Note 110 — The Sixth Book.

The Hammam Meskouteen, the Silent or Inchanted Baths, are situated on a low ground, surrounded with mountains. There are several fountains that furnish the water, which is of an intense heat, and falls afterwards into the Ze-nati. At a small distance from these hot fountains, we have others, which upon comparison are of as an intense a coldness; and a little below them, somewhat nearer the banks of the Ze-nati, there are the ruins of a few houses, built perhaps for the conveniency of such persons, who came hither for the benefit of the waters.

Besides the strong sulphureous steams of the Hammam[j] Meskouteen, we are to observe farther of them, that their water is of so intense a heat, that the rocky ground it runs over, to the distance sometimes of a hundred foot, is dissolved, or rather calcined by it. When the substance of these rocks is soft and uniform, then the water by making every way equal impressions, leaveth them in the shape of cones or hemispheres; which being six foot high and a little more or less of the same diameter, the Arabs maintain to be so many tents of their predecessors turned into stone. But when these rocks, besides their usual soft chalky substance, contain likewise some layers of harder matter, not so easy to be dissolved, then, in proportion to the resistance the water is thereby to meet with, we are entertained with a confusion of traces and channels, distinguished by the Arabs into Sheep, Camels, Horses, nay into Men, Women and Children, whom they suppose to have undergone the like fate with their habitations. I observed that the fountains which afforded this water, had been frequently stopped up: or rather ceasing to run at one place, broke out immediately in another, which circumstance seems not only to account for the number of cones, but for that variety likewise of traces, that are continued from one or other of these cones or fountains, quite down to the river Zenati.

This place, in riding over it, giveth back such a hollow sound, that we were afraid every moment of sinking thro’ it. It is probable therefore that the ground below us was hollow: and may not the air then, which is pent up within these caverns, afford, as we may suppose, in escaping continually thro’ these fountains, that mixture of shrill, murmuring and deep sounds, which, according to the direction of the winds and the motion of the external air, issue out along with the water? the Arabs, to quote their strength of imagination once more, affirm these sounds to be the music of the Jenoune, Fairies, who are supposed, in a particular manner, to make their abodes at this place, and to be the grand agents in all these extraordinary appearances.

There are other natural curiosities likewise at this place. For the chalky stone being dissolved into a fine impalpable powder and carried down afterwards with the stream, lodgeth itself upon the sides of the channel, nay sometimes upon the lips of the fountains themselves; or else embracing twigs, straws and other bodies in its way, immediately hardeneth and shoots into a bright fibrous substance, like the Asbestos, forming itself at the same time, into a variety of glittering figures and beautiful christalizations.

Shaw.