“We wound round a peak,” says M. Laborde, “surmounted by a single tree. The view from this point exhibited a vast frightful desert; a chaotic sea, the waves of which were petrified. Following the beaten road, we saw before us Mount Hor, crowned by the tomb of the prophet, if we are to credit the ancient tradition, preserved by the people of that country. Several large and ruinous excavations, which are seen in the way, may arrest the attention of a traveller who is interested by such objects, and has no notion of those, still concealed from his view by the curtain of rocks which extends before him; but at length the rock leads him to the heights above one more ravine; whence he discovers within his horizon the most singular spectacle, the most enchanting picture, which Nature has wrought in her grandest mood of creation; which men, influenced by the vainest dreams of ambition, have yet bequeathed to the generations that were to follow them. At Palmyra, Nature renders the works of man insignificant by her own immensity and her boundless horizon, within which some hundreds of columns seem entirely lost. Here, on the contrary, she seems delighted to set, in her most noble frame-work, his productions, which aspire, and not unsuccessfully, to harmonize with her own majestic, yet fantastic, appearance. The spectator hesitates for a moment, as to which of the two he is the more impelled to admire; whether he is to accord the preference to Nature, who invites his attention to her matchless girdle of rocks, wondrous as well for their colour as their forms; or to the men who feared not to mingle the works of their genius with such splendid efforts of creative power.” We now give an abstract of what has been written of this city, mainly taken from a very intelligent periodical journal, published at Edinburgh (Chambers’s Journal). Nearly at the spot where the defile opens into the site of the city, one excavation in the site of the pass arrests the attention of the traveller. This is a vast circular theatre hewn out of the solid rock, consisting of thirty-three seats of stone sloping upwards, and surmounted, and in some degree sheltered, by the rocks above. The countless tombs in the immediate vicinity of this ruined edifice led M. Laborde to remark on the extraordinary taste of the people of Petra, in selecting a place of amusement, encircled on all sides by the mansions and memorials of death!