'I am thinking of the first Abiagil, who rode out on her ass to meet King David among the palm-trees, with the loaves and the bunches of raisins; but she was in terror of her life; and bound for the captivation of her second husband, was not that it? My wife, the simpleton, made a present of all she had, like the widow's mite, to a ten years old husband, whom she is not soon to get rid of. We will want your poor little fortune yet, never fear, dear. There is the interest to Humphrey - we must and shall pay that, and the education of the ladswe will have no stinting there - eh? Angry because my wife was good and romantic!' Tom was playing all manner of wild pranks; the fever might have returned and gone to his brain, stroking the bronze hair, even the flag of an apron, blessing his wife. sent in a pair of spring chickens with asparagus, and a cut of salmon and oysters for the occasion. And I am going home to get my best cap: yes, Abigail, it is a great occasion, the celebration of your dear husband's recovery-twenty times greater than a christening dinner. By the by, Abigail, I passed Jack on the way, and he ran up and whispered to me that he was dux again. Mamma knew, but it was a secret not to be told to papa till he was head of his form for a week. What a scholar the boy is going to turn out! I told him I was proud of him, and gave him a sixpence on the spot. You need not laugh and shake your head, Abigail,-you have two very fine boys, and they have grown quite manly since their papa's illness.' 'I hope, mamma, their manliness will last, and help to keep their hands clean, and their jackets whole (though I sadly fear it will have the opposite result), and that it will progress till they take wives to themselves and daughters to me, and save further responsibility in their training.' me Yet Abigail felt a spasm of disappointment and a little sense of failure. She was an unworldly enthusiastic woman. Ten years and more before, the moral back-bone of her innocent, happy, hopeful, girlish nature sustained a horrible injury, and although it had been set with splints very 'Time enough, girl; you will not like to soon perhaps too soon afterwards -it see the day when other women come behad never recovered its vitality and elasti- tween you and your boys; the thought of city until Tom Prior's illness and Tom Prior's that always reconciled me to my only child wife's knowledge of his silent, self-ignoring being a daughter. But dear! dear! Jack cares and toils. To bring back Abigail, and Joe's marriages are a long look forward, like Eurydice, from the brink of Hades, Tom and in the meantime you are well off with had to play Orpheus and go down himself, your boys and your husband restored to without grudging, among the shades. And you. And as to another ten years, though it was the sound of Tom's footsteps in her I may not live to see it, there will be plenlife which Abigail dreaded to lose if there ty of women to envy you. Three gentlewere no change in her habits- -no obliga- men to wait on one lady, and two of them tion on her to do her duty. To be no poor- fine, strapping, smart young fellows, as I er, but with the prospect of becoming gra- know my grandsons will be. What a cheerdually richer, yet never so rich as to compass ful house they will keep for you! how much change of scene, travel, intellectual and they will make of you! Why, Abigail, if cultivated society like the Binghams - Abi- you don't take care you will be as full of hugail dreaded the old humdrum, moping, sick-mours as an heiress with a score of suitors.' ly feeling would steal over her again and she would not have the strength to resist it. Abigail was still struggling with the sense of discouragement and with the conviction that she was an ungrateful woman, next day, after Tom had gone to the Factory, when she was roused by her mother nodding joyously to her as she rang the door bell. My dear, I cannot stop a moment; I met Mr. Prior at the end of the street looking so much improved since Wednesday; but I took the precaution of hoping he was able to go back and forwards and eat a good dinner after it. "Come and see, grandmamma; we have not dined together since I was on beef tea, and now I eat beef like a grazier, and trot on my beat like a postman." Of course I am delighted to come; I only looked in to tell you I had Abigail laughed at her merry old mother, but the light words penetrated to her heart. She was well off-she knew it now; she would not change grey Tom and the rough boys for all the florid Humphrey Binghams and caressing girls in the world. It was fitter, too, that Tom should go on and win the battle for himself, having the credit and the reward, and only giving Abigail her share. It was far kinder to Humphrey, to let him be generous to his old friend, and retain the consciousness as a cool green spot in the blaze of unmingled prosperity, which is apt to scorch and harden God's garden of man's soul, till it is an arid wilderness. For her she had found that He maketh Him families like a flock. He maketh the barren woman to keep house and to be a joyful mother of children.' LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.—NO. 1133.-17 FEBRUARY, 1866. From the British Quarterly Review. form the base, about 130 miles long, of a THE PENINSULA OF SINAI; NOTES OF scalene triangle, the Suez Gulf forming the TRAVEL THEREIN. THESE notes of our journey through the Peninsula of Sinai will be better understood by a brief preliminary indication of its general features. longest side. North of the line so drawn, the desert extends to the Mediterranean Sea; westward to the Pelusiac branch of the Nile; and eastward as far as the Persian Gulf; wrapping itself round the mountainous slip of Palestine, this same desert waste stretches away to the north nearly to the Black Sea; and to the north-east as far as Bagdad, Mosul, and the Armenian mountains. ites 3,000 years ago. This desert plateau, Among the most remarkable of the physical phenomona of our globe are the vast wastes upon its surface, its extensive tracts of water, steppes, wilderness, desert, and mountain, not only unreclaimed for The centre of the Peninsula itself consists habitable uses, but for the most part unre- of an elevated plateau or table land — the claimable. These are in perfect harmony well-known et-Tih, or desert of the Wanwith the grand economy of nature, -where- derings'- -a name traditionally derived, by the balance of natural forces is preserved, probably, from the wanderings of the Israeland the fruitfulness, beauty, and utility of the earth, as a whole, are maintained, but in themselves these are very remarkable. A reference to the map will show that the desert region of which the Peninsula of Sinai forms a part, extends from Cape Blanco on the north-west coast of Africa, to beyond the Indus in Central Asia; - a distance of 5,600 miles a 'vast sea of sand,' as Herodotus calls it;-a desert belt of varying depth, beginning with the Great Sahara, which stretches right across Northern Africa, and is separated from the desert of Suez only by the narrow valley of the Nile. That again is separated by the Gulf of Suez from the broad plateau of Arabia, and the desert of Syria, which extend as far as the Persian Gulf and the rivers of Mesopotamia. Then come the vast wastes of Persia, as far as the Indus, beyond which is the desert of Mool tan; This This plateau is thrust like a tongue into the peninsula; its boundary is an almost perpendicular mountain wall, averaging between 3,000 and 4,000 feet in height, and extending from nearly opposite Suez to 'Akabah. On the Suez side it runs parallel with the sea for about sixty miles, at a distance of about fifteen miles from the margin of the latter; then it trends away to the east in a rough kind of semicircle, making way for the highland district of Sinai, - the vast mountain ranges of the Tûr. Mountain ranges, property so called, vary in height and outline; but this huge wall, which is simply the precipitous termination of the desert plateau, is nearly uniform in its level; it varies only with the undulating surface of the desert. The mountains of Moab, on the east of the Jordan, form a similar mountain wall, seen from every part of Palestine. As the traveller to Sinai leaves Suez, he traverses the low belt of desert between the plateau and the sea, having the latter on his right hand at an average distance of four or five miles; and on his left this magnificent THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1471. wall of limestone, with its magical colours varying with the course of the sun and the condition of the atmosphere, from the dull grey of the morning to the brilliant white of mid-day, and the dolphin hues of evening. Thus far the range is called Jebel erRahah, or mountain of rest;'- a name singularly corresponding with that of the opposite headland on the Egyptian side-the Jebel 'Atâkah, or mountain of deliverance.' Approaching the plateau from Sinai, on the south, it still towers and glitters from every point of elevation - a magnificent and precipitous, almost a perpendicular fortification, to be scaled by only one or two passes. This part of the wall of the plateau bears the same name as the desert- - the Jebel et-Tih, or mountain of wandering.' Along the base of it, from 'Akabah nearly to the Gulf of Suez - a distance of perhaps seventy or eighty miles - lies a broad belt of sand, dividing the desert plateau from the mountains of Sinai. This plain of sand is called the Debbit-er-Ramleĥ,' or 'sandy plain,' to indicate its peculiar character. It is almost the only sandy district of that part of Arabia. In the greater part of it the sand is deep, and fatiguing to traverse. We were about four hours in crossing it. It is a popular misconception that the surface of the desert is sand. Save the Debbit-er-Ramleh,' and a little in the Wâdy Ghurundel, probably brought from the former by easterly winds, we encounterd no sand. The general surface of the desert is hard and gravelly; it consists of broad rolling plains, broken by limestone rocks and mountain ranges upheaved therefrom, which, worn by centuries of storm and heat, are of ten very fantastic in their forms. I do not remember any spot in our path across the great desert whence several of these low mountain ranges cannot be seen. Deep fissures, also, occur in the desert; it is a land of deserts and of pits, as well as a land of drought, and of the shadow of death; a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt.' Some of these pits are singularly formed, and are very extensive; they resemble a series of vast chalk pits. Others are simple crevasses, and form natural receptacles for water, of which they furnish a permanent and precious supply. In one extensive system of fissures, just on the edge of the desert plateau, we had a !refreshing bath. whence the adjective Towâra, as applied to the Arabs of the district. This is a highland region of great magnificence and intricacy, rising to a maximum height of 9,300 feet. On the north-west, the mountains are limestone and sandstone; Mount Serbâl, and the mountains south of it are red and grey granite. This ganglion of mountains again is surrounded by a coast margin of level gravelly ground, called El-Ka'a, the plain,' except at the extreme southern point, where the mountain mass projects a tongue of granite into the sea; and on the east, where, towards 'Akabah, it terminates in cliffs overhanging the sea. This cluster of mountains, of which Sinai is nearly the centre, is intersected by deep tortuous valleys, and by narrow and rugged passes. Its three principal peaks are Serbâl (6,759 feet) on the north-west; St. Katherine (8,705 feet) in the centre; and Um Shōmer (9,300 feet) in the south-east. The Sinai mountains can scarcely be said to form a system. There are no regular ranges, as in the Alps, or in the Highlands of Scotland: all is intricate, tumultuous confusion, as if a vast molten explosion had suddenly congealed in the upper air. 'It is,' says Sir Frederick Henniker,* as if Arabia Petræa were an ocean of lava, which, whilst its waves were running mountains high, had suddenly stood still." Unlike other mountainous countries, the district of Sinai is utterly barren and desolate. The Alps and the Highlands are clothed with pine forests, and their intersecting valleys are carpeted with greenest grass: but no tree grows upon the granite sides of Sinai; no verdure of any kind relieves their desolateness. A few odoriferous herbs, and here and there a stunted, shrub, are found in their recesses; but neither tree nor grass, nor any green herb, appears to the eye: the valleys are simply torrent beds, wreathed with drifts of sand, and strewed with huge boulders, through which, for a few days in the year, the deluge of rain, falling upon the mountains, rushes with a depth and a force that are irresistible and almost incredible. mountains are Alps without verdure; the valleys are rivers without water. There are but few of the springs that commonly abound in mountain regions, and give rise to great rivers. Hence the desolation Separated from the great plateau by the of Sinai. In Wâdy Feirân, where there is Debbit-er-Ramleh is the grand tumultuous a spring of water tolerably affluent, there mountain system of Sinai, the mountains is a luxuriant vegetation. But what the of Tûr, as they are collectively called, Tûr scenery of Sinai lacks in verdure is almost being the Arabic word for mountain; * Quoted by Stanley, Sinai and Palestine,' p. 12. The compensated by the gorgeous colours of its mountains. It is almost impossible to conceive, and it is difficult to exaggerate, the magnificence and variety of colouring, in both the limestone and sandstone mountains of the north, and the granite mountains of the south. The sandstone deepens into the rich glowing red which gives its name to the similar formation of Edom; and where it is not a gorgeous green, the granite vies with it, and in the ever-changing light they present infinite varieties of tint and combination. The same effect is never produced twice. Nothing can be more magical than these effects of colouring. We shall often be constrained to speak of them in their local peculiarities. They far surpass the wondrous hues with which the setting sun suffuses the Aiguille Rouge, while the mystic shadows are climbing, and just before they enwrap the summit of the 'great white throne:' they are more gorgeous even than the marvellous after-glow' which we so often saw in Egypt. The lack of geographical magnitude in the Peninsula of Sinai is more than compensated by its geographical position, and its unique associations. In the old world, its position was at the junction of the two great continents of civilization, and closely adjacent to the cradles of the world's chief religions. Indeed, each religion in its turn seems to have regarded Sinai as its holy place. There are reasons for thinking that before the time of Moses Serbâl was a shrine of Egyptian pilgrimage. To the Jew it was associated with the most awful and sacred events of his religious history. The footmark of Mahomet's camel upon Jebel Mousa is still pointed out, as a tradition of the prophet's association with it; while it has ever been a chief resort of Christian Eremites. And yet the moral influence of these traditions is so utterly lost, that, perhaps, no people upon the face of the earth are more destitute of all that constitutes a religion than the Towâra Arabs. But although Sinai has always lain, and still lies, beside the gateway of nations, it has never been their path. No city has ever stood within its boundaries. No port has ever given commercial life to its shores. Migratory Bedouins, scattered hermits, and passing pilgrims have, from the days of the Amalekites, been its only inhabitants; the little ecclesiastical city of Paran being scarcely an exception, inasmuch as it was only, for a while, a larger aggregate of pilgrims and hermits. The entire history of the Peninsula is restricted to the eighteen months during which the Israelites sojourned in it. It has formed no nation; it has had no government; it has witnessed no events that the historian might record. In all other countries that have won a record in the annals of the world there has been, first, a local history, generally springing out of legend and myth, and recording invasion, conflict, and conquest one nation superseding or intermingling with another, until national character is formed and national history achieved. Not so with the Peninsula of Sinai : it has no aborigines; it is identified with no race; it has no autocthonous history; it owes all its renown to the transfent passage through it of a foreign people, and the remarkable events that befel them therein. Before their advent, we know only, that it was possessed by the wandering descendants of Esau; and since their advent, we know only, that it is possessed by the wandering descendants of Ishmael. Its history is a great darkness, upon which only the. light of the pillar of fire and of the lightnings of Sinai have broken in. But these were so. vivid and Divine, that they have filled the world with their awful glory; and Sinai has become one of the world's most sacred places. With the Jew it divides religious reverence with Jerusalem with the Mahomedan, with Mecca with the Christian, with Bethlehem. There is, perhaps, no place that gathers so many various sanctities, that inspires so much reverent awe, the associations of which are so thrilling, the power of which is so subduing. In part, this probably arises from the fact that its sacred associations have been preserved so inviolate. Its desert barrenness, its mountain ruggedness, have restricted human habitation to the tent of the Bedouin or the cell of the hermit. It has thus been preserved sacred to the associations of the law-giving. In Jerusalem, the hurrying, irreverent foot of generations of crowded city life, interrupted only by the devastations of war and the solitude caused by exile, have almost obliterated the sacred footsteps of Him who once trod its ways. The débris of its ancient buildings lie twenty feet thick beneath its modern streets. Even Gethsemane has been desecrated into a trim and gravelled garden, with gaudy flowers in partitioned beds, and fancy palings around its venerable olives; the whole enclosed by a lofty wall, within which the cottage of the custodian is built, and at the doorway of which you pay for admission; -a place over which irreverent crowds "Those blessed feet Which eighteen hundred years ago were nailed are irreverently shown. The loneliness that | found them at our doors when we rose in sustains hallowed association; the venera- the morning. Our choice fell upon Hassan ble antiquity that no modern touch pro- Ismael, a Nubian, from Assouán. He was fanes, that only hushed and trembling feet about fifty years of age, and black as a approach, are utterly wanting. The coal; but with a shrewd, good-tempered Mount of Olives, again, whose paths re- face, which his character did not belie. He main as when trod by had been a dragoman for upwards of twenty years, and had accumulated considerable property. Although unable to read, he had given his two sons a good education in the school of the American mission, and had himself picked up a considerable amount of is the suburb of a great city, and is daily miscellaneous information from gentlemen trodden by hundreds of thoughtless wayfar- with whom he had travelled. He was tolerers. Not so the valleys and mountains of ably well acquainted with the history of Sinai rarely is it visited and the traveller Egypt, and with the general state of things conscious of other presence beside his own, in Europe. Although a Mussulman, he was save a few monks and servants of the con- liberal in his conceptions. He had a great vent, occasional pilgrims, whose reverence reverence for Isa (Jesus), and even avowis attested by their arduous pilgrimage, and ed his belief, which, he said, he had heard perchance a few Bedouins pasturing their an Imaum avow from the pulpit, that, one flocks. The holy mount has ever been a day, Christianity would be the religion of desert solitude. It has suffered no effacing the world. He was inquisitive after knowlpower of later events, or of a numerous edge, sensible in judgment, and shrewd in population. Like a great cathedral in the observation. You cannot,' said he one day, heart of a city, it has stood sequestered'expect all Arabs to be good; angels is selfrom the world. Its awful peaks are solitary, solemn, and unchanged; they are as Hassan had been strongly recommended when the foot of Jehovah trod them, as to us; and his sensible, business-like way of when the lightnings of Jehovah enwrapped negotiation predisposed us in his favour. them, as when the awful trumpet rever- Fight,' said he, for your bargain, and be berated from summit to summit, and the good friends ever afterwards.' We had no still more awful thunder made them trem-cause to repent our choice. Hassan served ble to their base. Cities change; moun- us faithfully and honorably, and provided tains remain the same. It is, therefore, for us carefully and liberally. Fiery in temwith a feeling of undisturbed and indescribable awe, that the pilgrim first beholds these solemn peaks, and climbs to their summit. It needs but little imagination to make him feel as if the Divine footstep were still upon them, as if the awful voice that the people could not hear any more' were latent in the atmosphere. And yet no solitary ruin remains to help the imagination of the traveller; no record save the mysterious inscriptions here and there upon the rocks which only fanaticism can associate with the law-giving; no monument save the unchanged and silent face of nature, which, in every feature and with startling minuteness, testifies to the local truthfulness of the historian. Such is the district traversed by the writer and his friends in March 1865. The preparations for our journey were made in Cairo, and occupied several days. First, a dragoman had to be chosen out of some six or seven, who gave us no peace until our choice was made. They beset our going out and our coming in; we passed them when we went to our bedrooms at night, and 6 dom. per, rapid and vehement in expression, he Our contract with Hassan was duly executed at the English consulate. In consideration of a fixed sum per diem, he was to conduct us, as we might direct, from Cairo to Sinai, and through the great desert to Palestine and Syria. He was to provide everything necessary for the journey camels, horses, tents, bedding, provisions, and servants. He was to pay all bakhshish, provide local guides where necessary, and whenever we chose to sleep in convents, or stay at hotels, where such were available, he was to pay the bill. Indeed, so far as the necessary expenses of travel were concerned, we needed no money until our contract expired. Hassan's first concern was to covenant with a Sheikh of the Towâra Arabs, through whose district we were to pass. They oc |
