Since this, Captains Irby and Mangles, who accompanied Mr. Banks, have published an account of their journey:—“Our defile brought us directly down into the valley of Wady Mousa, whose name had become so familiar to us. It is, at the point where we entered it, a stony but cultivated valley, of moderate size, without much character or beauty, running in a direction from east to west. A lesser hollow, sloping down to it from the southward, meets it at an angle. At the upper end of the latter valley is the village seen over stages of hanging fruit-grounds, which are watered by a spring. * * Some hundred yards below this spring begin the outskirts of the vast necropolis of Petra. * * As we advanced, the natural features of the defile grew more and more imposing at every step, and the excavations and sculpture more frequent on both sides, till it presented at last a continued street of tombs, beyond which the rocks, gradually approaching each other, seemed all at once to close without any outlet. There is, however, one frightful chasm for the passage of the stream, which furnishes, as it did anciently, the only avenue to Petra on this side (the eastern). “It is impossible,” continues Captain Irby, “to conceive any thing more awful and sublime than the eastern approach to Petra. The width is not more than just sufficient for the passage of two horsemen abreast; the sides are in all parts perpendicular, varying from four hundred to seven hundred feet in height; and they often overhang to such a degree, that, without their absolutely meeting, the sky is intercepted, and completely shut out for one hundred yards together, and there is little more light than in a cavern.” This half subterranean passage is more than two miles in length, and retains throughout the same extraordinary character. “After passing the Khasne, the defile becomes contracted again for three hundred yards, when suddenly the ruins of the city burst on the view in their full grandeur, shut in on the opposite side by barren craggy precipices, from which numerous ravines and valleys, like those we had passed, branch out in all directions. (All of these ravines, however, that were explored, were found to terminate in a wall of rock, admitting of no passage outwards or inwards.) The sides of the mountains, covered with an endless variety of excavated tombs and private dwellings, presented altogether the most singular scene we ever beheld. We must despair to give the reader an idea of the peculiar effect of the rocks, tinted with most extraordinary hues, whose summits present us with Nature in her most savage and romantic form; whilst their bases are worked out in all the symmetry and regularity of art, with colonnades and pediments, and ranges of corridors adhering to the perpendicular surface.”