THE prophecies concerning Edom are very remarkable. It was foretold by the prophet Jeremiah, that "Edom should be a lesolation" (xlix. 17.); and the wild and desolate scenery delineated in our engraved frontispiece, sufficiently attests the fulfilment of this prediction. "From generation to generation, it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the cormirant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it, and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness," &c. See also Isaiah xxxiv. 5 1017; also, Jeremiah xlix. 7-10; 12–18; Ezek. xxv. 13; xxx. 1, &c. Joel iii. 10; Obad. ver. 1, 2, 8, 9, 17, 18; Mal. i. 3, 4. The following extracts, respecting "PETRA, the excavated city, are taken from "Stephens's Travels," an extremely interesting ublication. We doubt not, that the reader will acknowledge her the utility of good engravings, without which we should have ut a faint idea of the subject and scenery, which the author his so happily described :—

"Petra, the excavated city, the long-lost capital of Edom, n the Scriptures and profane writings, in every language in wheh its name occurs, signifies a rock; and, through the shadows of its early history, we learn that its inhabitants lived in natural clefts or excavations made in the solid rock. Desolate as it now is, we have reason to believe that it goes back to the time of Esau, the father of Edom;' that princes and dukes, eight successive kings, and again a long line of dukes, dwelt there before any king reigned over Israel;' and we recognise it from the earliest ages, as the central point to which came the caravans from the interior of Arabia, Persia, and India, laden with all the precious commodities of the East, and from which these commodities were distributed through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, even Tyre and Sidon deriving their purple and dies from Petra. Eight hundred years before

Christ, Amaziah, the king of Judea, slew of Edom in the valley of Salt ten thousand, and took Selah (the Hebrew name of Petra) by war.' Three hundred years after the last of the prophets, and nearly a century before the Christian era, the 'king of Arabia' issued from his palace at Petra, at the head of fifty thousand men, horse and foot, entered Jerusalem, and uniting with the Jews, pressed the siege of the temple, which was only raised by the advance of the Romans; and in the beginning of the second century, though its independence was lost, Petra was still the capital of a Roman province. After that time it rapidly declined; its history became more and more obscure; for more than a thousand years it was completely lost to the civilized world; and, until its discovery by Burckhardt in 1812, except to the wandering Bedouins its very site was unknown.

"And this was the city at whose door I now stood. In a few words, this ancient and extraordinary city is situated within a natural amphitheatre of two or three miles in circumference, encompassed on all sides by rugged mountains five or six hundred feet in height. The whole of this area is now a waste of ruinsdwelling-houses, palaces, temples, and triumphal arches, all prostrae together in indistinguishable confusion. The sides of the mountains are cut smooth, in a perpendicular direction, and filled with long and continued ranges of dwelling-houses, temples, and tombs, excavated with vast labor out of the solid rock; and while ther summits present Nature in her wildest and most savage form, ther bases are adorned with all the beauty of architecture and art,with columns, and porticoes, and pediments, and ranges of coridors, enduring as the mountains out of which they are hem, and fresh as if the work of a generation scarcely yet gor by.

"Nothing can be finer than the immense rocky rampart which encoses the city. Strong, firm, and immoveable as nature itself, it sems to deride the walls of cities, and the puny fortifications of silful engineers. The only access is by clambering over this wallof stone, practicable only in one place, or by an entrance the mos extraordinary that Nature, in her wildest freaks, has ever framed. The loftiest portals ever raised by the hands of man, the proulest monuments of architectural skill and daring, sink into insignificance by the comparison."

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"For about two miles it lies between high and precipitous ranges of rocks, from five hundred to a thousand feet in height, standing as if torn asunder by some great convulsion, and barely wide enough for two horsemen to pass abreast. A swelling stream rushes between them; the summits are wild and broken; in some places overhanging the opposite sides, casting the darkness of night upon the narrow defile; then receding and forming an opening above, through which a strong ray of light is thrown down, and illuminates with the blaze of day the frightful chasm below. Wild fig-trees, oleanders, and ivy, were growing out of the rocky

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Christ

VIEWS IN EDOM (PETRA).

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sides of the cliffs hundreds of feet above our heads; the eagle was screaming above us; all along were the open doors of tombs, forming the great Necropolis of the city; and at the extreme end was a large open space, with a powerful body of light thrown down upon it, and exhibiting in one full view the façade of a beautiful temple, hewn out of the rock, with rows of Corinthian columns and ornaments, standing out fresh and clear as if but yesterday from the hands of the sculptor. Though coming directly from the banks of the Nile, where the preservation of the temples excites the admiration and astonishment of every traveller, we were roused and excited by the extraordinary beauty and excellent condition of the great temple at Petra."

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"The whole temple, its columns, ornaments, porticoes, and porches, are cut out from and form part of the solid rock; and this rock, at the foot of which the temple stands like a mere print, towers several hundred feet above, its face cut smooth to the very summit, and the top remaining wild and misshapen as Nature made it. The whole area before the temple is perhaps an acre in extent, enclosed on all sides except at the narrow entrance, and an opening to the left of the temple, which leads into the area of the city by a pass through perpendicular rocks, five or six hundred feet in height.

"It is not my design to enter into the details of the many monuments in this extraordinary city; but, to give a general idea of the character of all the excavations, I cannot do better than go within the temple. Ascending several broad steps, we entered under a colonnade of four Corinthian columns, about thirty-five feet high, into a large chamber of some fifty feet square, and twenty-five feet high. The outside of the temple is richly ornamented, but the interior is perfectly plain, there being no ornament of any kind upon the walls or ceilings; on each of the three sides is a small chamber for the reception of the dead; and on the back wall of the innermost chamber I saw the names of Messrs. Legh, Banks, Irby, and Mangles, the four English travellers who, with so much difficulty, had effected their entrance to the city; of Messieurs Laborde and Linant, and the two Englishmen and Italian of whom I have before spoken; and two or three others, which, from the character of the writing, I supposed to be names of attendants upon some of these gentlemen.

"These were the only names recorded in the temple; and, beside Burckhardt, no other traveller had ever reached it. I was the first American who had ever been there. Many of my countrymen, probably, as was the case with me, have never known the existence of such a city; and independently of all personal considerations, I confess that I felt what I trust was not an inexcusable pride, in writing upon the innermost wall of that temple the name of an American citizen; and under it, and flourishing on its own account in temples, and tombs, and all the most conspicuous places in Petra, is the illustrious name of Paulo Nuozzo, dragomano.