REG-RAWAN, or moving sand, is a small hill in the Kohistan, forty miles north of Kabul, remarkable for a bed of sand on its southern face. This is subject to sliding movements, which occasion sonorous sounds. It is styled the Khwaja Reg-rawan. A whitish streak is observed, ex tending from the summit to the foot. It is mentioned by Baber. The natives say that it runs up again, and that it is never diminished ; and that there is a cave at its foot where noises are heard.
Burnes describes the sounds as loud and hollow, very like those of a large drum ; whilst Sultan Baber, in his Memoirs, speaks of the sounds of drums and nagarets, and the same instruments were specified by the Friar Odoric. A still more apt comparison is afforded by Captain Newbold's account of the like phenomenon in the Sinai desert, at the sand-hill known as Jabal Nakus, ' the hill of the bell.' Dr. Wallin also was told when crossing a wadi of the Sinai desert, called Hamade, near 1Vadi Araba, that sometimes very strange sounds, like those of kettle - drums or nakkara, were heard to rise from the earth, without any discoverable cause. Friar Odoric
gives an account of a sandy hill, on which he heard the sound of invisible nakkara or drums. Mr. C. R. Markham, C.B., says the musical sounds caused by moving Band, which astonished Odoric, are heard also in the deserts of the west coast of Peru. Mrs. Markham and himself heard them when they halted amidst the medano or hills of light sand in the Arequipa desert. Another case was discovered by the late Hugh Miller in the island of Eigg (Cruise of the Betsy, quoted in Petermamfs Mittheilungen, 1858, p. 405). Mr. Bollaert notices the Bramador or rumbling mountain of Tarapaca, which appears to be dis tinct from Mr. Markhara's.—J. G. S. xxi. p. 104 ; Yule, Cathay, i. p. 244 ; Burnes' Travels.