And is the present fratricidal war in Switzerland unconnected with this principle of blood and persecution! No; and again, no! How, then, can we find fault with the barbarians of the Great Desert? Nay, contrarily, those who follow me through The Desert, will find the Saharan Barbarians infinitely more tolerant than the mild, and the gentle, and the polished, and the educated, and the civilized, and the Christianized professors of religion in our own great Europe! This afternoon the first portion of the Ghadamsee Soudanic caravan left for Ghat, consisting of about twenty-five camels, and some ten merchants and traders. This is merely a detachment. The larger portion of the population went to see them off, and several families were dressed in their best clothes, as on festas. It is the usual custom on the departure and return of caravans. Two or three mounted on saddled Maharees accompanied the caravan a day's journey. I have many offers of the people, as in The Mountains, to accompany me to Ghat: a strange infatuation for such rigid Moslems as the Ghadamseeah! To-day I witnessed in my court-yard or _patio_ a tremendous struggle between an ant and a fly: both species of insects are very numerous in Ghadames, and there is a great number of various coloured ants. The ant got hold of the muzzle of the fly, or its neck, and there grasped it with as firm a grasp as it is possible to conceive of one animal grasping another. In vain the fly struggled and flapped its wings; over and over again the combatants rolled as these weak defences beat the air: and yet they must have had great force in them, for they flung over the ant, of a good size, some hundred times. The struggle continued a full half hour. I once or twice took them up on a piece of straw, but the ant never let go its hold on the fly, and paid no attention to me. At last, the fly was exhausted, and ceased to flap its tiny wings. The sanguinary ant strangled the poor silly fly, as some sharper strangles or ruins his poor dupe. After death, the ant seemed busy at sucking its blood. Satiated with this, the ant attempted to convey the fly away, dead as it was, but thinking better of the matter, the carcase was abandoned. I observed that the combat went on in the midst of a thousand flies, but alas! these rendered their fellow, in this his death-struggle, against a common foe, no assistance. Such is the way the tyrants of the earth succeed! They strike down the friends of freedom one by one, and the people, as silly as the flies, leave their champions to struggle alone against the common oppressor of mankind, only thinking of what they shall eat and drink, in which fashion adorn themselves, and how they shall fill up sufficiently the measure of their idle days of folly.