fiery-flying

Updated: June 9, 2025

I wonder what the people of Europe will say when I tell them, that The Desert pictured in such frightful colours by the ancients, as teeming with monsters and wild beasts, and every unearthly and uncouth thing and being, not forgetting the dragons, salamanders, vampyres, cockatrices, and fiery-flying serpents, and as such believed in these our enlightened days is a very harmless place, its menagerie being reduced to a few small crows, and now and then a stray butterfly, and a few common house and cheese-and-bacon and fruit flies! these poor little domestic everyday creatures!

James Richardson - Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846