as they are every winter supposed to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, are, according to Lady Montague, regarded as so many hajjîs by the Turks. When about to migrate from the country, it is observed that they constantly assemble together from the circumjacent regions in a vast plain, where, in the opinion of the inhabitants, they daily hold a divan, or council, for about a fortnight before their departure; after which they rise at once upon the wing, marshal themselves into close compact bodies of prodigious dimensions, and then, putting themselves in motion, float away like dusky clouds of many miles in length upon the wind. The aspic, one of which opened the voluptuous Cleopatra a way to the court of Proserpine, is still very numerous in the sandy and mountainous districts on both sides of the Nile. This reptile, now called the cerastes, is capable of existing for an incredible length of time without food; at least if we can rely upon the veracity of Gabrieli, an Italian gentleman, who showed our traveller a couple of these vipers, which he had kept, he said, five years in a large crystal vessel, without any visible sustenance. "They were usually coiled up," says the doctor, "in some fine sand, which was placed in the bottom of the vessel; and when I saw them they had just cast their skins, and were as brisk and lively as if newly taken. The horns of this viper are white and shining, in shape like to half a grain of barley, though scarce of that bigness." The warral, a gentle and docile species of lizard, which appeared to be inspired with violent emotions of delight by the sounds of music, he beheld keeping exact time and motion with the dervishes in their rotatory dances, running over their heads and arms, turning when they turned, and stopping when they stopped. These timid practitioners, however, who thus charm or tame this small and apparently in-*noxious creature, are mere children compared with those daring adepts of Hindostan who, by the
