a hot wind which blows occasionally in the deserts of Africa, and probably in other widely extended countries parched in the same manner by a vertical sun. Its effects on the human body are dreadful. If inhaled in any quantity, it produces instant suffocation, or at least leaves the unhappy sufferer oppressed with asthma and lowness of spirits. The approach of this awful scourge of God is indicated by a redness in the air, well understood by those who are accustomed to journey through the desert; and the only refuge which they have from it, is to fall down with their faces close to the ground, and to continue as long as possible without drawing in their breath.

Mr Bruce, who, in his journey through the desert, suffered from the simoom, gives of it the following graphical description: "At eleven o'clock, while we contemplated with great pleasure the rugged top of Chiggre, to which we were fast approaching, and where we were to solace ourselves with plenty of good water, Idris our guide cried out, with a loud voice, Fall upon your faces, for here is the simoom. I saw from the fourth-east a haze come, in colour like the purple part of the rainbow, but not so compressed or thick. It did not occupy twenty yards in breadth, and was about twelve feet high from the ground. It was a kind of bluish upon the air, and it moved very rapidly; for I scarce could turn to fall upon the ground with my head to the northward, when I felt the heat of its current plainly upon my face. We all lay flat on the ground as if dead, till Idris told us it was blown over. The meteor or purple haze which I saw was indeed past, but the light air that still blew was of heat to threaten suffocation. For my part, I found difficulty in my breast that I had imbibed a part of it, nor was I free of an athmatic sensation till I had been some months in Italy, at the baths of Poretta, near two years afterwards." Though the severity of this blast seems to have passed over them almost instantaneously, it continued to blow so as to exhaust them till twenty minutes before five in the afternoon, lasting through all its stages very near fix hours, and leaving them in a state of the utmost dependency.