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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 65 riodically cool fountain of the Sun. The ruins of Ummibida (OmmBeydah) belong incontestably to the fortified caravanserai at the temple of Ammon, and therefore to the most ancient monuments which have come down to us from the early dawn of civilization. (Caillaud, Voyage a Syouah, p. 14; Ideler in den Fungruben des Orients, bd. iv. s. 399-111.) The word Oa is is Egyptian, and synonymous with Auasis and Hyasis ( trabo, lib. ii. p. 130, lib. xvii. p. 813, Cas.; Herod. lib. iii. cap. 26, p. 207, Wessel). Abulfeda calls the Oases, el-Wah. In the later times of the Cresars, malefactors were sent to the Oases; being banished to these islands in the sea of sand, as the Spaniards and the English have sent criminals to the Falklands or to New Holland. Escape by the ocean is almost easier than through the desert. The fertility of the Oases is subject to diminution by the invasion of sand. The small mountain-range of Harudsh is said to consist of basaltic hills of grotesque form (Ritter's Afrika, 1822, s. 885, 988, 993, and 1003). It is the Mons Ater of Pliny; and its western extremity or continuation, called the Soudah mountains, has been explored by my unfortunate friend, the adventurous traveller Ritchie. This eruption of basalt in tertiary limestone, rows of hills rising abruptly from dike-like fissures, appears to be analogous to the outbreak of basalt in the Vicentine territory. Nature often repeats the same phenomena in the most distant parts of the earth. In the limestone formations of the "white Harudsh" (Harudje el-Abiad), which perhaps belong to the old chalk, Bornemann found an immense number of fossil heads of fish. Ritchie and Lyon remarked that the basalt of the Soudah mountains, like that of the Monte Berico, was in many places intimately mixed with carbonate of lime-a phenomenon probably connected with eruption through limestone strata. Lyon's map even mentions dolomite in the neighborhood. Modern mineralogists have found syenite and greenstone in Egypt, but not basalt. Possibly the material of some of the ancient Egyptian vases, which are occasionally found of true basalt, may have been taken from these western mountains. May "Obsidius lapis" also have been found there? or are basalt and obsidian to be sought for near the Red Sea? The strip of volcanic or eruptive formations 6* |
