Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/106

Professor Ebers has heard the like under the porphyry cliffs of Sinai; the granite sanctuary of Karnak, the granite quarries of Assouan are said to be musical also; and the "music-stones" of the Orinoco are well known. The extensive broken and sloping surface of the Colossus, wet with the dews of early morning—the tears of Eos over her child, according to the Greek myth—becomes suddenly warm at sunrise, and "the current of air produced by this rapid change of temperature passing over its rough and pebbly surface" produces the mystic sound. The "eminent physicists" who offer us this explanation of the song of the Northern Colossus have omitted, it will be seen, to explain the silence of its colleague; but this by the way. Enough that science satisfies herself in the matter, and hat as the chant of the Memnon was holy to the mytho-poet and fraudulent to the ancient geographer, so it is simply a natural effect of heat and moisture to the modern sage. To our assembled party at the base of the statue