thirty yards away; and we found that where a damp
semi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath,
and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest and
sharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery,--for I
trust I may regard it as such,--adds a third locality to two previously
known ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand,--no unmeet
counterpart to the "singing water" of the tale,--has now been found. And
as the island of Eigg is considerably more accessible than _Jabel
Nakous_, in Arabia Petraea, or _Reg-Rawan_, in the neighborhood of Cabul,
there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did not
exist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which it
exhibits,--a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatest
masters of the science have confessed their inability to explain.

_Jabel Nakous_, or the "Mountain of the Bell," is situated about three
miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which
witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in
which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness
of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of
the desert, that there rose at times from this hill a strange,
inexplicable music. As he leads his camel past in the heat of the day, a
sound like the first low tones of an Aeolian harp stirs the hot
breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations,
till at length the dry baked earth seems to vibrate under foot, and the
startled animal snorts and rears, and struggles to break away. According
to the Arabian account of the phenomenon, says Sir David Brewster, in
his "Letters on Natural Magic," there is a convent miraculously
preserved in the bowels of the hill; and the sounds are said to be those
of the "_Nakous_, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, which
the priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling the
monks to prayer." There exists a tradition that on one occasion a
wandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, he
descended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautiful
gardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to the
upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The first
European traveller who visited _Jabel Nakous_, says Sir David, was M.
Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours