage of plunderers and assassins. Having compleated the difficult passage of the desart, and having gained the first ascent of the mountains, they proceeded without opposition, till at length the natives, who waited in ambush, rushed upon them, and with the bows and arrows, and lances, with which they were armed, began a furious assault: but the instant that the foremost of the soldiers had given their fire, the mountaineers, more alarmed at the dreadful sounds which they heard, and at the imagined lightning which they saw, than terrified with the slaughter that was made, threw down their arms, and flying with great precipitation, abandoned, to the mercy of the victors, their houses and their helpless inhabitants. The next morning, a deputation, from the natives, of their principal people arrived at the camp, with humble intreaties that their wives and children might