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VAN COURT'S

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

TRAVELLING IN THE DESERT.*

haze of an Egyptian atmosphere.

THE author having arrived at Cairo, the fainter, till we lost them in the red and dusky general rendezvous, and properly equipped himself for the journey, says:

At length, every thing being ready, the camels blockading the door, and the usual clamor of the Arabs filling the street, I left the hotel to pay one or two farewell visits, and joined my little caravan in the cemetery outside the Bab-en-Nusr, or Gate of Victory, where the splendid domes of the tombs of the Memlook sultans-the perfection of Arabian architecture-rise like an exhalation from the lonely waste. By unusually good management the camels, often reloaded here, were already provided with their respective burdens, and I had nothing to do but to start. It was so much earlier than I had expected to be ready, that no one was found to give me a parting convoy; and I stood in the dead, oppressive heat of noon, alone, on the verge of the Desert. The hot film trembled over the far-fetched and apparently boundless sands; and though I had looked forward with delight to the time of setting off, the journey now for the first time seemed formidable; and with not even a friendly shake of the hand, or a parting God-b'w'ye-within a stone's throw too of the grave of poor Burkhardt, I could not repress a feeling of melancholy. but the Arabs cut this short, by suddenly leaping up out of the shade of a ruined tomb, and mechanically bringing forward my dromedary, over whose wooden packsaddle, mattress, carpets, and saddlebags were spread, so as to make a broad and comfortable seat; the growling animal was forced upon its knees; and leaping on, and holding firm by the pegs of the saddle as he suddenly rose upon his hind legs, I achieved (more fortunate than some others) my first ascent without pitching head foremost upon the sands, which I accounted a good omen: the others were ready, and we paced off on our noiseless track over the broad expanse, as a vessel spreads its sails and slips quietly out to sea; while the minarets of Cairo grew fainter and

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A singular and half-dreamy sensation is that of first riding a camel, the very opposite to that quickening of the pulse which comes to us on horseback. Your seat, on a broad pile of carpets, is so easy and indolent, the pace of the animal so equal and quiet,-instead of the noisy clatter of hoofs, you scarcely hear the measured and monotonous impress of the soft broad foot on the yielding sand,the air fans you so lazily as you move along; from your lofty post your view over the Desert is so widely extended, the quiet is so intense, that you fall by degrees into a state of pleasurable reverie, mingling early ideas of the East with their almost fanciful realization. And thus the hours pass away till a sense of physical uneasiness begins to predominate, and at length becomes absorbing. It now appears that the chief and only art in camel-riding lies in the nice poising and management of the vertebral column, which seems to refuse its office, though you sustain its failing functions by a desperate tightening of your belt. To sit quite upright for a length of time is difficult on account of your extended legs: you throw your weight alternately to the right or left, lean dangerously forward on the pummel, sit sideways, or lounge desperately backwards, all in vain. To lose your sense of weariness you seek to urge the animal to a trot; but a few such experiments suffice; fatigue is better than downright dislocation; and you resign yourself perforce to the horrible see-saw and provoking tranquillity of your weary pace, till the sun's decline enables you to descend and walk over the shining gravel. With this it will be plain that no one makes his first day's journey in the Desert a long one, and we joyfully encamped for the night in a Wady,* a little beyond the first station of the Transit Company.

October 1. Off again before sunrise. I am

* Wady signifies valley, or a watercourse. †These occur at about every ten miles, the central one being furnished as a temporary hotel, with tanks of water, formed at a great expense. 199

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receive their loads, then one by one jump up| and assume that monotonous pace and placid expression, which they never vary through the long and weary day, unless again forced to kneel down. The sun is not yet up, though there is a glorious radiance through the vast opal concave of the sky; and it is for some time delightful to walk over the fine shining gravel-surface of the silent Desert, my cheerful Komeh by my side, with his pipe, and the Arabs in straggling groups coming up slowly behind.

With the twilight fal's the grateful dew, and comes on the refreshing breeze, cooling the heated surface of the wilderness, and restoring the languid frame of the traveller. Wander but a few paces from the encampment, and listen in the profound of the solitude to the low and melancholy sugh of the night wind, which sweeps the light surface of the sand, aud drifts it against the canvass wall of the tent; that breeze, laden with the voice of ages, which traverses the old historic desert, and has waved the long grass and But as the sun rose higher and higher into stirred the slumbering waters of the ancient the cloudless sky, and the blanched surface fountains where the patriarchs encamped of the Desert giared under his fiery beams, with their flocks. There is a rapture in and the reflection from the glittering and pacing alone with such fancies among the heated waste dazzled the eye and seemed to drifted sand-heaps, and listening to that wild pierce to the very brain, it was another mat- music, till night has fallen upon the wilderter. The camels now groan with distress; ness, over which millions of stars, rising up the Arabs are silent, slipping from time to resplendently from the very edge of the vast time alongside the water-skins, and, with horizon, seem quietly brooding. One may their mouths to the orifice, catching a few hear, as it were, the solemn pulsation of the gulps without stopping; then, burying their universe. No wonder that of old the shepheads in the ample bernous, pace on again herds of the Desert were star-worshippers; quietly-hour after hour. The water, which to the uninstructed spiritual impulse, ignosmacks of the leathern bottle, or Zemzemia, rant of the unity of the Great Cause, the in which it is coutained, warm, insipid, and even nauseous, seeins but to increase the parching thirst; the brain is clouded and paralysed by the intolerable sultriness; and, with the eyes protected by a handkerchief from the reflected glare of the sand, and swaying listlessly to and fro, I keep at the same horrible pace along the burning track.

glorious brightness of these radiant orbs must have appeared supernatural; for there are here no works of man to distract the absorbing contemplation of the heavens in their glory; that little patch of earth from which alone lights gleam and a few broken sounds arise, the temporary halting-place, to be given back on the morrow to the mighty waste,

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After our supper, I often went out and joined the Bedoins. They were seated apart, round a large fire, which glared upon their savage, but often noble features, wild dress and accoutrements, and the heads of camels dozing in the grateful warmth, shooting a few rays beyond into the blackness and silence around, presenting a subject that Rembrandt would have revelled in. The Bedoins, in their ordinary habits, and unless excited by any subject of dispute, are as "subdued in manner" as the most fastidious aristocrat might desire. The wide expanse and brooding silence of the outstretched wilderness seem to fall like an influence upon them, moulding their thoughts and actions into conformity with the elements they move in. They are also singularly temperate in their habits; and, as yet, have not acquired a taste for drinking from travellers or recreant Moslems. Not all the wines in the world were to them worth those minute cups of sugarless coffee which made their round, often till late into the night, and the whiff of their broken pipe, which also passed round, accompanying the endless tales, in which Komeh, I found, was no mean proficient; for, besides the marvellous subjects common to the Arabs, he had moreover his stock of foreign travel to Mecca, and into Abyss nia, and elsewhere, upon which to draw for startling adventures. At length, wrapped in their scanty cloaks, these children of the Desert, and even their camels, sleep, as the proverb has it, with one eye open, in a circle built of packsaddles and gear; the camel, it is said, uttering a peculiar suppressed sound at the approach of any thing suspicious. Such is the ordinary routine of the day and night in the wilderness; and with good health and spirits, it is for a while delightful.

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We halted a moment to give our camels a little brakish water at the Well of Suez; and as we proceeded towards the town, encountered a file of these old-fashioned carriers, laden as described, who may find, some of these days, their occupation gone, by the construction of a railroad, or the revival at least of the canal of the old Egyptian kings. Next issued forth several of the light vans in which the passengers are conveyed to Cairo, their Arab drivers furiously cracking their whips, and urging along the slight but sinewy horses at top speed over the grave'. From beneath the awnings which shaded these carriages peeped forth faces, from which, for the most part, all trace of the rose of Eng

land had forever vanished; pale women, with sickly children, tended by dusky Indian ayahs; bronzed and sinewy-looking men too, negligent in costume, and indifferent in look, but with all that calm hauteur which cleaves to the masters of the world, some of whom, indeed, appeared to be seasoned to the climate; while others, stricken by its fatal influence, seemed hurrying home but to die, or drag out the remainder of a life robbed of that elasticity of nerves and spirits which alone can render it desirable; with whom to reach once more the chalk cliffs of England, and to breathe again the air of her green fields, is the one absorbing feeling.

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After a brief survey of Suez, and loitering an hour or two on the sands, together with dining under the shade of my tent, I set off towards evening to go across the gulph, walking slowly round the shore in advance of the camels. Leaving the mounds of the ancient canal far to the left, we struck directly across to the other side, the tide then being out.

The sun had set long before we cleared the sea-beat sands, and reached the plain beyond, on the Asian side of the gulf. There was a wild and most thrilling excitement to me in this passage: the sun set beyond the long dark mass of Mount Attaka-the "Mount of Deliverance"-shooting its fiery rays through a mass of lurid clouds; a strong wind set up the gulf; the distant roar of the sea was on our right; the time, the place, the darkness, the knowledge that either here, or not far hence, is supposed to have occurred so stupendous a manifestation of divine power, affected the imagination with peculiar force: the tempestuous wind; the division of the agitated waves; the defiling of the trembling Israelites through the awful pass; the confusion and terror of the host; the sublime confidence of the leaders; the grandeur of the terrible catastrophe, were pictured to the soul as they never could have been elsewhere than on these memorable sands. We halted and pitched our tent by star-light on the first rise of the Arabian peninsula, and, with Suez and the stations behind us, felt that we had done with civilization for a while to come.

The Desert, upon which we were now entering, has most probably remained unchanged, save by the slow processes of nature, ever since the remote era of those marvellous events which have stamped its barren sands with so lasting an interest; no spiritstirring movements have disturbed its loneliness; the march of armies, and the shock of conflict, may have been faintly heard on its borders, but the wild Bedouin has retained for ages undisputed possession of its inner

solitudes, and wandered through them entirely unmolested by other races of men, and unnoticed, unless, when impelled by curiosity, or, peradventure, by holy zeal, an occasional traveller has now and then solicited his guidance through its weary defiles to the localities sanctified by the miracles of his faith. On the threshold of this theatre of wonders a few remarks suggest themselves, derived from personal observation and from the testimony of others. Some of those who admit the truth of the Biblical history of the Exodus, have often, while retaining the miracles, appeared anxious, as I think uselessly, to give them a rational interpreta tion; as though the only difficulties were those connected with the admission of the isolated prodigies, which occur as exceptions in the course of the narrative. This is especially the case with writers at a distance from the actual scene; and thus it occurs that in popular histories of the Jews, their gathering on the borders of Egypt, and their march through the wilderness, are, although admitted to be extraordinary and providential circumstances, yet considered as entirely within the pale of natural possibility. The impression on the mind of the visitor to the scene itself is, however, quite different; for when he comes to view with his own eyes this region of desolation, and personally to experience its perils and privations, the mere fact of such a multitude subsisting there for any lengthened period, or even hastily passing through it, as far exceeds the passage of the Red Sea, or any other of the recorded exhibitions of divine power, as a continual miracle must surpass an occasional one. When we picture to ourselves a scattered multitude greater than the population of London, with its usual proportion of women and children, of weakness and superannuation, to have organized it on so short a notice, for any journey, and under the most favorable circumstances, could scarcely have come within the range of mortal power; and, unless the "Wilderness" of the Bible was widely different from the Desert of our day, of which we have not the smallest proof, nothing less than a daily succession of miracles could have enabled them to accomplish it. Could they other-wrought to facilitate the journey of that vast unwise have braved the hot sands of the Desert, or carried the booty collected from their op. pressors, or the necessary stock of food for the two months which elapsed before the first miraculous supply in the Desert of Sin? We read of no camels so employed, although very many thousands must otherwise have been necessary. And what must have been the supply of water required for all this host? If, as now, obtainable only at distant intervals, how soon would most of the present

wells have been exhausted in supplying the first comers! and where were the means of carrying with them enough to suffice until the next was reached? Either the number and volume of these wells and springs must have been miraculously increased, or the power of endurance of thirst on the part of the wanderers.* To any who realizes these difficulties on the spot, the Exodus of the Israelites must appear, from beginning to end, to require a succession of continual miracles, although mention is made of only a few. This merely partial allusion to supernatural interposition made in the sacred history, is a difficulty, doubtless, more frequently felt than empressed by those travellers who uphold its divine inspiration; while to an opposite class, this apparent contradiction, or more properly omission, may, perhaps, tend to give it, apart from other difficulties, the character of a mere legendary narrative, founded on some slender basis of a fact, now difficult to trace. But if the confiding Christian will admit any hypothesis rather than this, and will recoil from the idea of rejecting that which is given because more is not given, the mere student of history will admit that all the information which has been of late years so abundantly derived from Egyptian monuments, proves that the author of the Pentateuch was learned in all the wisdom of that nation, and that no more plausible theory has ever, as yet, been suggested, to explain the admitted forcible seizure and possession of Palestine, by the children of Israel, than such an Exodus as is there detailed.

*

*

*

October 4. We broke up at an early hour from our encampment near the sea, and proceeding along the irregular sandy plain reached Ayun Musa, "the Wells of Moses,"+ about nine o'clock. Since leaving the green Nile we had seen nothing 20 refreshing as this little oasis; and yet it consisted but in a few patches of wild palm-trees and bushes,

*I am filled with wonder that so many travellers

should task their ingenuity to get clear of the mira-
cles, which, according to the narrative of Moses, were
wieldly host, when it is demonstrable that they could
not have subsisted three days in this desert without
supernatural resources."-Rev. E. Olin, Travels, &c.
"How, in these wild deserts, this host of more than
two millions of souls, having no traffic or intercourse
with the surrounding hordes, could find supplies of
food and water sufficient for their support, without a
constant miracle, I, for one, am unable to divine. Yet
among them we read only of occasional longings and
complaints; while the tribes that now roam over the
thousands, are exposed to famine and privations of
same regions, although numbering scarcely as many
every kind; and, at the best, obtain only a meagre
and precarions subsistence."-Rev. E. Robinson's Bib.

lical Researches.

† See engraving, page 198.

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