The Voyage Of The Vega Round Asia And Europe Part 63

We arrived at Galle on the 15th December, having during our pa.s.sage from Singapore had a pretty steady and favourable monsoon. While sailing through the Straits of Malacca strong ball-lightning was often seen a little after sunset. The electrical discharges appeared to go on princ.i.p.ally from the mountain heights on both sides of the Straits.

I allowed the _Vega_ to remain in the harbour of Point de Galle, partly to wait for the mail, partly to give Dr. Almquist an opportunity of collecting lichens on some of the high mountain summits in the interior of the island, and Dr. Kjellman of examining its algae, while I myself would have time to visit the famous gem-diggings of Ceylon. The return was as good as could have been expected considering our short stay at the place. Dr. Almquist's collection of lichens from the highest mountain of Ceylon, Pedrotalagalla, 2,500 metres high, was very large, Kjellman, by the help of a diver, made a not inconsiderable collection of algae from the neighbourhood of the harbour, and from an exclusion which I undertook in company with Mr. ALEXANDER C. DIXON, of Colombo, to Ratnapoora, the town of gems, where we were received with special kindness by Mr. COLIN MURRAY, a.s.sistant government agent, I brought home a fine collection of the minerals of Ceylon.

Precious stones occur in Ceylon mainly in sand beds, especially at places where streams of water have flowed which have rolled, crumbled down, and washed away a large part of the softer const.i.tuents of the sand, so that a gravel has been left remaining which contains considerably more of the harder precious stone layer than the original sandy strata, or the rock from which they originated. Where this natural was.h.i.+ng ends, the gem collector begins. He searches for a suitable valley, digs down a greater or less depth from the surface to the layer of clay mixed with coa.r.s.e sand resting on the rock, which experience has taught him to contain gems[388]. At the was.h.i.+ngs which I saw, the clayey gravel was taken out of this layer and laid by the side of the hole until three or four cubic metres of it were collected. It was then carried, in shallow, bowl-formed baskets from half a metre to a metre in diameter, to a neighbouring river, where it was washed until all the clay was carried away from the sand. The gems were then picked out, a person with a glance of the eye examining the wet surface of the sand and collecting whatever had more or less appearance of a precious stone. He then skimmed away with the palm of the hand the upper stratum of sand, and went on in the same way with that below it until the whole ma.s.s was examined. The certainty with which he judged in a moment whether there was anything of value among the many thousand grains of sand was wonderful. I endeavoured in a very considerable heap of the gravel thus hastily examined, to find a single small piece of precious stone which had escaped the glance of the examiner, but without success.

The yield is very variable, sometimes abundant, sometimes very small, and though precious stones found in Ceylon are yearly sold for large sums, the industry on the whole is unprofitable, although now and then a favourite of fortune has been enriched by it. The English authorities, therefore, with full justification, consider it demoralising and unfavourable to the development of the otherwise abundant natural resources of the region. For the numerous loose population devotes itself rather to the easy search for precious stones, which is as exciting as play, than to the severer but surer labours of agriculture, and when at any time a rich _find_ is made, it is speedily squandered, without a thought of saving for the times when the yield is little or nothing. A large number of the precious stones are polished at special polis.h.i.+ng places at Ratnapoora, but the work is very bad, so that the stones which come into the market are often irregular, and have uneven, curved, ill-polished surfaces.

Most of them perhaps are sold in the Eastern and Western Indian peninsulas and other parts of Asia, but many are also exported to Europe. The precious stones which are princ.i.p.ally found at Ratnapoora, consist of sapphires, commonly blue, but sometimes yellow or violet, sometimes even completely colourless. In the last case they have a l.u.s.tre resembling that of the diamond[389]. Rubies I saw here only in limited numbers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GEM DIGGINGS AT RATNAPOORA. ]

The precious stones occur in nearly every river valley which runs from the mountain heights in the interior of the island down to the low land. According to a statement by Mr. Tennent (i. p. 33), the river-sand at many places contains so much of the harder minerals that it may be used directly for the polis.h.i.+ng of other stones. The same writer, or more correctly Dr. GYGAX, who appears to have written the rather scanty mineralogical contributions to Tennent's famous work, states that a more abundant yield ought to be obtained by working in the solid rock than by the usual method. This idea is completely opposed to the experience of mineralogy. The finest gems, the largest gold nuggets, as is well known, are never, or almost never, found in solid rock, but in loose earthy layers. In such layers in Ceylon the abundance of precious stones, that is to say, of minerals which are _hard, translucent, and strongly l.u.s.trous_, is very great, and enormous sums would be obtained if we could add up the value of the ma.s.s of precious stones which have been found here for thousands of years back. Already Marco Polo says of Ceylon: "In ista insula nasc.u.n.tur boni et n.o.biles rubini et non nasc.u.n.tur in aliquo loco plus. Et hic nasc.u.n.tur zafiri et topazii, ametisti, et aliquae aliae petrae pretiosae, et rex istius insulae habet pulcriorem rubinum de mundo".

But some one perhaps will ask, where is the mother-rock of all these treasures in the soil of Ceylon? The question is easily answered.

All these minerals have once been imbedded in the granitic gneiss, which is the princ.i.p.al rock of the region.

In speaking of granite or gneiss in southern lands, or at least in the southern lands we now visited, I must, in the first place, point out that these rocks next the surface of the earth in the south have a much greater resemblance to strata of sand, gravel, and clay than to our granite or gneiss rocks, the type of what is lasting, hard, and unchangeable. The high coast hills, which surround the Inland Sea of j.a.pan, resemble, when seen from the sea, ridges of sand (_osar_) with sides partly clothed with wood, partly sandy slopes of a light yellow colour, covered by no vegetation. On a closer examination, however, we find that the supposed sandy ridges consist of weathered granitic rocks, in which all possible intermediate stages may be seen between the solid rock and the loose sand. The sand is not stratified, and contains large, loose, rounded blocks _in situ_, completely resembling the erratic blocks in Sweden, although with a more rugged surface. The boundary between the unweathered granite and that which has been converted into sand is often so sharp that a stroke of the hammer separates the crust of granitic sand from the granite blocks. They have an almost fresh surface, and a couple of millimetres within the boundary the rock is quite unaltered. No formation of clay takes place, and the alteration to which the rocks are subjected therefore consists in a crumbling or formation of sand, and not, or at least only to a very small extent, in a chemical change. Even at Hong Kong the princ.i.p.al rock consisted of granite. Here too the surface of the granite rock was quite altered to a very considerable depth, not however to sand, but to a fine, often reddish, clay, thus in quite a different way from that on the coast of the Inland Sea of j.a.pan. Here too one could at many places follow completely the change of the hard granite ma.s.s to a clay which still lay _in situ_, but without its being possible to draw so sharp a boundary between the primitive rock and the newly-formed loose earthy layers as at the first-named place. We had opportunities of observing a similar crumbling down of the hard granite at every road-section between Galle, Colombo, and Ratnapoora, with the difference that the granite and gneiss here crumbled down to a coa.r.s.e sand, which was again bound together by newly-formed hydrated peroxide of iron to a peculiar porous sandstone, called by the natives _cabook_. This sandstone forms the layer lying next the rock in nearly all the hills on that part of the island which we visited. It evidently belongs to an earlier geological period than the Quaternary, for it is older than the recent formation of valleys and rivers. The _cabook_ often contains large, rounded, unweathered granite blocks, quite resembling the rolled-stone blocks in Sweden. In this way there arise at places where the _cabook_ stratum has again been broken up and washed away by currents of water, formations which are so bewilderingly like the ridges (_osar_) and hills with erratic blocks in Sweden and Finland that I was astonished when I saw them. I was compelled to resort to the evidence of the palms to convince myself that it was not an illusion which unrolled before me the well-known contours from the downs of my native land. An accurate study of the sandy hills on the Inland Sea of j.a.pan, of the clay cliffs of Hong Kong, and the _cabook_ of Ceylon would certainly yield very unexpected contributions to an explanation of the way in which the sand and rolled-stone _osar_ of Scandinavia have first arisen. It would show that much which the Swedish geologists still consider to be glacial gravel transported by water and ice, is only the product of a process of weathering or, more correctly, falling asunder, which has gone on in Sweden also on an enormous scale. Even a portion of our Quaternary clays have perhaps had a similar origin, and we find here a simple explanation of the important circ.u.mstance, which is not sufficiently attended to by our geologists, that often all the erratic blocks at a place are of the same kind, and resemble in their nature the underlying or neighbouring rocks.

It is this weathering process which has originated the gem sand of Ceylon. Precious stones have been found disseminated in limited numbers in the granite converted into _cabook_. In weathering, the difficultly decomposable precious stones have not been attacked, or attacked only to a limited extent. They have therefore retained their original form and hardness. When in the course of thousands of years streams of water have flowed over the layers of _cabook_, their soft, already half-weathered const.i.tuents have been for the most part changed into a fine mud, and as such washed away, while the hard gems have only been inconsiderably rounded and little diminished in size. The current of water therefore has not been able to wash them far away from the place where they were originally imbedded in the rock, and we now find them collected in the gravel-bed, resting for the most part on the fundamental rock which the stream has left behind, and which afterwards, when the water has changed its course, has been again covered by new layers of mud, clay, and sand. It is this gravel-bed which the natives call _nellan_, and from which they chiefly get their treasures of precious stones.

Of all the kinds of stones which are used as ornaments there are both n.o.ble and common varieties, without there being any perceptible difference in their chemical composition. The most skilful chemist would thus have difficulty in finding in their chemical composition the least difference between corundum and sapphire or ruby, between common beryl and emerald, between the precious and the common topaz, between the hyacinth and the common zircon, between precious and common spinel; and every mineralogist knows that there are innumerable intermediate stages between these minerals which are so dissimilar though absolutely identical in composition. This gave the old naturalists occasion to speak of ripe and unripe precious stones. They said that in order to ripen precious stones the heat of the south was required. This transference of well-known circ.u.mstances from the vegetable to the mineral kingdom is certainly without justification. It points however to a remarkable and hitherto unexplained circ.u.mstance, namely, that the occurrence of precious stones is, with few exceptions, confined to southern regions[390]. Diamonds are found in noteworthy number only in India, Borneo, Brazil, and the Transvaal. Tropical America is the home-land of the emerald, Brazil of the topaz, Ceylon of the sapphire and the hyacinth, Pegu of the ruby, and Persia of the turquoise. With the exception of the diamond the same stones are found also in the north, but in a common form. Thus common sapphire (corundum) is found in Gellivare iron ore so plentifully that the ore from certain openings is difficult to smelt. Common topaz is found in ma.s.ses by the hundredweight in the neighbourhood of Falun; common emerald is found in thick crystals several feet in length in felspar quarries, in Roslagen, and in Tammela and Kisko parishes in Finland; common spinel occurs abundantly in ker limestone quarry; common zircon at Brevig in Norway, and turquoise-like but badly coloured stones at Vestan in Skane. True precious stones, on the other hand, are not found at any of these places. Another remarkable fact in connection with precious stones is that most of those that come into the market are not found in the solid rock, but as loose grains in sand-beds.

True jewel mines are few, unproductive, and easily exhausted. From this one would be inclined to suppose that precious stones actually undergo an enn.o.bling process in the warm soil of the south.

During the excursion I undertook from Galle to Ratnapoora, I visited a number of temples in order to procure Pali, Singhalese, and Sanscrit ma.n.u.scripts; and I put myself in communication with various natives who were supposed to possess such ma.n.u.scripts. They are now very difficult to get at, and the collection I made was not very large. The books which the temples wished to dispose of have long ago been eagerly brought up by private collectors or handed over to public museums, for example, to the Ceylon Government Oriental Library established at Colombo[391]. The collector who remains a considerable time in the region, may however be able to reap a rich after-harvest, less of the cla.s.sical works preserved in the temples than of the smaller popular writings in the hands of private persons.

We see in Ceylon innumerable descendants of the races who repeatedly subdued larger or smaller portions of the island, or carried on traffic there, as Moormen (Arabs), Hindoos, Jews, Portuguese, Dutchmen, Englishmen, &c., but the main body of the people at all events varies very little, and still consists of the two allied races, Tamils and Singhalese, who for thousands of years back have been settled here. The colour of their skin is very dark, almost black, their hair is not woolly, their features are regular, and their build is exceedingly fine. The children especially, who, while they are small, often go completely naked, with their regular features, their large eyes, and fresh plump bodies, are veritable types of beauty, and the same holds true of most of the youths.

Instead of buying in one of the capitals of Europe the right to draw models, often enough with forms which leave much to desire, and which must be used without distinction for Greek or Northern divinities, for heroes or _savants_ of the present or former times, an artist ought to make tours of study to the lands of the south, where man does not need to protect himself from the cold with clothes, and where accordingly nakedness is the rule, at least among the poorer cla.s.ses. The dress which is worn here is commonly convenient and tasteful. Among the Singhalese it consists of a piece of cloth wound round the middle, which hangs down to the knees. The men, who still prefer the convenient national dress to the European, go with the upper part of the body bare. The long hair is held together with a comb which goes right over the head, and among the rich has a large four-cornered projection at the crown. The women protect the upper part of the body with a thin cotton jacket. The priests wear a yellow piece of cloth diagonally over one shoulder.

The naked children are ornamented with metal bracelets and with a metal chain round the waist, from which a little plate hangs down between the legs. This plate is often of silver or gold, and is looked upon as an amulet.

The huts of the working men are in general very small, built of earth or _cabook_-bricks, and are rather to be considered as sheds for protection from the rain and suns.h.i.+ne than as houses in the European sense. The richer Singhalese live in extensive "verandas"

which are almost open, and are divided into rooms by thin panels, resembling in this respect the j.a.panese houses. The j.a.panese genius for ornament, their excellent taste and skill in execution, are however wanting here, but it must also be admitted that in these respects the j.a.panese stand first among all the peoples of the earth.

In the seaport towns the Singhalese are insufferable by their begging, their loquacity, and the unpleasant custom they have of asking up to ten times as much, while making a bargain, as they are pleased to accept in the end. In the interior of the country the state of things in this respect is much better.

Among the temples which I visited in order to procure Pali books was the so-called "devil's" temple at Ratnapoora, the stateliest idol-house I saw in Ceylon. Most of the temples were built of wood; all were exceedingly unpretentious, and without the least trace of style. The numerous priests and temple attendants lived in rather squalid and disorderly dwellings in the neighbourhood of the temple.

They received me in a friendly way and showed me their books, of which they occasionally sold some. The negotiation several times ended by the priest presenting me with the book I wished to purchase and positively refusing to receive compensation in any form. On one occasion the priest stated that he himself was prevented by the precepts of his religion from receiving the purchase-money agreed upon, but said that I might hand it over to some of the persons standing round. At two of the priests' houses there was a swarm of school-children, who ran busily about with their palm-leaf writing books and writing implements.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUES IN A TEMPLE IN CEYLON. ]

The temples were very different in their arrangements, probably on account of the dissimilar usages of the various Buddhist sects to which they belonged. A temple near Colombo contained a large number of wooden images and paintings of G.o.ds, or men of more than human size. Most of them stood upright like a guard round a sitting Buddha. I could not observe any dislike on the part of the priests to take the foreigner round their temples. The key, however, was sometimes wanting to some repository, whose contents they were perhaps unwilling to desecrate by showing them to the unbeliever.

This was, for instance, the case with the press which contained the devil's bow and arrows, in the temple at Ratnapoora. The temple vessels besides were exceedingly ugly, tasteless, and ill-kept. I seldom saw anything that showed any sign of taste, art, and orderliness. How different from j.a.pan, where all the swords, lacquer work, braziers, teacups, &c., kept in the better temples would deserve a place in some of the art museums of Europe.

In the sketch of the first voyage from Novaya Zemlya to Ceylon, a countryman of Lidner can scarcely avoid giving a picture of "Ceylon's burned up vales." In this respect the following extract from a letter from Dr. Almquist, sketching his journey to the interior of the island may be instructive:--

"Three hours after our arrival at Point de Galle I sat properly stowed away in the mail-coach _en route_ for Colombo. As travelling companions I had a European and two Singhalese. As it was already pretty dusk in the evening there was not much of the surrounding landscape visible. We went on the whole night through a forest of tall coco-nut trees whose dark tops were visible far up in the air against the somewhat lighter sky. It was peculiar to see the number of fire-flies flying in every direction, and at every wing-stroke emiting a bright flash. The night air had the warm moistness which is so agreeable in the tropics.

Now and then the sound of the sea penetrated to our ears.

For we followed the west coast in a northerly direction.

More could not be observed in the course of the night, and all the pa.s.sengers were soon sunk in deep sleep.

"After seven hours' brisk trot we came to a railway station and continued our journey by rail to Colombo, the capital of Ceylon. As there was nothing special to see or do there, I went on without stopping by the railway, which here bends from the coast to Kandy and other places. The landscape now soon became grander and grander. We had indeed before seen tropical vegetation at several places, but of the luxuriance which here struck the eye we had no conception.

The pity was that men had come hither, had cleared and planted.

"In the lowlands I saw some cinnamon plantations. Ceylon cinnamon is very dear; in Europe cheaper and inferior sorts are used almost exclusively, and most of the plantations in Ceylon have been abandoned many years ago. Soon the train leaves the lowland and begins to ascend rapidly. The patch of coast country, where the coco-nut trees prevail, is exchanged for a very mountainous landscape; first hills with large open valleys between, then higher continuous mountains with narrow, deep, kettle-like valleys, or open hilly plateaus. In the valleys rice is princ.i.p.ally cultivated. The hills and mountain sides were probably originally covered with the most luxuriant primitive forest, but now on all the slopes up to the mountain summits it is cut down, and they are covered with coffee plantations. The coffee-plant is indeed very pretty, but grows at such a distance apart that the ground is everywhere visible between, and this is a wretched covering for luxuriant Ceylon.

"At two o'clock in the afternoon we arrived at the station, Perideniya, the nearest one to Kandy. The famous botanical garden lies in its neighbourhood, and there I had to visit the superintendent of the garden, Dr. THWAITES. This elderly, but still active and enthusiastic naturalist is exceedingly interested in botanical research, and very obliging to all who work in that department. He received me in a very friendly manner, and it was due to him that the programme of my visit there was so full.

"A botanic garden in Ceylon must naturally be something extraordinary. Nowhere else can grander or more luxuriant vegetation be seen than here. The garden has been especially famous for the number of different varieties of trees of immense size which it can show. Besides, all possible better known plants are to be found here, cultivated in the finest specimens. Spices and drugs were specially well represented. Here long tendrils of the black pepper-plant wound themselves up the thick tree-stems, here the cardamon and the ginger flourished, here the pretty cinnamon, camphor, cinchona, nutmeg, and cocoa trees made a splendid show, here I saw a newly gathered harvest of vanilla. The abundance of things to be seen, learned, and enjoyed here was incredible. However, the next day I determined on the advice of Dr. Thwaites to make a tour up to the mountain localities proper, in order there to get a better sight of the lichen flora of Ceylon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A COUNTRY PLACE IN CEYLON. ]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HIGHLAND VIEW IN THE INTERIOR OF CEYLON. Coffee Plantations; Adam's Peak in the back-ground. ]

"I now travelled south partly by rail, partly by coach, until in the evening I found myself lodged at a 'rest-house' at Rambodde, a thousand metres above the sea, at about the same height accordingly as that at which trees cease to grow in southern Norway. This tropical mountain land reminds one a little, in respect of the contours of the landscape, of the fells of Norway. Here too are found league-long deep valleys, surrounded by high mountain summits and ranges with outlines sharply marked against the horizon. But here they were everywhere overgrown with coffee bushes, or possibly with cinchona plants. The mountain slopes were so laid bare from the bottom all the way up that scarce a tree was left in sight; everywhere so far as the eye could reach only coffee.

"Next day, attended by a Singhalese, I went, or to speak more correctly, climbed farther up the steep coffee plantations. At a height of 1,300 metres above the sea coffee ceases to grow, and we now found some not very extensive tea plantations, and above these the primitive forest commences. At a height of 1,900 metres above the sea there is an extensive open plateau. Up here there is a not inconsiderable place, Novara Elliya, where the governor has a residence, and part of the troops are in barracks during the summer heat. One of the mountains which surround this plateau is Pedrotalagalla, the loftiest mountain of Ceylon, which reaches a height of 2,500 metres above the sea.

"I have ascended not so few mountains, but of none has the ascent been so easy as of this, for a broad footpath ran all the way to the top. Without this path the ascent had been impossible, for an hour's time would have been required for every foot made good through the jungle, so closely is the ground under the lofty trees covered to the top of the mountain with bushes, creepers, or the bamboo.

In the evening I returned to my former night-quarters, where I slept well after a walk of thirty-six English miles.

"As I felt myself altogether unable the following day to make any further excursion on foot, I travelled back to Peradeniya by mail-coach. During this journey I had as my travelling companion a Singhalese, whom it was a special pleasure to see at close quarters. One of his big toes was ornamented with a broad ring of silver, both his ears were pierced above, and provided with some pendulous ornament, and one side of the nose was likewise perforated, in order that at that place too might he adorn himself with a piece of grandeur. On his head he had, like all Singhalese, a comb by which the hair drawn right upwards is kept in position, as little girls at home are wont to have their hair arranged. As the man did not appear to know a word of English, it was impossible to enter into any closer acquaintance with him.

"At noon on the following day I found myself compelled, by a quite unexpected occurrence, to return precipitately to the coast again. Dr. Thwaites and I had been invited to dinner by his Excellency the Governor. As I was still limping after my long excursion on foot, and besides had not had the forethought to take a dress-suit with me, I considered that, vexatious as it was to decline, I could not accept this gracious invitation, but instead went my way. Thus after six exceedingly pleasant days I came back to Point de Galle and the _Vega_".

[Footnote 385: Yet with one very laughable exception. I wished for zoological purposes to get one of the common Chinese rats, and with this object in view made inquiries through my interpreter at a shed in the street, where rats were said to be cooked for Chinese epicures. But scarcely had the question been put, when the old, grave host broke out in a furious storm of abuse, especially against the interpreter, who was overwhelmed with bitter reproaches for helping a "foreign devil" to make a fool of his own countrymen. All my protestations were in vain, and I had to go away with my object unaccomplished. ]

[Footnote 386: See on this subject W.A. Pickering, "Chinese Secret Societies" (_Journal of the Straits Branch of the R. Asiatic Society_, 1878, No. 1, pp. 63-84) ]

[Footnote 387: Concerning their formation and origin see a paper by K. Nordenskiold in _ofversigt af Vet.-akad Forh_ 1870, p 29. ]

[Footnote 388: Emerson Tennent says on the subject:--The gem collectors penetrate through the recent strata of gravel to the depth of from ten to twenty feet in order to reach a lower deposit, distinguished by the name of _Nellan_, in which the objects of their search are found. This is of so early a formation that it underlies the present beds of rivers, and is generally separated from them or from the superinc.u.mbent gravel by a hard crust (called _Kadua_), a few inches in thickness, and so consolidated as to have somewhat the appearance of laterite or sun-burnt brick. The nellan is for the most part horizontal, but occasionally it is raised into an incline as it approaches the base of the hills. It appears to have been deposited previous to the eruption of the basalt, on which in some places it reclines, and to have undergone some alteration from the contact. It consists of water-worn pebbles firmly imbedded in clay, and occasionally there occur large lumps of granite and gneiss, in the hollows under which, as well as in "pockets" in the clay (which from their shape the natives denominate "elephants'

footsteps "), gems are frequently found in groups, as if washed in by the current. (E. Tennent, _Ceylon_ London, 1860, i. p. 34.) ]

[Footnote 389: Diamonds are wanting in Ceylon. And neither gold nor platinum appears to occur in noteworthy quant.i.ty in the gem gravel. ]

[Footnote 390: The only considerable exceptions from this are two localities for precious stones in Southern Siberia and the occurrence of precious opal in Hungary. The latter, however, in consequence of defective hardness and translucency, can scarcely be reckoned among the true precious stones. ]

[Footnote 391: The Catalogue of Pali, Singhalese, and Sanscrit Ma.n.u.scripts in the Ceylon Government Oriental Library, Colombo, 1876, includes:--

41 Buddhist canonical books 71 Other religious writings 25 Historical works, traditions 29 Philological works 16 Literary works 6 Works on Medicine, Astronomy, &c.

According to Emerson Tennent (i. p. 515), the Rev. R. Spence Hardy has in the _Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Asiatic Society_ for 1848 given the t.i.tles of 467 works in Pali, Sanskrit, and Elu, collected by himself during his residence in Ceylon. Of these about eighty are in Sanskrit, 150 in Elu or Singhalese, and the remainder in Pali. ]

CHAPTER XX.

The Voyage Home--Christmas, 1879--Aden--Suez--Cairo-- Excursion to the Pyramids and the Mokattam Mountains-- Petrified Tree-stems--The Suez Ca.n.a.l--Landing on Sicily by night--Naples--Rome--The Members of the Expedition separate--Lisbon--England--Paris--Copenhagen--Festive Entry into Stockholm--_Fetes_ there--Conclusion