Page:Rude Stone Monuments.djvu/423

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Chap. X.
INTRODUCTORY.
397

thousand, averaging from 4 to 5 feet in height. One colossal monolith he describes as 26 feet in diameter at its base and 52 feet high.[1] This, however, is surpassed by a dolmen situated near Tiaret, described by the Commandant Bernard. According to his account the cap-stone is 65 feet long by 26 feet broad, and 9 feet 6 inches thick; and this enormous mass is placed on other rocks which rise between 30 and 40 feet above the surface.[2] If this is true, it is the most enormous dolmen known, and it is strange that it should have escaped observation so long. Even the most apathetic traveller might have been astonished at such a wonder. Whether less gigantic specimens of the class exist in that neighbourhood, we are not told, but they do in detached patches everywhere eastward throughout the province. Those described by Mr. Rhind are only twelve miles from Algiers, and others are said to exist in great numbers in the regency of Tripoli.[3] So far as is at present known, they are not found in Morocco, but are found everywhere between Mount Atlas and the Syrtes, and apparently not near the sites of any great cities, or known centres of population, but in valleys and remote corners, as if belonging to a nomadic or agricultural population.

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164.
Bazina. From Flower's Paper.

When we speak of the ten thousand or, it may be, twenty thousand stone sepulchral monuments that are now known to exist in northern Africa, it must not be understood that they are all dolmens or circles of the class of which we have hitherto been speaking. Two other classes certainly exist, in some places, apparently, in considerable numbers, though it is difficult to make out in what proportion, and how far their forms are local. One of these classes, called Bazina by the Arabs, is thus described by Mr. Flower:—"Their general character is that of three concentric enclosures of stones


  1. 'Mémoires de la Soc. arch. de Constantine,' 1864, p. 127.
  2. Flower, in Norwich volume, p. 204.
  3. 'Mémoires, etc., de Constantine,' 1864, p. 124.