THE PETKIF1ED FOREST. 117 



prolonged far beyond our ken. Dimly on the left may be perceived, 

 like an indigo-coloured ribbon, the line of the distant sea. The sky 

 itself appears jet black. The reverberation of sound is unendurable." 

 Still further, between Suez and Cairo, the same traveller speaks 

 admiringly of a natural amphitheatre, enclosed between two moun- 

 tain-spurs, and strewn with debris of rock, and especially with 

 petrified wood. It might be compared to a forest-clearing which 

 the woodmen had just quitted. The splinters are quite fresh, the 

 cloven fragments still expose the notches made by the axe. Great 

 trees, divided into beams, resemble long serpents which have been 

 slain by blows from a hatchet. The division is so clear that each 

 gash reveals the concentric tissues perfectly preserved by this 

 mineral embalming, this natural silification. Similar petrifactions 

 may be seen in abundance on the plateaux of the Makattam, 

 and the amphitheatre now described is not far from the hill, visited 

 by every tourist, which has received the name of the Petrified Forest. 

 Thus it appears that the Land Deserts, despite the proverbial 

 monotony of their aspect, do not fail to offer to the artist as well as the 

 savant, the philosopher no less than the historian, objects worthy of 

 patient study. Everywhere the handiwork of God and the evidences 

 of Almighty design awaken the admiration of the thoughtful. Whether 

 the picture be sombre or beautiful, grand or appalling, we see that it 

 was conceived and filled up by superhuman power. But we are now 

 in Egypt, on the threshold of the world's vast deserts. Egypt, kept 

 alive by the fertilizing and genial Nile, is but an island in the great 

 ocean of sand which encircles it, and which, far more truly than the 

 Red Sea or the Mediterranean, isolates it from the rest of the globe. 



