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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
an abyss on the summit, issued so vast a quantity of ashes that the
sun was entirely blotted out from the heavens, and it became darker
than the darkest midnight; so that when we were even at the distance
of a hundred and fifty miles from the mountain, it was impossible to
see the whitest object, however close we held it to our eyes.
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