over arid sands, and
under ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, that
tell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching,
about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of a
white friable sandstone, and presenting on two of its sides sandy
declivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and then
heard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resembling
that of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, and
then ceased again; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in the
act of climbing along the declivity, he heard the sound yet louder and
more prolonged. It seemed as if issuing from under his knees, beneath
which the sand, disturbed by his efforts, was sliding downwards along
the surface of the rock. Concluding that the sliding sand was the cause
of the sounds, not an effect of the vibrations which they occasioned, he
climbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards,
exerted himself with hands and feet to set the sand in motion. The
effect produced far exceeded his expectations; the incoherent sand
rolled under and around in a vast sheet; and so loud was the noise
produced, that "the earth seemed to tremble beneath him to such a
degree, that he states he should certainly have been afraid if he had
been ignorant of the cause." At the time Sir David Brewster wrote
(1832), the only other European who had visited _Jabel Nakous_ was Mr.
Gray, of University College, Oxford. This gentleman describes the noises
he heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as
"beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise
beneath his feet," but "which gradually changed into pulsations as it
became louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became so
strong at the end of five minutes _as to detach the sand_." The Mountain
of the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted,
of the Indian navy; and the reader may see it exhibited in a fine
lithograph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of broken
stone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of
course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope of
sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly its
apex. "It forms," says Lieutenant Welsted, "one of a ridge of low,
calcareous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from the
be