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Sardonyx

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SARDONYX.                                      307
period shows what is also manifest from other sources, that a direct trade with India was maintained by the Greeks down to the times of the final extinction of their empire. Amongst the most costly presents in the estimation of the age (including a case of " named " relics of saints), sent by Alexius Comnenus to the Emperor Henry III., a vase of Sardonyx, and another of Crystal, held a conspicuous place.
The exact locality that supplied the Romans is indicated by Ptolemy, thus : " The remarkable mountains in the known parts of India are the Apocopi Hills, called also the Pains of the Gods, and the Mount Sardonyx, in which the stone of the same name is found; its meridian being 117° 30' 21." Between Mount Sardonyx and Bittigus is held by the Tabassi, a great nation.'' Veltheim thinks this to be the range running between Ozene (Ongein) and Tagara (Dowlatabad).4
The Arabian kind may have been brought from the interior of Africa by the caravans—a traffic established from time imme­morial—into Abyssinia, and the other regions upon the Red Sea. The Ethiopian traders made Meroe their dépôt, where, says Diod. Siculus (i. 33), "all sorts of precious stones were to be got ; " certainly not found in that neighbourhood but brought by the traders. Bottiger relates that Sparrmann on his return from his African, exploration gave two pieces of the true antique Sardonyx, knocked off a rock that had served him for a dinner-table in the desert behind the Cape of Good Hope, to the mine­ralogist Danz, who afterwards got 10 Carolines for each at Vienna.
Veltheim, quoted by Bottiger, explained the existence of the material in pieces of such marvellous dimensions, by supposing them formed out of slabs of Obsidean, hardened by a boiling in sulphur, and then polished and cemented together : not ex­plaining, however, how the white and the red layers were pro­duced. A sufficient answer to this hypothesis, is the circumstance that the strata in our camei often undulate, besides being of
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