CHAPTER III. MORNING-THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS-MOONLIGHT SCRIPTURAL FACTS. It is said, that there was in ancient Egypt a statue of Memnon, the son of Aurora, looking towards the east, and that it spoke as soon as the rays of the rising sun fell on its mouth. The description of another ancient writer is more particular: "The statue emits sounds every morning at sunrise, which can be compared only to that of breaking the string of a lyre.” Strabo speaks only of a single sound which he heard; but Juvenal, who had probably often listened to it, describes it as if it emitted several sounds. These were afterwards formed into intelligible words, and even into an oracle of seven verses. According to Sir David Brewster, Sir A. Smith, a modern traveller, accompanied by a party, examined the statue, and heard, very distinctly, at six o'clock in the morning, the sounds which, for ages, had been so celebrated. It is also stated, on the same authority, 26 STATUE OF MEMNON. that the problem it presents was first solved by means of an observation made by a solitary traveller wandering on the banks of the Orinoco. "The granitic rock," says Baron Humboldt, " on which we lay, is one of those where travellers on the Orinoco have heard, from time to time, towards sunrise, subterraneous sounds, resembling those of the organ. The missionaries called these stones loxas de musica. 'It is witchcraft,' said our young Indian pilot. We never ourselves heard these mysterious sounds, either at Carichana Vieja, or in the upper Orinoco; but from information given us by witnesses worthy of belief, the existence of a phenomenon that seems to depend on a certain state of the atmosphere cannot be denied. The shelves of rocks are full of very narrow and deep crevices. They are heated during the day to about 50o. I often found their temperature at the surface during the night, 39°, the surrounding atmosphere being at 28°. It may easily be conceived that the difference of temperature between the subterraneous and the external air attains its maximum about sunrise, or at that moment which is at the same time farther from the period of the maximum of the heat of the preceding day. May not these sounds of an organ, which are heard when a person sleeps upon the rock, his ear in contact STATUE OF MEMNON. 27 with the stone, be the effect of a current of air that issues out through the crevices? Does not the impulse of the air against the elastic spangles of mica that intercept the crevices contribute to modify the sounds? May we not admit that the ancient inhabitants of Egypt, in passing incessantly up and down the Nile, had made the same observation on some rocks of the Thebaid, and that the music of the rocks there led to the jugglery of the priests in the statue of Memnon ?" It is also a singular fact that, about the same time Humboldt was traversing the wilds of South America, three travellers in Egypt heard at sunrise, in a monument of granite, situated near the centre of the spot on which the palace of Carnac stands, a noise resembling that of a breaking string, the very expression by which Pausanias described the sound of the statue of Memnon, It appears strange, however, that the Prussian and the French travellers should not have gone a step farther, and solved the problem of two thousand years, by maintaining that the sound of the statue was a natural phenomenon, or a granite sound produced at sunrise by the very same causes which operated on the Orinoco, and in the temple of Carnac, instead of regarding it as a trick in imitation of natural sounds. If, as Humboldt supposes, the people of Egypt, passing up object. It is computed that the height of the atmosphere surrounding the sun is not less than 1843, nor more than 2765 miles: it is supposed to consist of two regions; that nearest the sun being opaque, and probably resembling the clouds of our earth; the outermost emitting vast quantities of light, and forming the apparent luminous globe we behold. That it appears so small to us, is owing to its vast distance, which is no less than ninety-five millions of miles. A faint idea of this distance may be obtained by considering that a steam-boat, moving at the rate of 200 miles a day, would be 1300 years before it could traverse the space which intervenes between us and the sun. The sun A remarkable fact should here be noticed. and the stars appear to rise and set, passing from east to west; but the appearance is deceptive, and is caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis from west to east. Thus the different parts of the globe are brought before the sun, and successively exposed to its influence. Those along the equator, or at an equal distance from each pole, move at a rate of rather more than a thousand miles per hour, while the other parts move with diminished velocity as they approach the poles. The apparent motion of the heavenly bodies, as rising |