The Dipsads (1-5)

The south of Libya is deep sand and parched earth, desert for the most part, completely infertile, all flat land, devoid of green shoots and grass and growing things and water, except perhaps for a standing pool left by the rain—and this is turbid and stinking, unfit even for a very thirsty man to drink. For this reason the country is uninhabited—for who could live in a land so wild, arid, and barren, oppressed by continual drought? The very heat of the sun, the downright fiery hotness of the air, and the temperature of the seething sand make the country completely inaccessible.

Only the Garamantes live near by—a slim, agile race, tent-dwellers, living for the most part by hunting. They sometimes cross into the country on hunting forays, generally about the time of the winter solstice, after waiting for rain, when most of the heat has abated and the sand, now damp, can be trodden after a fashion. They hunt for wild asses and the ostrich, monkeys a great deal, and an occasional elephant. Only these animals can stand the thirst and endure for long periods the pressure of the great fierceness of the sun. Nevertheless, as soon as the Garamantes exhaust the food they have brought with them they drive for home, for fear that the sand

Yet all the points I have mentioned—the heat, the lack of water, the desert, the infertility—will seem to you less unbearable than what I am going to describe, something that makes that country to be completely avoided. Crawlers of many kinds, of enormous size and in vast numbers, monstrous in shape and deadly poisonous, live in the country. Some of them live underground hiding in holes in the sand; others crawl on the surface—puff-adders, asps, vipers, horned snakes, ox-beetles, darters, double-ended snakes, pythons, and two kinds of scorpions—a big multi-jointed one that crawls on the ground, and a winged one that flies, though its wings are of membrane like those of locusts, cicadas, and bats. The number of these flying, winged creatures make that part of Libya difficult of access.

But the most terrible reptile of all that the sand breeds is the dipsad, a snake not particularly big, resembling a viper. Its bite is strong and its poison is thick, causing immediate and lasting pain. It burns and corrodes and sets on fire and its victims scream as if lying on a pyre. But what is

The doctors say that this is because the thick poison flows more easily when wetted by drinking and becomes more liquid, naturally enough, and so spreads over a greater area.