ILLUSTRATIONS (6). MOUNTAINS OF THE HARUDSCH. 45 



The word Oasis is Egyptian, and is synonymous with Auasis 

 and Hyasis.* Abulfeda calls the Oases el-Wah. In the 

 latter time of the Caesars, malefactors were sent to the Oases, 

 being banished to these islands in the sandy ocean, as the 

 Spaniards and English transported their malefactors to the 

 Falkland islands and New Holland. The ocean affords almost 

 a better chance of escape than the desert surrounding the 

 Oases; which, moreover, diminish in fruitfulness in propor- 

 tion to the greater quantity of sand incorporated in the soil. 



The small mountain range of Harudsch (Harudje]) consists 

 of grotesquely- shaped basaltic hills. It is the Mont Ater of 

 Pliny, and its western extremity, known as the Soudah 

 mountain, has been recently explored by my unfortunate 

 friend, the enterprising traveller Ritchie. These basaltic 

 eruptions in the tertiary limestone, and rows of hills rising 

 abruptly from fissures, appear to be analogous to the basaltic 

 eruptions in the Yicentine territory. 



Nature repeats the same phenomena in the most distant 

 regions of the earth. Hornemann found an immense quantity 

 of petrified fishes' heads in the limestone formations of the 

 White Harudsch (Harudje el-Abiad], belonging probably to 

 the old chalk. Ritchie and Lyon remarked that the basalt 

 of the Soudah mountain was in many places intimately 

 mingled with carbonate of lime, as is the case in Monte 

 Berico ; a phenomenon that is probably connected with 

 eruptions through limestone strata. Lyon's chart even indi- 

 cates dolomite in the neighbourhood. Modern mineralogists 

 have found syenite and greenstone, but not basalt, in Egypt. 

 Is it possible that the true basalt, from which many of the 

 ancient vases found in various parts of the country were 

 made, can have been derived from a mountain lying so far 

 to the west ? Can the olsidius lapis have come from there, 

 or are we to seek basalt and obsidian on the coast of the 

 Red Sea ? The strip of the volcanic eruptions of Harudsch, 

 on the borders of the African desert, moreover reminds 

 the geologist of augitic vesicular amygdaloid, phonolite, 

 and greenstone porphyry, which are only found on the 

 northern and western limits of the steppes of Venezuela 



* Strabo, lib. ii. p. 130, lib. xvii. p. 513, Gas. ; Herod, lib. iii. cap. 

 26. p. 207, Wessel. 



t See Bitter's Afnka, 1822, s. 885, 988, 993, and 1003. 



