"The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

This account, at first discredited, has since been corroborated by
the discovery of a completely petrified forest, near the head waters
of the Cheyenne, or Chienne river, which has its source in the Black
Hills of the rocky chain.
There is scarcely, perhaps, a spectacle on the surface of the
globe more remarkable, either in a geological or picturesque point
of view than that presented by the petrified forest, near Cairo. The
traveller, having passed the tombs of the caliphs, just beyond the
gates of the city, proceeds to the southward, nearly at right angles
to the road across the desert to Suez, and after having travelled some
ten miles up a low barren valley, covered with sand, gravel, and sea
shells, fresh as if the tide had retired but yesterday, crosses a
low range of sandhills, which has for some distance run parallel to
his path. The scene now presented to him is beyond conception singular
and desolate. A mass of fragments of trees, all converted into
stone, and when struck by his horse's hoof ringing like cast iron,
is seen to extend itself for miles and miles around him, in the form
of a decayed and prostrate forest. The wood is of a dark brown hue,
but retains its form in perfection, the pieces being from one to
fifteen feet in length, and from half a foot to three feet in
thickness, strewed so closely together, as far as the eye can reach,
that an Egyptian donkey can scarcely thread its way through amongst
them, and so natural that, were it in Scotland or Ireland, it might
pass without remark for some enormous drained bog, on which the
exhumed trees lay rotting in the sun. The roots and rudiments of the
branches are, in many cases, nearly perfect, and in some the
worm-holes eaten under the bark are readily recognizable. The most
delicate of the sap vessels, and all the finer portions of the
centre of the wood, are perfectly entire, and bear to be examined with
the strongest magnifiers. The whole are so thoroughly silicified as to
scratch glass and are capable of receiving the highest polish.-
Asiatic Magazine.

"Hum!" said the king, again; but Scheherazade, paying him no
attention, continued in the language of Sinbad.
"'Passing beyond this last island, we reached a country where
there was a cave that ran to the distance of thirty or forty miles
within the bowels of the earth, and that contained a greater number of
far more spacious and more magnificent palaces than are to be found in
all Damascus and Bagdad. From the roofs of these palaces there hung
myriads of gems, liked diamonds, but larger than men; and in among the
streets of towers and pyramids and temples, there flowed immense
rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes.'"*

* The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.

"Hum!" said the king.
"'We then swam into a region of the sea where we found a lofty
mountain, down whose sides there streamed torrents of melted metal,
some of which were twelve miles wide and sixty miles long*; while from