A gust of wind careering over the waste from the Pass, rolled away, like a veil of gauze, the shroud which had half concealed the place they were approaching; and with a mournful and sickly interest, not unmixed with anticipated dread, Mabel and her friends surveyed the city of Bameean. Rising terrace over terrace on the green acclivities of an insulated mountain, the bolder features and details shining in the ruddy sunlight, the intermediate spaces sunk in sombre shadow, it exhibited a series of the most wonderfully excavated mansions, temples, and ornamental caverns (the abodes of its ancient and nameless inhabitants), to the number of more than twelve thousand, covering a slope of eight miles in extent. Many of those rock-hewn edifices, carved out of the living stone which supports the mountain, and are the chief portions of its foundation and structure, have beautiful friezes and entablatures, domes and cupolas, with elaborately arched doors and windows. Others are mere dens and caverns, with square air-holes; but towering over all are many colossal figures, more particularly two--a woman one hundred and twenty feet high, and another of a man, forty feet higher--all hewn out of the face of a lofty cliff. By what race, or when, those mighty and wondrous works of art were formed, at such vast labour, no human record, not even a tradition, remains to tell; their origin is shrouded by a veil of mystery, like that of the ruined cities of Yucatan; so whether they are relics of Bhuddism, or were hewn in the third century, during the dynasty of the Sassanides, has nothing to do with our story. But the poor hostages, as they were conveyed past those silent, dark, and empty temples, abandoned now to the jackal, the serpent, and the flying fox, with the towering and gigantic apparitions of the stone colossi lookingly grimly down in silence, felt strange emotions of chilly awe come over them--the ladies especially. To Mabel Trecarrel, in her weak and nervous state, the scene proved too much; she became hysterical, and wept and laughed at the same moment, to the great perplexity of Saleh Mohammed, who was quite unused to such exhibitions among the ladies of _his_ zenanali. Though stormed by Jenghiz Khan and his hordes, in 1220, after a vigorous resistance, this rock-hewn city, by its materials and massiveness, could suffer little; yet it was subsequently deserted by all its inhabitants, who named it "Maublig," or the _unfortunate_. After that time, its history sank into utter obscurity; its once-fertile plain reverted to a desert state once more; yet unchanged as when Bameean was in its zenith, its river of the same name flows past the caverned mountain, on its silent way to the snowy wastes where its waters mingle with those of the Oxus.