_22nd._--Weather continues cool. Few more patients. Present of dates from one of them. Very little meat now killed in Ghadames, less and less every day. What will become of this once flourishing city it is hard to tell. The prejudices of the people against the residence of an European in this city have apparently disappeared; people are increasingly civil; many would willingly look upon me as their protector, were I made Consul, but unfortunately for them, I am not ambitious of, nor have any inclination for, the honour. This morning heard a curious opinion about Younas, or Jonas (Jonah), for the Arabs, like the Greeks[31], sometimes change the last letter of the Hebrew ה into a Σ. Probably they got their traditions through the Greeks or the Greek language. I was talking with a taleb about longevity, when he observed, "There is but one person who is always alive." "Who is that?" I inquired very anxiously. "It is our lord Jonas, who is living in _distant_ and _unknown_ parts of the world," he said. "Is he alone?" I further inquired. "No," he added, "he has with him a hundred thousand people, who live to a great age, but who at last die, whilst he is always living. Then as to Jesus, the son of Mary, he also never died, and went up to heaven alive. The Jews (the curse of God upon them!) only killed his _likeness_." I have always observed these mysterious events to transpire in some _unknown_ and _distant_ part of the world, and took the liberty of telling this taleb that the "smoke-ships" (steamers) could soon make every place in the world near and known, and then we might find out the residence of Jonah as well as the captivity of the ten tribes. The story of the ten tribes is pretty well known. A Maroquine rabbi told me they are somewhere about the regions of Gog and Magog, in Central Asia, situate in a country where there is a river running perpetually six days out of seven, very rapid and full of stones, so that they cannot pass it and return to the Holy Land. On the seventh it stops, when it might be passed, but on the Sabbath day the law does not permit them to travel. This is the Barbary version. Central Asia is still the land of mysteries for both Jews and Mohammedans. The Russians have done little to dispel these mysteries, if they have not tried to envelop these lands in profounder obscurity, for political purposes; but had we been established in Affghanistan, we might have discovered _Jibel Kaf_, the retreat of Gog and Magog, the strange stony river, the ten tribes, and all the other objects of Jewish and Mohammedan superstition. But as with the famous gardens of the Hesperides, the abode of perfectly happy mortals, which were shifted farther and farther from actual observation by the progress of ancient discovery, so the mysterious retreat of the ten tribes and the ever-living Jonas will be transferred to other unknown lands when modern discovery shall have exhausted Central Asia.