PILGRIMAGE ACROSS THE DESERT OF AFRICA.

[The following very lively description of a Pilgrimage across the Desert is given by Ali Bey, in his Travels in Morocco, Tripoli, &c. It is an animated picture, which pourtrays, in the strongest colours, the perils and sufferings encountered in these enterprizes.]

We continued marching on in great haste, for fear of being overtaken by the four hundred Arabs whom we wished to avoid. For this reason we never kept the common road, but passed through the middle of the desert, marching through stony places, over easy hills. This country is entirely without water; not a tree is to be seen in it-not a rock which can offer a shelter or a shade. A transparent atmosphere, an intense sun, darting its beams upon our heads, a ground almost white, and commonly of a concave form, like a burning glass; slight breezes, scorching like a flame;-such is a faithful picture of this district, through which we were passing.

Every man we meet in this desert is looked upon as an enemy. Having discovered about noon a man in arms, on horseback, who kept at a certain distance, my thirteen Beduins united the moment they perceived him, darted like an arrow to overtake him, uttering loud cries, which they interrupted by expressions of contempt and derision; as, "What are you seeking, my brother?" "Where are you going, my son?" As they made these exclamations, they kept playing with their guns over their heads. The discovered Beduin profited of his advantage, and fled into the mountains, where it was impossible to follow him. We met no one else.

We had now neither eaten nor drunk since the preceding day; our horses and other beasts were equally destitute; though ever since nine in the evening we had been travelling rapidly, Shortly after noon we had not a drop of water remaining, and the men, as well as the poor animals, were worn out with fatigue. The mules, stumbling every moment, required assistance to lift them up again, and to support their burthen till they rose. This terrible exertion exhausted the little. strength we had left.

At two o'clock in the afternoon a man dropped down stiff, and as if dead, from great fatigue and thirst. I stopt, with three or four of my people, to assist him. The little wet which was left in one of the leathern budgets was squeezed out of it, and some drops of water poured into the poor man's mouth, but without any effect. I now felt that my own strength was beginning to forsake me; and, becoming very weak, I determined to mount on horseback, leaving the poor fellow behind. From this moment others of my caravan began to drop successively, and there was no possibility of giving them any assistance; they were abandoned to their unhappy destiny, as every one thought only of saving himself. Several mules, with their burdens, were left behind;

and I found on my way two of my trunks on the ground, without knowing what was become of the mules which had been carrying them, the drivers having forsaken them, as well as the care of my effects and of my instruments.

I looked upon this loss with the greatest indifference, as if they had not belonged to me, and pushed on. But my horse began now to tremble under me, and yet he was the strongest of the whole caravan. We proceeded in silent despair. When I endeavoured to encourage any one of the party to increase his pace, he answered me by looking steadily at me, and by putting his forefinger to his mouth to indicate the great thirst by which he was affected. As I was reproaching our conducting officers for their inattention, which had occasioned this want of water, they excused themselves by alleging the mutiny of the Oudaias; and besides, added they, " Do we not suffer like the rest?" Our fate was the more shocking, as every one of us was sensible of the impossibility of supporting the fatigue to the place where we were to meet with water again. At last, about four in the evening, I had my turn, and fell down with thirst and fatigue.

Extended without consciousness on the ground, in the middle of the desert, left with only four or five men, one of whom had dropped at the same moment with myself, and all without any means of assisting me, because they knew not where to find water, and, if they had known it, had not strength to fetch it, I should have perished with them on the spot, if Providence, by a kind of miracle, had not preserved us.

Half an hour had already elapsed since I had fallen senseless to the ground (as I have since been told), when, at some distance, a considerable caravan, of more than two thousand souls, was seen advancing. It was under the direction of a Marebout or Saint, called Sidi Alarbi, who was sent by the Sultan to Ttemsen or Tremecen. Seeing us in this distressed situation, he ordered some skins of water to be thrown over us. After I had received several of them over my face and hands, I recovered my senses, opened my eyes, and looked around me, without being able to discern any body. At last, however, I distinguished seven or eight Sherifs and Fakirs, who gave me their assistance, and showed me much kindness. I endeavoured to speak to them, but an invincible knot in my throat seemed to hinder me; I could only make myself understood by signs, and by pointing to my mouth with my finger.

They continued pouring water over my face, arms, and hands, and at last I was able to swallow small mouthfuls. This enabled me to ask, "Who are you?" When they heard me speak, they expressed their joy, and answered me, "Fear nothing; far from being robbers, we are your friends," and every one mentioned his name. I began by degrees to recollect their faces, but was not able to remember their names. They poured again over me a still greater quantity of water, gave me some to drink, filled some of my leather bags, and left me in haste, as every minute spent in this place was precious to them, and could not be repaired.

+

This attack of thirst is perceived all of a sudden by an extreme aridity of the skin; the eyes appear to be bloody, the tongue and mouth, both inside and outside, are covered with a crust of the thickness of a crown piece; this crust is of a dark yellow colour, of an insipid taste, and of a consistence like the soft wax from a beehive. A faintness or languor takes away the power to move; a kind of knot in the throat and diaphragm, attended with great pain, interrupts respiration. Some wandering tears escape from the eyes, and at last the sufferer drops down to the earth, and in a few moments loses all consciousness. These are the symptoms which I remarked in my unfortunate fellowtravellers, and which I experienced myself.

I got with difficulty on my horse again, and we proceeded on our journey. My Beduins and my faithful Salem were gone in different directions to find out some water; and two hours afterwards they returned one after another, carrying along with them some good or bad water, as they had been able to find it. Every one presented to me part of what he had brought; I was obliged to taste it, and I drank twenty times, but as soon as I swallowed it my mouth became as dry as before; at last I was not able either to spit or to speak.

The greatest part of the soil of the desert consists of pure clay, except some small traces of a calcareous nature. The whole surface is covered with a bed of chalky calcareous stone, of a whitish colour, smooth, round, and loose, and of the size of the fist; they are almost all of the same dimension, and their surface is carious, like pieces of old mortar. I look upon this to be a true volcanic production. This bed is extended with such perfect regularity, that the whole desert is covered with it, a circumstance which makes pacing over it very fatiguing to the traveller.

Not any animal is to be seen in this desert, neither quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, nor insects, nor any plant whatever; and the traveller who is obliged to pass through it is surrounded by the silence of death. It was not till four in the evening that we began to distinguish some small plants, burnt with the sun, and a tree of a thorny nature, without blossom or fruit.

DESCRIPTION OF ICELAND.

[The following brief account of a most singular portion of the Globe is abridged from the Travels of Dr. Henderson, the intelligent and pious agent of the Bible Society. This gentleman visited every corner of the island, and is the first among our countrymen who crossed the central desert, skirted the northern and eastern coasts, and passed a winter among the natives. He has most happily united the characters of an observer of the moral and religious dispositions of the inhabitants, and an accurate delineator of the wonders of nature.]

ICELAND is situated in the northern Atlantic, between the parallels 63 deg. 30 min. and the Arctic circle, and between the meridians of 23 deg. 15 min. and 24 deg. 4 min. being in mean length, from east

to west, about 280, and in mean breadth, from north to south, 210 miles. Its coasts are everywhere much indented with deep bays and inlets, called fiords or firths: its superficial contents, however, may be estimated at 40,000 square miles, and its population, which from its registers is pretty well ascertained, at 48,000; or about one fifth person to every square mile. There is reason to believe that the average population was formerly about 60,000; but it never recovered the loss it sustained by famine from 1753 to 1759, which carried off 10,000 persons, and the more dreadful scourge of 1707, when the small-pox destroyed 16,000 persons. Vast numbers since that period have perished by this fatal disease; but the general introduction of vaccination has happily of late years arrested its progress. With the exception of Reykiavik, on the southern coast, which may contain about 500 inhabitants, and half a dozen other places along the different coasts, called villages, which consist of three or four houses and a church, the population is scattered over the plains and the valleys, in insulated farm-houses, from some of which the nearest farm is at the distance of eight or ten miles. The central parts are nearly, if not wholly, uninhabited. The general surface and appearance of the country are thus described by Dr. Henderson :

"The opinion that this island owes its formation to the operation of submarine volcanoes, is not only confirmed by reasonings deduced from the appearance presented by other islands which are confessedly of volcanic origin, but gains ground in proportion to the progress of a closer and more accurate investigation which every part of it exhibits to the view of the naturalist. In no quarter of the globe do we find crowded within the same extent of surface such a number of burning mountains, so many boiling springs, or such immense tracts of lava, Las *here arrest the attention of the traveller. The general aspect of the country is the most rugged and dreary imaginable. On every side appear marks of confusion and devastation, or the tremendous sources of these evils in the yawning craters of huge and menacing volcanoes. Nor is the mind of a spectator relieved from the disagreeable emotions arising from reflection on the subterraneous fires which are raging beneath him, by a temporary survey of the huge mountains of perpetual ice by which he is surrounded. These very masses, which naturally exclude the most distant idea of heat, contain in their bosom the fuel of conflagration, and are frequently seen to emit smoke and flames, and pour down upon the plains immense floods of boiling mud and water, or red-hot torrents of devouring lava.” „oolterg

Every hill almost is a volcano ; but, besides the immense number of smaller cones and craters, there are at least thirty of more remarkable appearance, of which nine have been in a state of activity in the course of the last century. Streams of brown lava, stript of all vegetation, vast sichasms, from some or other of which volumes of smoke are perpetually 9.ascending, with multitudes of hot springs, occur in every part of the island. "Many of these springs," says Dr. Henderson, throw up large columns of boiling water, accompanied by immense volumes of steam, to an almost incredible height into the atmosphere, and present is coarso 2 J

to the eye of the traveller some of the grandest scenes to be met with on the face of the globe." In the midst of this region of fire are not fewer than twelve or fourteen mountains, whose summits are covered with eternal ice and snow. Their heights vary from three to six thousand feet above the level of the sea; and some of them are occasionally disturbed by internal fires.

It is in the valleys between the inferior hills, and on the plains which the streams of lava have spared, that the cottages of the peasants are generally found, and that a scanty herbage for three or four months in the year affords a miserable subsistence to a few horses, cattle, and sheep, and sometimes a little hay for the winter. It is said that the Norwegians, on their first arrival, found extensive forests growing on Iceland, and this account is somewhat warranted by the trees occasionally dug out of the peat bogs; such trees, however, are rare, and none have been discovered exceeding a foot in diameter: at the present day there is probably not a tree in a growing state on the whole island that measures ten inches. It is also supposed that grain was once produced on the island; but the present race have met with no encouragement to persevere in their attempts to cultivate it. A few greens and potatoes are occasionally raised, but even these do not always succeed. The climate, as might be expected, is exceedingly unsteady; but Dr. Henderson did not consider the winter which he spent in Iceland as more severe than in the south of Scandinavia; and was surprised to find the temperature of the atmosphere, not only less severe than that of the preceding winter in Denmark, but equal to that of the mildest which he had passed either in Denmark or Sweden. The original settlers in Iceland were voluntary exiles, who abandoned Norway from a dread of the tyranny of the ruling prince: the form of government adopted in their new abode was just the reverse of that which they fled from; and its suitableness to the circumstances of the people may be inferred from its long continuance of nearly four hundred years. In the 1261 their liberties were somewhat abridged by becoming trao to their original country; but they expressly stipulated that vald be allowed to retain their ancient laws and privileges, and

ży should be exempt from all taxes.

In 1387 they were trans. d to Denmark, but no alteration took place; nor are we aware any material change in their internal polity from that period till the year 1800, when the Althing, or general assembly of the island, was abrogated, and a supreme court, consisting of a chief justice, two assessors, and a secretary, substituted in its room, from which an appeal lies to the high court in Denmark. In ancient times the punishment for murder was hanging; for childmurder, drowning; and for witchcraft, burning. At present the only punishment inflicted on the island is fine, imprisonment, and whipping; if a capital crime should occur, which is extremely rare, they are obliged to send the criminal to Denmark to suffer the sentence of the law, as no person could be found on the whole island to carry it into execution.

Iceland was converted to Christianity about the year 1000. The religion remained Catholic till the year 1540, when the doctrines of