DESERT, a term generally used to designate an uninhabited place or soli tude. In this sense it is equally appli cable to the fertile plains watered by the Marafion, and to the wastes of Libya; but it is applied more particularly to the vast sandy and stony plains of Africa and Asia. The most striking feature of north Africa consists of its immense deserts. Of these the chief is the Sahara, or the Desert, so called by way of pre eminence. In many parts the dreary waste of loose and hardened sand is broken by low hills of naked sandstone, or by tracts of arid clay, and occasional ly it is enlivened by verdant isles, or oases, which serve as resting-places for the caravans that traverse these dismal regions. But for these oases, indeed, the Sahara would be wholly impassable. The great deserts of Africa are separated from those of Asia only by the valley of the River Nile and the Red Sea. Soon after quitting the Nile, the traveler by the route of Suez encounters sand, which is continued into the center of Arabia, where it forms the desert of Nejd, ex tending to the valley of the Euphrates.
The sandy zone then inclines N., enters Persia, and forms the saline deserts of Adjemi, Kerman, and Mekran: it is turned N. E. by the valley of the Indus, passes through Cabul and Little Bok hara, till it joins the vast deserts of Gobi and Shamo, which occupy so large a portion of central Asia between the Altaian and Mustai chains, and reach to the confines of China. The sandy zone, thus traced throughout the breadth of the ancient continent from western Africa to 120° E. longitude, has been computed to cover an area of 6,500,000 square miles; but the Asiatic portion of this tract includes many chains of moun tains, and fertile valleys. Except the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Oxus, there are no large rivers in a 'region which embraces almost a fourth part of both Africa and Asia. This por tion of central Asia forms a series of elevated plains 6,000 miles in length from E. to W. In the Old Testament the term desert bears a wholly different interpretation from that usually attached to it in other writings.