Wady Mokatteb, or the Written Valley, of Akabah on the east,-the two limbs of is another of the peculiar spots of the Desert. the maritime fork, known in ancient as well It is no oasis certainly. Its rocks and slopes as modern times by the name of the Red are utterly verdureless. No well is to be Sea. If the region between the Euphrates found in any of its recesses, and not a drop took the name of Mesopotamia from its of water can be wrung out of its scorched position; if the sea between Europe and and weary sands. It is no camping-ground Africa is called the Mediterranean from its for any who do not carry water as well as boundaries; the Sinaitic Desert, were it food along with them. Nor is there shade large enough to take so dignified a name, during the day from palm or rock; for all might be designated the Mesoceanic Highthe day long does it lie broadly exposed to lands of Arabia. But, perhaps, "the Sinaievery ray that pours down from Arabia's tic Peninsula" is sufficient for it; unless, burning sun. Protected from the only rays from its curious resemblance to the Pyrathat one can tolerate in the Desert, those of mids of Egypt, it may be called the Desert sunrise and sunset, it is swept ever by the whole burning strength of noon. And such a noon, when it flings its heat down upon the sands without a cloud or breeze!

or Arabian Pyramid, having as its apex the Ras Mohammed, and its base the mountains and desert of El-Tih. Though the vast tract between these two seas is properly one great region of barrenness and unpeopled desolation, extending from the promontory above named to the southern slopes of Palestine,

The old rock-writings of this wady are full of interest; nor have they as yet had full justice done to them. If unbiassed scholarship would apply itself to their decipher- yet it has, from the earliest times, been subment, something would be extracted, which divided into smaller deserts, each with its would at least end the controversy regard- own district-name. From the south-western ing them, even if it did not contain much of border of Palestine to the Gulf of Suez, and information or interest. That they are the beyond it a little, it was called the wilderwork of Christian pilgrims, on their way to ness of Shur; then came the wilderness of Feiran or Sinai, is mere absurdity. No Sin; then the wilderness of Sinai; then, pilgrims ever wrote these thousands of in- turning north by the Gulf of Akabah, came scriptions, for no pilgrims could remain a the different deserts of Paran, Zin, and Kaday in this valley. Whoever might resort desh, while in the centre lay the desert of to it, pilgrims would not. Nor would they Beersheba. All these names have perished; have left traces of their handiwork only in but others have come in their place, and in Wady Mokatteb, where they could not have several cases the new names have not alterstayed, and not in Feirân, where they did ed the old limits of the provinces. The stay. But to what nation could those Christian pilgrims belong who wrote an alphabet belonging to no known Christian nation under the sun?

Terâbin, the Tawarah, the Tiyahah, the Haiwat the Sawâlihah, the Aleikât,-are the designations of the desert tribes, taken from the names of the districts which they But we are not going to settle the ques- specially haunt. For though they are tion. Whoever wrote these inscriptions, thorough nomads, they have their own indeand drew these sketches of goats and camels, pendent domains, ruled by seperate Sheikhs. must have stayed here. There must have That domain may be small and barren,— been some reason why this unattractive and the poorest that ever owned a ruler; yet it unwatered neighbourhood should have been is their birth-place and their burying-place. fixed upon, to the almost entire neglect of Though wanderers over a hundred hills, they all the other regions of the Desert. And no count this their home. Here they were theory ought to be listened to that does not born; here they have known what life's set out, or at least end, with accounting for affections are; here they hope to die and be this. buried.

Instead, however, of taking up successive It is of some importance to get a correct points or objects, let us try to give our read-general view of the Desert in some of its ers some idea of this great and terrible wil- broader features; and it is worth while to derness in its more general features. For correct one or two false, or at least onedetails, they must consult the works already sided ideas, in common currency regarding referred to. But meanwhile let them accept it. Few take the trouble to inquire what the following sketch, for the accuracy of the Desert really is. They are content to which the writers of the above volumes will think of it merely as a sand-waste, a region be sufficient vouchers.

The Desert of Sinai is commonly understood as embracing the triangle formed by the Gulf of Suez on the west, and the Gulf

of waterless desolation. A slight study of one or two of the books of travel already quoted from will set them right, without the toil and heat of a desert-journey.

The Desert is not one vast level area, the sand. Sometimes these are found, in stretching over an immense region, like a yel- isolated blocks, (a large stone, having shot low sea, in unrelieved, unbroken monotony of down from the cliffs into the valley), as in plain. It not merely swells and undulates, but the case of the Hajir-er-Rukkab, or Stone it heaves into wide table-lands, nay, bursts of the Rider, near the Ain Howârah;* up in all directions into the magnificence of sometimes they are found in level patches, cliff, and ridge, and mountain. Though the debris of the hills having spread itself none of its hills reach the nobility either of out, and bedded itself in the sand or clay; Libanus or Anti-Libanus, yet they have a sometimes in rugged heaps, like Highland fierce grandeur peculiarly their own; and cairns, which appear at a distance like artifithe eight thousand feet of Jebel Katherin cial mounds; sometimes rolled and pounded, fall but little short of the ten thousand feet as if some iceberg had once passed along, of Jebel-esh-Sheikh. There is far more of grinding the rocks to fragments, and spreadthe mountain than of the plain in the Desert; ing them out in fields of stone, to be afterand for one broad plain or strath, such as wards sifted by the winds and caked together Debbet Ramleh, there are at least a hundred by the rain floods, so as to form a smooth, hills most of them truly Alpine. The broad highway, extending for miles, and to hills of the African waste are low and present a vast plain or area of cyclopean rounded, but those of the Sinaitic highlands mosaic, or a stripe of tesselated pavement, exhibit some of the grandest specimens of relieving the monotony of the waste by mountain scenery which earth contains. breaking up into variegated stripes the vast tracts of grey or yellow sand.

The peninsular Desert is not a land without rain; and speaking generally of the East, we may say, that there seems to be much more rain than we usually give it credit for. In Upper Egypt, certainly, there is hardly such a thing as rain. That region

the region where the wondrous ruins of a hundred temples crowd together, embalmed, and so preserved by the hot dry air, as effectually as their tenants are by spice and odours-may be called rainless. It is wholly at the mercy of the Nile. Middle Egypt has more rain, though little to boast of. Lower Egypt has considerably more; and in some places might do battle with the droughts on its own resources. But the Desert has more than all Egypt together,

The Desert is not a region of mere scorch ing calm, without a breeze or a tempest. Even at noon, and in the heart of some valley, there comes a quiet breeze, -not certainly "stealing and giving odours," as in the Shubra gardens or the vale of Nablus, but still bringing coolness to the hot air and the parched Arab, as it passes on its way. The storm, too, wakes up and tries its strength against the sharp peaks of ElBenát, or rushes through Nukb-Howai, "the pass of the winds," or loses itself in the mountain network of Esh-Shubeikeh; and while, in the plain below, the sand-drift is pouring along, like yellow hail, the snowblast is sweeping over the hill-top, and reminds the traveller of Skiddaw, or Schreck Horn, or Snee-Hatten. Yet the sand-storms of the Peninsula, though they make the only so regulated as to be useless, save camels halt and the Arabs cower, and the traveller stop his ears and eyes, are not destructive like those of Eastern Arabia or Africa. The sand is not fine enough to admit of its being raised by the blast in sufficient quantities at a time to overwhelm its victims. A whirlwind in the Ghôr of the Jordan would be a more unpleasant assail ant than any tempest that ever brushed along the white bluffs of Et-Tih, and lifted the clouds of grey sand from its base to deposit them on the steeps of Jebel-Wutah, or amid the slag-debris and scoria of Surâbit. The Desert is no mere sand-field, or series of sand-fields. You find sand in abundance certainly, on the hill-slopes, in the beds of the wadys, and in the broad plains that intersperse in all directions their yellow reaches or grey stripes. But there seems to be an immense amount of stone and rock overspreading the land, extending for miles between the hills, and in some places hiding

for maintaining the thin-strewn dusky shrubs which so timidly sprinkle its wadys. It has its rainy seasons, during which the clouds pour down a deluge; but there is no such regular supply of water as to tell even upon its lowest hollows or most sheltered plains, save in the way of scooping out water-courses, or tearing up tamarisks, or cutting away the half gravelly, half sandy soil, into what the Bedouin call Jurfs, or abrading the more impressible parts of the sandstone steeps, or still more rarely helping (along with local springs, sometimes hot, sometimes cold) to rear up an oasis of palms and tarfas, such as that of Feiran, hard by Mount Serbal, whose praises so many travellers have sung, and as many more likely to sing again. For, by all accounts, it is quite a gem of desert-verdure,

*Robinson, vol. i., p. 66. the Bible," vol. i., p.

Wilson's "Lands of

these,— "I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah-tree, the myrtle, and the

-a genuine "Palmyra," though without a | and dingy as that may be. There are few city and without a queen. The rain meant parts where the Bedouin may not find for Egypt seems to be swept aside from shrubs sufficient, in quantity and size, to that level region by the stormy west wind; feed his camel for a night. In some places, and attracted by the mountains of the Penin- no doubt, the region is so absolutely waste, sula, it turns aside and pours itself down in that he has to carry provision for his camel water-spouts upon the Sinaitic wastes. But as well as for himself, and he produces at it comes in such rushes that it brings night his bag of beans, as the drayman or no blessing to the soil, and is so unequally cabman of our streets does his bag of oats distributed, as to time, that even the spring for his horse upon a journey; but this is gets no refreshment from the winter floods, rather infrequent; generally he finds a sufnay, hardly can remember that they have ficiency of desert-herbage for his camel, and been. If the traveller is bold enough to here and there (in some moister place) somepenetrate the Peninsula during the summer thing less coarse for a small flock of sheep months,--from April on to August or Septem- or goats. Musing over such passages as ber, he may with certainty count upon rainless skies; and he may pitch his tent anywhere, even in the low bed of the torrent; nor oil-tree; I will set in the desert the firwill he find a drier or safer place of encamp- tree, and the pine, and the box-tree together," ment than any one of the hundred tarfa-groves the traveller wonders at the marvellous picthat cover the bed of el-Arish, from the spot ture thus sketched in the unfailing word, where it leaves the slopes of Et-Tih, to the and asks, "Has this ever been ?" "When place where it spreads itself out over the is all this to be ?" Totally unlike to so fair sands of Rhinocolura. But if he is bent on a portrait do the terrific features of the a winter-tour, or travels even so early as Desert at present seem. What forest does January or February, he must be on the he see anywhere here, or what stream to outlook, not for showers merely, but for water even the stray tree that might be floods. He dare not choose for his encamp- planted? Is it conceivable that the savage ment that sandy hollow where the tarfa and ruggedness of El-Amârah can smile with the rittem are so invitingly waving; for verdure, or the wild but barren bends of though it should be in Wady Taiy beh, "the Esh Sheikh throw up the cedar or the myrgood," or in Wady el-Markhâh, the "valley tle? But there are some spots where not of rest," he will find himself reckoning with- only the shrub struggles up out of the sand, out his host. If the wind shift to the west but where trees show themselves, some of during the night, bright as the sunset might low stature, some of considerable size. be over the blue of Bahr Suweis, or above There is the tamarisk or tarfa, with its thin the brow of Abû Deraj beyond, he may wiry foliage; the wide-branching acacia or find himself, tents, turbans, baggage, pro- seyaleh, which is the shittim-wood of Scripvisions, camels, fowls, and all, hurrying ture, and the tree from which gum-arabic down a swollen river, which, ere the next exudes; the rittem or broom, under the evening's shadows have come down upon shade of which, in the wilderness of Beerthese sands, will have passed into the sea, sheba, Elijah sat down in his desponding or wholly vanished in the thirsty porous weariness; there is the fruitful nubk, which, ground, leaving no trace of its exuberant with its tiny apples, feeds the dwellers in flow save a few pools in the deeper hollows, some richer wady till the date appears; or a few drops in a hole of yon flat stone, which the thirsty Arab or his camel stoops to drink up.

then there is the palm-tree, with its shaggy stem in Ghurundel, or its well-pruned tapering stem in Feirân, towering above all the rest, and casting the shadow of its feathery crown, in sunshine or moonlight, upon the passive sand. So scanty, however, is this forest-verdure, that it can hardly be said to relieve the brown or yellow sterility of these cheerless wastes.

Our travellers tell us, too, that the Desert is not so absolutely bare and verdureless as we sometimes imagine. One traveller, indeed, speaks of a thin clothing of vegetation, which is seldom withdrawn from the hill-sides and valleys; but the others do not concur in this, and while not refusing to do Besides, everything like grass seems be justice to its excellences, think that a "thin awanting. No carpet of green anywhere sprinkling" of vegetation would be nearer spreads itself under foot, or clothes the rugthe truth than a "thin clothing." For cer- ged steeps. Even in some bright oasis, tainly it would seem that, according to our where the palm-shadows cool the ground, northern notions at least, the Desert may and the air seems more genial, and the birds well be called unclothed, if not totally bare. are singing, there is no verdure on the Yet it has verdure of its own-fitful, coarse, ground, and even the commonest weeds are

awanting. The soil will support nothing! tall cone of the Zodiacal light to tell where which cannot strike its roots at least some the sun had been. What a blank in the six inches into it. There is nothing beneath beauty of the fairest day is this absence of your feet but the monotony of the endless twilight-the time when it is neither day nor sand, whose colour, unlike the "universal night, but something more grateful than green," fatigues, instead of refreshing the either!

eye. The oasis is adorned, but not clothed. Seldom do these travellers speak of seeBut whatever one misses in the earth being the face of man in their journeyings, and neath you, you miss nothing in the heavens when they do see him, they think there is above you. The greenness of earth is awant- something worthy to be noted. A tree and ing, but the blue of the heavens has become a man are rare in these strange regions. No brighter and purer. The varied twinkle of one traversing the Hartz Forest would note flowers under your feet is gone; but the or count the trees; nor, in passing down sparkle of the orbs overhead has doubled its Cheapside, would make note of the men he lustre. The flowers have folded up their saw; but in the Desert the traveller notes blossoms, and hid them from the hot air both as marvels, and talks of them with beneath the sands; but the stars have un- interest at the close of a weary journey. folded theirs all the more freely, as if the Just once, perhaps, in two or three days, he desert sky, with its arch of matchless azure, meets a caravan on its way from Sinai to were the soil in which they can best give Cairo, or from Cairo to Sinai; or perhaps, forth their brilliancy. The north star has still more seldom, he may meet a solitary come down low in the heavens, and you feel messenger, or come upon the black camelthat another two hundred miles to the south hair tent under which a family of Bedouin would make it drop out of sight, or only is sheltering itself from wind, or sun, or rain. glimmer on the horizon; but other stars are Little enough of man, and still less of woascending in the opposite horizon, and you man, is to be met with in these sands. feel that you gain as much as you lose by your southern latitude. Yet the brightness of sun, and moon, and stars, cannot make up for the want of other things. You miss the wreaths of village smoke, rising from a hundred homes; for which the wild blaze of Bedouin fires, flinging up their gleam upon the rocks, is no equivalent. You miss the lark's song, the streamlet's murmur, the whisper of the woods; for which the scream of the eagle, and the torrent's rush, and the shrill echo of the cliff, are no compensation. You miss the mighty masses of cloud that give such splendour to our sunsets; and for which the round red blaze of an Arabian sun, dropping down like a fiery globe, is no equivalent.

No village, no town of living men, does he light upon. The ruins in some of the northern wadys, such as Ruhaibeh and Serâm, remind him that there had been once cities here; and those in Feirân speak of the six thousand monks that once had their abode in the convent or the mountain-cell of that more southern wady. But, save in the convents of Wady esh-Shueib, at the foot of Jabel Mûsa, or the khâns at Nukhl or Akabah, on the line of the Haj road, he sees no abodes of congregated men. But what he does not see of the living, he does see of the dead. In life the Bedouin wander; in death they come together, and are thus "gathered to their fathers" in the spots which, for ages beyond tradition, have been the tribal ceinIn the Sinaitic latitudes, the length of day eteries. Traversing the more inland parts varies but little throughout the seasons. A of the Desert, he sees not unfrequently little before six, when the sky is still darkly groups of stones, perhaps a foot high, which blue, a faint whitish glow steals up the east, in the distance might be mistaken for wayand then strikes across to the west in pale, marks, or the mysterious circles of olden silky purple, while the zenith remains un- worship; but as he comes near, he sees that touched in its star-studded blue. This is the the stones are generally arranged in coupsignal that the night is done, and that the lets a few feet asunder. The stones are sun is coming up. In less than half an hour unhewn and uncarved, without a name, a every mountain has taken on the golden date, or line-fragments of debris from the radiance. The living glory slowly creeps down the cliffs, every five minutes altering the hue of the mountain-sides, which had hitherto remained a mass of shade, till it reaches the mountain-base, and shoots across the brightening sand. It is day morning is at an end. So at sunset. Swiftly the sun drops down from the flaming firmament, and in half an hour all is night,-with only the

neighbouring cliff, inserted sufficiently in the sand to keep them erect. No church, no mosque, no minaret, no enclosing wall! But Moslems do not bury in or beside mosques. Here and there a saint's wely is built for and used as a mosque; for Mohammedanism, as well as Popery, ascribes sanctity, if not to dead men's bones, at least to dead men's tombs. Generally, however,

Eastern grave-yards are at a distance both down exhausted. No one throws a shovelful from city and mosque. These Bedouin of sand upon him; ere his eye is closed, and tombs are, by all accounts, strangely, sadly life is gone, the vulture is there, screaming attractive to the passer-by from their rude- and tearing, till, in a few hours, only his ness and loneliness. Here and there the bones remain-in a few weeks or months Arab has planted the green-leaved, white- to be buried in the sweeping sand-drift. blossomed rittem, the slenderest and most graceful of his native shrubs. And this he has chosen for affection's memorial. There it stands, in its ever-green beauty, braving the desert-sun, or courting the desert-breeze, above the quiet dust of centuries, at once the indication of Desert poverty, and the unobtrusive expression of Desert love.

feast, and sacrifice. There is the convent of St. Katharin, at the foot of Jebel Mûsa, where miracles are recorded, and the places shown where they took place,-the very indentation made by the body of Moses on the rock, the very cypress tree planted by Elijah.

In the Desert, too, the traveller finds strange traditions, old and new, Mohammedan and Christian-traditions of love, cruelty, superstition, miracle,-though none of daring deeds,-true deeds for moulding a nation's character, such as fasten their stories to the rocks of home. There is Jebel elBanat, the "Hill of the Maidens," where A less attractive sight, the traveller tells two Arab sisters, " long, long ago," in the us, are the remains, not of the dead, but of madness of disappointed love, twisted their the living. Wearied with a long day's locks together, and flung themselves from the sultry march, during which his only shelter double peak into the rocky ravines below. from the heat has been his white umbrella, There is the grave of Sheikh Amri in the for which he paid dear enough at Cairo, he northern region, between Hufîr and Nehecomes up, about sunset, to some bright sandy yeh, where, beneath a rude cairn, lie the level, such as El-Markhâh, which, shaded bones of a chieftain famed only for the blood from sun and wind, looks out upon the Red he shed and the cruelties he inflicted-blood Sea in its blue stillness, or to some quiet and cruelty which still bring down on his nook, as Wady Esh-Sheikh affords, looking remains the hot curses of each passing son up to the not distant Sinaitic cliffs,-he of the Desert. There is the chapel-tomb of finds the ground covered with the filthy Sheikh Saleh, in the valley which still bears. relics of a Bedouin encampment which had his title, if not his name. Here, once a yesterday or last week quitted the spot,-year, the Desert tribes assemble to comhalf-burnt shrubs, blackened stones, embers memorate his birth or death, with game, and of extinct fires, torn sandals, shreds of old garments, fragments of rope, bones of animals, with numerous indentations in all directions, where men and camels had been lying. Or, approaching some wide-branching seyâleh tree, he is surprised to find its branches covered with rags of every hue and shape, like the mast of a ship on some galaday. Have the rags been drifted in upon quently noted by travellers.* There is no the breeze, or has a torrent passed this way silence so profound anywhere, either by day and deposited its floating spoil upon the or night. The little lizards, shooting like arresting branches? No. They are votive arrows from bush to bush, or from rock to offerings of Moslem pilgrims or the Bed- rock, are wholly noiseless; the black ants, ouin, hanging there as propitiatory gifts or burrowing every where in the sand, are unthanksgiving memorials; the seyaleh or heard; the light foot of the gazellah amid acacia being the only tree on which these the crags sounds not, save when he dashes memorials are found, as if it alone were down some stone into the valley below. sacred. Or he notices in the distance curi- Even the wind, as it takes its way over ous objects on the sand, which look like the sands, moves along in silence (as through baskets of wicker-work, white as snow. On some Æolian harp that has lost its strings), each side of the road between Cairo and having no outstanding object to break the Suez, traversed annually by so many thou- smoothness of its course and draw out the sands of beasts of burden; or in that region sounds, save when it rouses itself into temof the Desert where Abbas Pasha built his pest. All is silence,-silence even at noon palace, on the very peak of the mountain-silence especially in moonshine or starthat adjoins Sinai, these strange basket-like light-silence, whose profoundness, when objects appear every mile or two. He goes long continued, ceases to be soothing or up to them, and finds that they are the solemn, and becomes absolutely painful, if skeletons of camels which the vulture has not appalling, oppressing the spirit with an picked clean, and which sun and rain have indescribable sense of dreary desolation. bleached to the whiteness of ivory; for the camel is left to die on the spot when he falls

The silence of the Desert has been fre

*Stanley, pp. 14, 65.