But all that I have yet mentioned, heat, thirst, desolation, barrenness, you will count less formidable than what I now come to, a sufficient reason in itself for avoiding that land. It is beset by all sorts of reptiles, of huge size, in enormous numbers, hideous and venomous beyond belief or cure. Some of them have burrows in the sand, others live on the surface—toads, asps, vipers, horned snakes and stinging beetles, lance-snakes, reversible snakes’, dragons, and two kinds of scorpion, one of 1 The amphisbaena, supposed to have a head at each end and move either way.; great size and many joints that runs on the ground, the other aerial, with gauzy wings like those of the locust, grasshopper, or bat. With the multitude of flying things like these, that part of Libya has no attraction for the traveller.