To-day passed several tumuli of stones, more than eight feet high, evidently placed to direct the caravans over the trackless portions of Sahara. I wonder what the people of Europe will say when I tell them, that The Desert--pictured in such frightful colours by the ancients, as teeming with monsters and wild beasts, and every unearthly and uncouth thing and being, not forgetting the dragons, salamanders, vampyres, cockatrices, and fiery-flying serpents, and as such believed in these our enlightened days--is a very harmless place, its menagerie being reduced to a few small crows, and now and then a stray butterfly, and a few common house and cheese-and-bacon and fruit flies! these poor little domestic everyday creatures! Nay, there is not found here the wild ox, or the oudad, or the antelope, or ostrich, or the wild boar, or any other animal which inhabit and mark the Saharan regions near the north coast of Africa. It is, indeed, impossible to conceive of a country so devoid of living creatures as the route which we have traversed these last twelve days. To this must be added, that now is the favourable season for animals, and we should certainly see them if there were any to be seen. Of the four routes to Ghat, the next to us on the west, is the shortest. People say the route which we are now travelling is only frequented in this season, and mostly by large caravans, or scarcely ever in the summer. _8th._--Rose at day-break and started at sunrise: as usual, the sky overcast and in an hour the wind got up and blew a strong gale awhile from the south-east. To-day Sahara looked unusually dark and drear; night as a dread pall seemed to hang on the day and all visible things--all life and animation was extinct but our lone, solitary, melancholy caravan! We moved on in deep and weary silence, not a noise, a cry, a murmur, the grumbling of the camels was even hushed. Nothing broke the horrid silence of The Desert. We wound round long-long winding valleys-- "Through many a dark and dreary vale [We] pass'd, and many a region dolorous--" "Where all life dies."