Monotony, the irritating yellow color of the sand plain, the heat, and, above all, boundless immensity are the most peculiar traits of the Libyan desert, which extends westward from Egypt. But viewed more nearly the desert is in fact less monotonous. Its sand is not level, but forms a series of swellings which recall immense waves of water. It is like a roused sea solidified on a sudden. But whoso should have the courage to go across that sea for an hour, two hours, a day, directly westward would see a new sight. On the horizon would appear eminences, sometimes cliffs and rocks of the strangest outlines. Under foot the sand would grow thinner, and from beneath it limestone rocks would emerge just like land out of water. In fact that was a land, or even a country in the midst of a sand ocean. Around the limestone hills were valleys, in them the beds of streams and rivers, farther on a plain, and in the middle of it a lake with a bending line of shores and a sunken bottom. But on these plains, hills, and heights no blade of grass grows; in the lake there is no drop of water; along the bed of the river no current moves. That is a landscape, even greatly varied with respect to forms, but a landscape from which all water has departed,--the very last atom of moisture has dried from it; a dead landscape, where not only all vegetation has vanished, but even the fertile stratum of earth has been ground into dust or dried up into rock slabs. In those places the most ghastly event has taken place of which it is possible to meditate: Nature has died there, and nothing remains but her dust and her skeleton, which heat dissolves to the last degree, and burning wind tosses from spot to spot. Beyond this dead, unburied region stretches again a sea of sand, on which are seen, here and there, towering up in one and another place, pointed stacks as high as a house of one story. Each summit of such a little hill is crowned by a small bunch of gray, fine, dusty leaves, of which it is difficult to say that they are living; but it may be said that they cannot wither. One of these strange stacks signifies that water in that place has not dried up altogether, but has hidden from drought beneath the earth, and preserves dampness in some way. On that spot a tamarind seed fell, and the plant has begun to grow with endless effort. But Typhon, the lord of the desert, has noted this, and begun to stifle it with sand. And the more the little plant pushes upward, the higher rises the stack of sand which is choking it. That tamarind which has wandered into the desert looks like a drowning man raising his arms, in vain, heavenward. And again the yellow boundless ocean stretches on with its sand waves and those fragments of the plant world which have not the power to perish. All at once a rocky wall is in front, and in it clefts, which serve as gateways.