The packing up for the journey was a new source of trouble; every camel-driver found fault with his load.  However, at length every article was stowed, except a hand-organ and a few stand of arms.  At length, a great hulking savage offered to take the arms, provided they were cut in two to suit the back of his animals.  We have then another instance of Arab drollery.  “You are a tall man,” said the old pilot; “suppose we shorten you by the legs.”  “No, no,” said the barbarian, “I am flesh and blood, and shall be spoiled.”  “So will the contents of these cases, you offspring of an ass,” said the old man, “if you divide them.”

The progress to the interior from the port of Tajura, led them over immense ranges of basaltic cliffs, where the heat of the sun was felt with an intensity scarcely conceivable by European feelings.  In this land of fire, the road skirting the base of a barren range covered with heaps of lava blocks, and its foot marked by piles of stones, the memorials of deeds of blood, the lofty conical peak of Jebel Seearo rose in sight, and not long afterwards the far-famed Lake Assad, surrounded by its dancing mirage, was seen sparkling at its base.

The first glimpse of this phenomenon, “though curious, was far from pleasing”—­“an elliptical basin, seven miles in its transverse axis, filled half with smooth water of the deepest cerulean hue, and half with a sheet of glittering snow-white salt, girded on three sides by huge hot-looking mountains, that dip their basins into its very bowl, and on the fourth by crude, half-formed rocks of lava, broken and divided by chasms.  No sound broke on the ear, not a ripple played on the water.  The molten surface of the lake lay like burnished steel, the fierce sky was without a cloud, and the angry sun, like a ball of metal at a white heat, rode in full blaze.”

It is scarcely wonderful, that among a people devoted to superstition, those terrible passes and sultry hollows should be marked as the haunts of the powers of evil.  Adyli, a deep mysterious cavern at the extremity of one of those melancholy plains, is believed to be the especial abode of gins and afreets, whose voices are heard in the night, and who carry off the traveller to devour him without remorse.  A late instance was mentioned of a man who was compelled by the weariness of his camel to fall behind the caravan, and who left no remnants behind him but his spear and shield.  Major Harris well describes this spot as one which, from its desolate position, might be believed to be the last stage of the habitable world.  “A close mephitic stench, impeding respiration, arose from the saline exhalations of the stagnant lake.  A frightful glare from the white salt and limestone hillocks threatened extinction to the vision, and a sickening heaviness in the loaded atmosphere was enhanced rather than alleviated by the fiery breath of the north-westerly wind, which blew without interruption during the day.  The air was inflamed, the sky