The stars of far Europe have fled from the skies, And the Cross of the South meets his terrified eyes; Of the unarmed people that cover the coast. Who with loud mimic thunderbolts slaughter the host And the peaceful Cazique 'mid their ashes expire; He sees, too-oh, saddest! oh, mournfullest sight! But at length the slow dawn, softly streaking the He sees the fair palace, the temple on fire, night, Illumes the dark dome with its beautiful light. "Columbus! 't is day, and the darkness hath past!" -"Day! and what dost thou see?" “ І see nought but the Vast!" What matter! he's calm!-but ah, stranger, if you Had you felt the wild throb of despair and delight rage And the multiplied malice and pains of an ageYou would say these three days half a lifetime have slain, And his fame is too dear at the price of such pain. Oh! who can describe what the crushed heart must The delirium of hope and the lonely despair- despise As a fool, 'mid the vain vulgar crowd of the wise! That you trembled to feel moving under your feet! die!" "He must triumph to-morrow, or perjured must Of that sea which his daring a highway hath made? The corse of an unknown adventurer then- He dreams, how a veil drooping over the main The crucifix gleam in the thick of the fight- He sees the earth open and reel to and fro, Poor captives! whose arms, in a languid despair, tear. Pale spectres! whose agonized cries, uncontrolled, Seek the light of that sun that they're ne'er to behold. They struggle, they pant 'mid the pestilent dews, And by labor the sharp whip that pursues, light, Till a long, lingering death, in the cavern's dim Consigns them at length to eternity's night! forth Full of strength, full of hope, a new empire spring Or that creature of iron which lately they swayed They have conquered!-they show him with grate- And conceive what corruption till now could con ceal. In the council, a Sage by the Hero is seen, Oh, how fresh! oh, how fair the new virgin earth seems! With gold the fruits glisten, and sparkle the streams Green gleams on the mountains, and gladdens the He runs-yes! behold it!-it blesseth his sightThe land! O sweet spectacle! transport! delight! O generous sobs which he cannot restrain! "Joy! joy!" cries Columbus, "this region is He will lay this fair land at the foot of the throne- From Chambers' Journal. NATURE'S ICE-CAVES. SOME curious and but little-known facts upon natural ice-houses having turned up in the course of our reading, we are tempted at this time, when the production of cold is becoming almost as necessary as that of heat for domestic comfort, to set them in some sort of order. When it is borne in mind that the natural refrigeratories of which we are about to speak abound in the production of clear, massive, and valuable ice, and yet that they often exist in places where the mean or average Professor Pictet, of Geneva, who paid much attention to this natural phenomenon, and has published a scientific communication upon the subject, in a tour in the same regions, visited another natural ice-cave, of almost equal celebrity, called St. George's. This cave is let out to a peasant, by the commune to which it belongs, for a small annual rental, for the sake of the beautiful ice which it produces. In ordinary years, the cave supplies only the families in the immediate vicinity; but when a mild winter is succeeded by a broiling summer, even Geneva itself, although several leagues distant, receives its store from this temperature is far above the freezing-point, we are source. At such seasons, every second day a justified in claiming a peculiar interest for our heavily-laden wagon proceeds from the ice-cave article. Many of these natural storehouses of cold are highly estimated in the districts where they occur, and furnish in various instances enormous supplies of ice at a period when every other source is either unavailable or exhausted. Several natural ice-houses exist in the chain of the Jura Mountains. Some of these have been long known to a few scientific travellers, and have formed the "lions" of the unimportant districts in which they are situated. Perhaps one of the best known is called La Beaume, and has been described in most interesting terms by several men of science who have visited it. M. Prévost, who made a scientific tour in the region, has related the following particulars concerning it: Situated in the above-named locality, it is a grotto or cavern hollowed out in a naturally low hill, the average temperature of its position being considerably above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the freezing-point. From the peculiarity of its aperture and general form, no snow can enter, and therefore the internal cold of this place cannot be due to any external cause. The cavern is upwards of 300 feet in length, and at its widest is about 100 feet, and is naturally divided into three compartments. The traveller visited it in the middle of August, on a broiling, scorching day, and, on entering it, experienced the most severe and penetrating cold. "The first object," he says, "that struck my eyes was a mass of ice fed by the water which distilled constantly, drop by drop, from a sort of spring in the roof." The whole cavern was covered with a sort of glittering pavement, clear as crystal, of ice a foot thick. In it were numerous holes containing water of intense coldness, by sounding which, the thickness of the pavement was easily ascertained. This, it will be observed, is the scene in summer. The winter comes, and all is changed: the crystalline pavement melts, and runs away into water; the solid masses of ice are no longer visible; and the cavern is actually warmer than the external air; and during all this period a thick mist issues to the hospital at Geneva, which purchases the whole quantity, and retails it at a profit to the confectioners of the town-a trade by which its revenues are considerably augmented. This cavern is entered by two well-like pits, down which the visitor must descend by a ladder. The bottom is a solid bed of ice, and its form is that of a lofty hemispherical vault about twenty-seven feet in height, which is covered by a stratum of calcareous rock only eighteen inches thick. The length is seventy-five feet, its width forty feet. A regular set of ice-masons are engaged in excavating the sparkling solid. It is cut with appropriate tools into long wedges, and then divided by transverse cuts about a foot distant from each other, by which means blocks of ice a cubic foot in dimensions are detached. After a certain quantity has been quarried out, it is carried in hods to a magazine near the place, where the wagons are loaded. Some idea may be formed of the severity of the cold inside, when it is mentioned, that, although the thermometer in the shade was at 63 degrees Fahrenheit outside, it was at 34 degrees Fahrenheit, or only two degrees from the freezing mark inside! That even a more severe cold than this exists during the most broiling summer day, is evident from a fact mentioned by the workmen, that if two blocks are left in contact for a little while, they become so firmly frozen together, as to require to be re-cut to separate them. Now it is an extraordinary fact, that the temperature of a spring which bubbled from the rock at a little distance did not indicate in the remotest manner the existence of such a degree of cold in its source, as it was as high as 51 degrees. Hence it was evident that the cause of the frigorific effects was purely local, and confined to the cave and its immediate vicinity. In this cave, as in the last, the ice disappears in winter; and, singular to say, the hotter the summer, in both cases, the more abundant the productiveness of the caves in this substance! Had constantly from its mouth, and fills its interior. the cave been the work of some ingenious artist, Surely here is a paradox, which, at a less enlight- one would scarcely have felt surprise at the exactened and more illiberal period, would have been ness of its adaptation for the production of ice; scouted as one of the improbable series called and it must be considered, with the rest of the travellers' tales. The fact, however, can be well cases to be quoted, as a rare illustration of an authenticated, and will receive abundant corrobora- apparently fortuitous arrangement of inanimate tion in the many similar examples we shall ad- nature, fulfilling in the most complete manner all duce. the functions of a special contrivance. But, as will be noticed in the sequel, the law which gov- utility. Milk, they said, could easily be kept erns its temperature sufficiently indicates that an sweet and fresh in the heats of summer for three all-wise Mind ordained it, and no doubt with a weeks, meat for a month, and cherries from one special object in view. At no great distance from season to another! In winter, curious enough it the ice-cave of St. George's another was found, is to notice that outside water will be frozen the entrance to which was announced by a low for some time before it is so within. Saussure vault, forty feet or so in width, and by a current adds, that the "proprietors of the caves unaniof air which fell upon the over-heated traveller mously affirmed, that the hotter the summer was, with folds of deadly coldness, so that the greatest the greater was the strength of the cold current caution is necessary in entering it. Descending which issued from them;" in the winter a sensible by an inclined plane, the cavity is found to become current of air sets into them. In the south of wider from the entrance inwards. At the bottom France is another famous natural ice-cave-that is a horizontal platform of ice. The cave is about of Fondereule. M. Hericart de Thury has given sixty feet long by thirty wide; the ice is thickest an interesting account of a visit to it. This cave at the farthest end. The roof presents a beautiful is situated in a wild and romantic region, where appearance, all pendent with elegant stalactites of some long bygone convulsion of the earth has the purest ice; and the coup d'œil is picturesque rent asunder the solid rocks, and produced a scene in the extreme. The temperature in the open of confusion of the wildest description. The air at this time was 58 degrees Fahrenheit in the occurrence of the cave in this district, and its shade, and in the grotto it was 34 degrees Fahren- extraordinary phenomena of temperature, &c., are heit. The guide related that when he visited it without doubt attributable to this geological disin the previous April, three months before, there turbance, as will be best perceived in the sequel. was no ice then; yet at this period, in the middle It was long thought to be a subterranean glacier, of an unusually hot summer day, it existed in abundance. The all-observant and renowned De Saussure, in his travels in the Alps, paid much attention to these caves, and offered the first rational attempt and has been described as such, but this is an erroneous view of the case. It is a magnificent cavern, nearly two hundred feet in depth, of very irregular width; and the thickness of its vaulted roof is about sixty-six feet. Its interior is deco at a solution of the riddle. He says that in the rated with the most beautiful calcareous stalactites, volcanic island of Ischia, near Naples, which and the floor is variegated with curious alabaster abounds with hot springs, a number of grottos cones, which shoot out from the sheet of clear, exist in which a great degree of cold is felt. At transparent ice forming the pavement. In many the period when he visited them, the external places elegant stalactites of ice drop down from shade-heat was 63 degrees, that of the grottos the roof like pendents of clear glass, and, as it 45 degrees, and in a severely hot summer they were were, melt into the glassy floor beneath, so that colder still. Other caves are mentioned in a free- the vault is upheld by pillars of this beautiful mastone hill upon which the town of St. Marin is built, terial. The alabastrine stalactites are found prinwhere the same violent contrasts existed between cipally at the sides of the cavern, while the icy ones are in the middle, and here and there produce all the resemblance of rich folds of drapery clear as water. One of the travellers cut a hole in a pillar of ice, and placed a candle inside; the most magical effects were thus produced; and the fantastic aisles of this subterranean temple of cold were illuminated with the richest yellow, blue, green and red tints, the reflected rays playing with illusory effect upon the floor of ice, the pillars of the same substance, and of alabaster, and the great stalagmites which lined the walls. A larger illumination was afterwards got up by arranging torches in the clearest and best crystallized parts of the cavern; and the result, say the visitors, "was worthy of all that the 'Thousand and One Nights' could present to the richest and most brilliant imagination." This beautiful cave is sometimes made use of economically when there is a scarcity of ice; and its crystalline pavement is dug up and carried to several towns in the vicin the temperature of the external and internal atmos- was as low as 39 degrees, or seven degrees above We have met with an account, by Professor Silthe freezing-point; and all that separated these liman of America, which we have no hesitation in remote degrees of temperature was a few planks classifying under our present head. The ice-cave of wood! The proprietors of these places men- of which he speaks is in the state of Connecticut, tioned several curious facts in illustration of their between Hartford and New Haven. It is only two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and isness. The inhabitants also dig caves into the hill, which they use as refrigeratories, and in these the thermometer often marks 44 degrees when the temperature outside is nearly 80 degrees. situated in a defile filled with fragments of rocks of various sizes, through which a small brook runs. It was visited in the middle of July, the thermometer at 85 degrees in the shade; and on approaching it, an evident chilliness was felt in the air. Parties of pleasure often resort hither in the sultry summer days to drink of the cold flowing waters, and to amuse themselves with the rich store of ice here treasured up. In some places the ice is quite near the surface, and is only cov-ick T. Murchison. The ice-cave here commemo We shall conclude our series of illustrations upon this curious subject, by referring to one which has attracted a large share of interest and attention of some of the most talented of our learned men. It is to be found in the splendid work on the Geology of Russia, recently published by Sir Roder rated is not far from Orenburg, and boasts of the unpronounceable name Illetzkaya-Zastchita. It is situated at the base of a hillock of gypsum, at the eastern end of a village connected with the imperial establishment, and is one of a series of apparently natural hollows, used by the peasants for cellars or stores. It possesses the remarkable property of being partly filled with ice in the summer, and totally destitute thereof in the winter. "Standing," says the talented author, on the heated ground, and under a broiling sun, I shall never forget my astonishment when the woman to whom the cavern belonged opened a frail door, and a volume of air so piercingly keen struck the legs and feet, that we were glad to rush into a cold bath in front of us to equalize the effect! We afterwards subjected the whole body to the cooling process by entering the cave, which is on a level with the street. At three or four paces from the door, on which shone the glaring sun, we were surrounded by half-frozen quass and the provisions of the natives. The roof of the cavern hung with solid undripping icicles, and the floor might be called a stalagmite of ice and frozen earth. We were glad to escape in a few minutes from this ered with leaves. A boy, armed with a hatchet, descended into a cavity, and, after a little hard work, hewed out a solid lump of ice several pounds in weight. An idea of the solidity of this piece may be formed, by adding that on the third day some of it was yet unmelted. A similar repository of cold exists about seven miles from New Haven, at the bottom of a steep ridge of trap rock. In the hottest summers ice is conveyed from this place to New Haven, much soiled, indeed, with leaves and dirt, but useful for cooling beverages. A more celebrated one, also in America, has often been noticed by tourists of that country; some accounts, in fact, have been greatly exaggerated about it. It is situated in Hampshire county, Virginia, and is widely celebrated under the title of the Ice-Mountain. The place where the store of cold exists is a sort of natural glacier, which lies against a steep mural ridge of lofty rock, and is composed of a number of fragments of sandstone of all sizes loosely heaped together. In the midst of these the ice is contained. It was visited in the summer of 1838, a season of drought and heat quite unparalleled in the history of that country. But the excessive external heat did not appear to exert the smallest influence on the Ice-ice-bound prison, so long had our frames been ac Mountain. At the depth of a few inches abundance of excellent ice was found, and a thermometer lowered into a cavity dropped from 95 to 40 degrees. The surrounding rocks were covered with dew, owing to the condensation of atmospheric vapor by the excessive coldness of their surface. One cavity had been filled with snow, and only covered with a few planks, and yet the snow was as crisp as if it had but just fallen! At the bottom is a little artificial structure called the "dairy," and used for that purpose in the summer. In ordinary summers its roof is covered with icicles, and its sides are often quite incrusted with ice. Strange to say, a spring near the rock has only one degree less temperature than the customed to a powerful heat." The cold in this cavern is invariably the greatest inside when the air is the hottest outside. As soon as winter sets in, the ice disappears, and in mid-winter the peasants assured the travellers that the cave was of so genial a temperature that they could sleep in it without their sheep-skins. At the very period when Sir R. Murchison visited it, the thermometer was 90 degrees in the shade, a degree of heat which only those who have experienced it can appreciate; yet a single plank was the division between a burning sun and a freezing vault! The cave is about ten paces long, and about ten feet high. It has a vaulted roof, in which great fissures open, which appear to communicate with the waters of the surrounding district. The atmos- body of the hillock. This account was first read phere over this singular spot had in this scorching before the Geological Society, and excited much season a balmy, spring-like coolness, most refresh- | discussion among the members of the body. Sir ing to the weary traveller. Most Italian tourists R. Murchison at first believed that the intensely know the Monte Testacco near Rome. It is a hill, from two hundred to three hundred feet high, composed of broken pieces of urns; hence its name. It is, in fact, a vast mass of broken pottery; therefore extremely light and porous. It is situated in the burning Campagna, near the city; and yet, most singular it is, that from every side of this hill there descend winds of the most refreshing cool frigorific powers of the cave were due, in some way which the learned expositor could not make very clear, to the presence of saline ingredients in the rocks. His geological chemistry, however, being shown to be at fault, and the causes on which he relied, if they existed at all, being such as to produce heat instead of cold, Sir J. Herschel under took the solution of the problem. An elaborate letter of his soon appeared, in which he attempted | will not be moved in the presence of this people, to show that the cold of the cave was explicable which of old accomplished such mighty deeds, and on climatological grounds solely, and in which now are reduced to misery so extreme? Who much was said about waves of heat and cold, so as can visit Alexandria, Cairo, the Pyramids, Heliop to give a very scientific air to the explanation. But on similar grounds we might expect every natural cavern similarly situated to be a freezing cave; which is not the case. Saussure long ago gave the clue to the real exposition of this paradoxical phenomenon; and Professor Pictet, following it out, has satisfactorily demonstrated that it is a beautiful example of a practical illustration in nature of that first principle in chemistry-evaporation produces cold. It is well known to the geological student, that in certain mines which have a horizontal gallery terminating in a vertical shaft communicating with the atmosphere, a current of air in summer descends olis, Thebes, without being moved by reminiscences the most imposing and the most diverse ? The Bible, Homer, philosophy, the sciences, Greece, Rome, Christianity, the monks, Islamism, the crusades, the French revolution; almost everything great in the world's history seems to converge in the pathway of him who traverses this memorable country! Abraham, Sesostris, Moses, Helen, Agesilaus, Alexander, Pompey, Cæsar, Cleopatra, Aristarchus, Plotinus, Pacomus, Origen, Athanasius, Saladin, St. Louis, Napoleonwhat names! what contrasts!" Thus exclaims an eloquent writer in the "Revue des Deux Mondes:" but his list of memorabilia, M. Ampère the vertical shaft, and emerges from the horizontal; very well knows, begins where the really marvel while in winter the current sets in at the horizontal, and issues from the vertical shaft. Now, in almost every instance quoted, the arrangement of these caves has been precisely similar; they are placed at the bottom of a hill perforated by various rents and chasms. Thus the cave is the horizontal, and the vertical shaft lies in the mass of the hill. Suppose, then, the mean temperature of the hill to be about 48 or 50 degrees. The descending summer current passing through the channels in the hill evaporates the water it meets with in its progress, and so rapidly, as to become colder and colder in its descent; until, reaching the cave, it is even below 32 degrees, and there freezes the water collected in it. The hotter the air outside, the greater the destruction of equilibrium between the interior and exterior columns, which communicate at their base in the cave; consequently, the more rapid and intense the evaporation, the more severe the measure of cold produced. Every postulate is satisfactorily answered upon this hypothesis; and while no doubt occasionally the ice found in some caves may be part of a glacier, or the remains of last winter's product, yet the phenomenon which we would include under the term Nature's Ice-Caves, is explicable solely upon this simple and beautiful law. "This view," says Sir R. Murchison, in a postscript to his previous account, "is supported by reference to the climate of the plains of Orenburg, in which there is great wetness of the spring, caused by melting of the snow, succeeded by an intense and dry Asiatic heat." From Chambers' Journal. THE LANGUAGE OF THE TOMBS. EGYPT offers subjects of conversation and meditation which no one can entirely neglect, whoever he may be, if he have eyes to see, a memory to remember, or a sprinkling of imagination wherewith to dream. Who can be indifferent to the tableaux of unaccountable nature on the banks of the Nile? At the spectacle of this river-land, that no other land resembles? Who lous ends; and to arrive-not at the origin of Egyptian civilization, but merely at the epoch where our researches are lost in the darkness of antiquity-we must go back at least fifteen centuries before the calling of Abraham! With Moses, between two and three hundred years after the first patriarch, begins the procession of the historians, lawgivers, and warriors of a world now passed away; but in the tombs of Egypt there are written, with a freshness that endures to this day, the annals of a long anterior greatnessa greatness earlier than antiquity itself. Egypt is now the great highway between the east and west; and one may as well stay at home as pretend to travel without seeing the pyramids. To enjoy, however, the descriptions we receive, from every succeeding tourist, of a buried people, who, 2400 years ago, reproached the ancient Greeks with their modern juvenility, it is necessary to know from what sources these records are drawn, and what are the claims to authenticity possessed by the Language of the Tombs. To do this, we do not require to understand the ancient tongues, or any other modern one than English; Colonel Vyse having thrown into an appendix, in the second volume of his quarto work, all that is known on this subject.* But a much smaller book has recently been published, touching upon all the Egyptian questions together; and although, from the highly-condensed form in which the knowledge is conveyed, it is somewhat difficult of study for persons previously ignorant of the subject, we are in hopes of being able to extract from it, for the benefit of our readers, some rudimental information. It consists of a series of reports, taken from several American newspapers, of the lectures of the distinguished Egyptian antiquary Mr. Gliddon; and the whole has been revised by himself, and enriched with learned notes and appendices.f * Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Ghizeh from 1837 to 1839. See also Gliddon's Chapters on Early Egyptian History. 1843. † Otia Ægyptiaca: Discourses on Egyptian Archæology and Hieroglyphical Discoveries. By George R. Gliddon. London: Madden. 1849. |