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, 39o, 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 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 |