We were making about thirty miles a day, sleeping soundly at night, when the ever-watchful hyena, and occasionally a troop of wild asses, would pay us their nocturnal visits, and upon the fourth morning we began to approach the shores of the Mirage Seas.  These atmospheric phenomenas on the Nubian Desert are not only very perfect imitations of real lakes, but have on many occasions inveigled expeditions away, to perish of heat and thirst.  A little time before my expedition to Central Africa a body of Egyptian troops crossing this desert found their water almost at a boiling point in the skins, and nearly exhausted.  They beheld, a few miles distant, an apparent lake overshadowed by a forest, and bordered with verdure and shrubbery.  Although told by the guide that it was an illusion, they broke ranks, started off in pursuit of the sheet of water, chasing the aerial phantom, although it receded with the pace of their approach.  At last they sunk down from thirst and fatigue, and died!  Twelve hours on the Nubian Desert without water means a certain and terrible death; and even to this day, having been near such an end, with all of its indescribable anguish, I seldom raise a glass of water to my lips that I do not recall a day when I lay upon the burning sand, awaiting with impatience the moment that should snap asunder the vital cord and give peace to my burning body.

A mirage certainly presents an incomparable scenic effect.  Once in its midst, you are encompassed by an imponderable mirror.  It reflects the rocks, the mountains, the stray mimosa trees, and reproduces by inverted mirage every prominent object of the extended landscape.  It has the blue of polished platinum, and lies like a motionless sea, stretching away from the craggy bluffs.  Sometimes during the noonday heat it dances within a few yards of the caravan, and gives motion to every object within its area, changing the waste to the semblance of rolling seas peopled with the semblance of men.

Attacked by semi-blindness, with a blistering nose, and lips almost sealed to speech because of the agony of attempted articulation, I found the fifth day brought me to the extreme of suffering, when a terrific simoon burst over the desert, gathering up and dispersing the sands with indescribable fury.  My mouth and nostrils were filled with earthy atoms, and my eyes were filled with irritating particles.  The storm grew so dense and awful that it became a tornado, and we were soon enveloped in total darkness.  All routes of travel were obliterated, and destruction threatened my command.  These sand spouts are frequent, making a clean swathe, burying alike man and beast, and often they blow for weeks.  During the approach of one of those death-dealing simoon’s I noted a sublime phenomenon.  To southward were fine equi-distant sand spouts, rising perpendicularly to a great height, and losing their swelling capitals in the clouds.  They seemed to stand as majestic columns supporting the vault of the sky, and the supernatural architecture was further heightened by mirage-lakes, whose waters seemed to dash against the pillars as the green of doom-palms waved through the colonnade.  The spectacle appeared like the ruin of a supernal pantheon once reared by the banks of the Nile, whose welcome and real waters greeted my eye after a fourteen days’ journey, which I trust I may never be called upon to repeat.