The inquiries of recent travellers have enabled us to corroborate these views, and to add another remarkable example of the influence of subterraneous sounds over superstitious minds. About three leagues to the north of Tor in Arabia Petræa, is a mountain, within the bosom of which the most singular sounds have been heard. The Arabs of the Desert ascribe these sounds to a convent of monks preserved miraculously underground; and the sound is supposed to be that of the _Nakous_, a long narrow metallic ruler suspended horizontally, which the priest strikes with a hammer for the purpose of assembling the monks to prayer. A Greek was said to have seen the mountain open, and to have descended into the subterranean convent, where he found fine gardens and delicious water; and, in order to give proof of his descent, he produced some fragments of consecrated bread, which he pretended to have brought from the subterranean convent. The inhabitants of Tor likewise declare that the camels are not only frightened, but rendered furious, when they hear these subterraneous sounds. M. Seetzen, the first European traveller who visited this extraordinary mountain, set out from Wodyel Nackel on the 17th of June, at five o’clock in the morning. He was accompanied by a Greek Christian and some Bedouin Arabs, and after a quarter of an hour’s walk they reached the foot of a majestic rock of hard sand-stone. The mountain itself was quite bare and entirely composed of it. He found inscribed upon the rock several Greek and Arab names, and also some Koptic characters, which proved that it had been resorted to for centuries. About noon the party reached the foot of the mountains called _Nakous_, where at the foot of a ridge they beheld an insulated peaked rock. This mountain presented upon two of its sides two sandy declivities about 150 feet high, and so inclined that the white and slightly adhering sand which rests upon its surface is scarcely able to support itself; and when the scorching heat of the sun destroys its feeble cohesion, or when it is agitated by the smallest motions, it slides down the two declivities. These declivities unite behind the insulated rock, forming an acute angle, and like the adjacent surfaces, they are covered with steep rocks which consist chiefly of a white and friable free-stone. The first sound which greeted the ears of the travellers took place at an hour and a quarter after noon. They had climbed with great difficulty as far as the sandy declivity, a height of seventy or eighty feet, and had rested beneath the rocks where the pilgrims are accustomed to listen to the sounds.