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| Title | Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt, Vol. 2 |
| Creator (LCNAF) |
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| Publisher | D. Appleton and Company |
| Date | 1883 |
| Description | Index: Phoenicia and Lebanon / by the Rev. H. W. Jessup -- The Phoenician plain / by the Rev. Canon Tristram -- Acre, the key of Palestine, Mount Carmel and the river Kishon, Maritime cities and plains of Palestine / by Miss M. E. Rogers -- Lydda and Ramleh, Philistia / By Lt. Col. Warren -- The south country of Judaea / by the Rev. Canon Tristram -- The southern borderland and Dead Sea / by Professor Palmer -- Mount Hor and the cliffs of Edom, The convent of St. Catherine / by Miss M. E. Rogers -- Sinai / by the Rev. C. P. Clarke -- The land of Goshen, Cairo, Memphis, Thebes, Edfu and Philae / by S. Lane-Poole. |
| Subject.Geographic (TGN) |
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| Genre (AAT) |
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| Language | English |
| Type (DCMI) |
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| Original Item Location | DS107 .W73 v.2 |
| Original Item URL | http://library.uh.edu/record=b1703789~S11 |
| Digital Collection | Exotic Impressions: Views of Foreign Lands |
| Digital Collection URL | http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/exotic |
| Repository | Kenneth Franzheim II Rare Books Room, William R. Jenkins Architecture and Art Library, University of Houston Libraries |
| Repository URL | http://info.lib.uh.edu/about/campus-libraries-collections/william-r-jenkins-architecture-art-library |
| Use and Reproduction | No Copyright - United States |
| Identifier | exotic_201304_015 |
| Title | Page 294 |
| Format (IMT) |
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| File Name | exotic_201304_015_318.jpg |
| Transcript | 294 PICTURESQUE PALESTINE. outline of a body could be seen in some of these cists; and this outline, thus traced, as it were in human dust, showed that the body had been buried in the most ancient manner, on its left side, doubled up so that head and knees met. We shall come to other similar circles and to traces of the altars at which the offerings of the dead were • sacrificed and offered, and to the huts and dwellings called nawamis, in which the people lived who buried their dead in such wise. But who were they ? The mode "of burial proves their great antiquity. May they have been the Amalekites, the people who fought Israel at Rephidim ? or may they have been the homes of some still more ancient people ? The change from sandstone to granite as one leaves Jebel Mukatteb and winds alono- Wady Feiran is very striking. " Even," says Dean Stanley, "to the most uneducated eye the colours tell their own story of chalk and limestone and sandstone and granite, and these portentous appearances " (the mountains streaked from head to foot as if with boiling streams of dark red matter poured over them, the vast heaps of seemingly calcined mountains, the detritus of iron in the sandstone formation, the traces of igneous action on the granite rocks dating from their first upheaval) " are exactly such as give the impression that you are indeed travelling in the very focus of creative power. I have looked on scenery as strange and on scenery more grand, but on scenery at once so strange and so grand I never have looked, and probably never shall again." In Wady Feiran, there can hardly be a doubt, with the reports of the Ordnance Survey and the opinions of its able conductors lying before us, that we are again on the track of the main body of the Israelites. Their course was followed by us to the encampment in the Wilderness of Sin ; then we made a detour. The two next encampments mentioned are those of Dophkah and Alush (Numbers xxxiii. 12, 13), and after these Rephidim, "where was no water for the people to drink." From the point at which we escaped from the thirsty plain El Markha, and turned up between the white bare-looking hills of Seih Bab'a, to the mouth of Wady Feiran is about nineteen miles ; from the mouth of Wady Feiran to the stone circles at the entrance of the little Wady Nisrin is another seventeen miles as the crow flies, or say twenty miles, a long day's march for such a host. Except, however, from the weariness of the plain and the distress caused by the heat of the sun, this route presents no difficulties. Some four or five miles below the stone circles which we have already described there is another group of them. May they not have been the sites of Amalekite villages, and occupied in that day when Israel passed by as outposts to the great force gathering at Rephidim to bar their further progress ? The limestone hills between Seih Sidreh and Wady Feiran are so low that, though the ground is broken and not always easy for travelling, we may rightly suppose large bodies of the Israelites to have made a cut across them in order to save going all the way round by the valley's mouth. " Familiar as we had grown with desert scenes," writes Professor Palmer of his journey from Seih Sidreh to this mouth of Wady Feiran, in the month of March, 1869, " we were not prepared for such utter and oppressive desolation as this; the blue waters a) calm or rather dead before us, a realisation of the ' Ancient Mariners' dreary vision, whilst c |