AL HYMEK. 
393 
37, the east 48, and the west 51. Through them all, the usual 
air-cliannels traverse each other. The courses of the bricks differ 
in this building from any I had hitherto remarked, a layer of clay 
only, seeming to be their cement; though at the unequal distances 
of four, five, six, or seven bricks, a bright white substance appears 
in some places an inch thick, as if spread between them. At 
first I took it for lime, or something resembling the purest 
plaster-or-Paris; but on touching it, it becomes an almost im¬ 
palpable powder. Whether it may originally have been the 
common bed of reeds, transformed thus by some peculiar oper¬ 
ation of the air or of the earth that composed the bricks, I am 
not natural philosopher enough to decide, though the softened 
state of the exterior bricks may authorise the latter supposition; 
from an idea that the same action of the air which wrought on 
the particular clay of the brick, might, from the partial de¬ 
composition of the one, thus strangely affect the substance of 
the other. But I have brought a specimen of the powder away 
with me, which may hereafter enable some European chemist to 
investigate the fact. * No cement whatever was mixed with it. 
Lime was no where traceable. I closely examined the broken 
fragments of brick-work below, and found only quantities' of 
bitumen. The burnt bricks I have already described as forming 
the solid summit of the mound, are very coarsely finished; but 
the masses found at its foot in different places, are of fine clay, 
of the best kiln-baked fabric. They differ in size from any 
others I had seen, being fourteen inches long, twelve and three * 
quarters broad, and about two and a half thick ; those I had 
examined in the great piles of the Birs, the Kasr, &c., usually 
* Subsequent chemical examination of the white powder found at A1 Hymer 
proves it to be no calcareous cement, but principally composed of common earthy 
matter; and therefore probably produced by the causes above suggested. 
VOL. II. : *3e 
