The Sinaitic peninsula is one vast witnessing-stone fitting up its craggy mountains and its barren wastes in testimony to the divine word. This great and terrible wilderness has little to attract the pleasure-seeking traveler; but to the Bible student it seems to be haunted with memories of Moses and of the great march of the tribes under the lead of the cloud and the fire. It has been traversed many times by earnest and devout pilgrims who were intent to follow the steps of the great Hebrew lawgiver. The portion which lies alongside of the Gulf of Suez, and which is of the greatest interest te Bible students, has been carefully measured and mapped by the British Ordnance Survey.
In November, 1868, an exploring party, nine in number, set out from Suez, with a train of forty-four camels and forty Arab drivers, and they spent the whole of the following winter and spring in tracing out the mysterious pathways, collecting and classifying the meager productions of the desert and making an accurate trigonometrical survey of the whole region crossed by the tribes in their march to the mount of God.
The company was under the command of Captain Wilson, well known for his accurate and exhaustive survey of Jerusalem. Rev. F. W. Holland, who had traversed the country three times before, and who was on terms of close acquaintanceship with the native Arabs, accompanied the expedition as guide. The difficult task of interpreting Arabic names, gathering up and sifting local traditions and deciphering inscriptions was undertaken by Mr. E. H. Palmer, of St. John's College, Cambridge. His remarkable familiarity with the language and his skill in questioning and cross-questioning the suspicious and deceptive wanderers of the desert enabled him to obtain much information where ordinary travelers would be misled or would be left in utter ignorance. In his excellent work, "The Desert of the Exodus," Mr. Palmer has embodied the results of observations made in eleven months of wandering on foot through the desolate region where the tribes sojourned forty years. The expedition was provided with experienced photographers, draftsmen and observers in geology and natural history.
The leading object of the survey was to trace the march of the Israelites, so far as possible, and to identify the sites named by Moses; and yet, irrespective of any theories or conclusions of their own, their purpose was to map all the passages among the mountains so minutely, and to describe the features of the country so fully and accurately, that students of the Bible could weigh the evidence and judge for themselves.
The two great rival mountains, Jebel Musa and Jebel Serbal, each of which has been claimed for the true Sinai, were made the subject of a special and more minute survey, and a map of both was drawn on a scale of six inches to the mile. Every gorge and height of these ragged and terrible masses of rock was delineated with the utmost accuracy. In addition to these two special maps, nearly Tour thousand square miles of country are embraced in the general survey. Every pass which it was possible for the tribes to take was explored and laid down on the maps. The natural productions, the water supply, the temperature, the Signs of ancient occupancy, the possible changes in fertility, were all subjected to the most rigid examination.
The survey of the two most important and interesting groups of mountains was attended with great difficulty and much exposure of life and limb, and yet it was accomplished without serious accident. The engineers were obliged to climb and to carry their instruments to stations six, seven and eight thousand feet high. When heated and exhausted with the toil of reaching such lofty heights, they must remain there for hours exposed to the icy wind and making minute and careful observations, while so chilled and benumbed with cold that they could scarcely hold the hand steady enough to adjust the instrument or to write down the figures. The distance from one station to another was often very great, and the intervening country was crossed and cut up by jagged ridges and gorges to such a degree that it would cost a hard day's toil just to reach some lofty crag and cover some conspicuous spot with whitewash, so that it could be sighted by the distant observer.
Sometimes the adventurous climber must cling to the face of the crag with both hands and carry the whitewash bucket by the bail in his teeth. Loose boulders would give way beneath the feet and the wind would set others rolling down from above, and between the two it was as lunch as the wariest engineer could do to save his head and his instrument from fracture.
The bold bluff of the Sinaitic mountains called Ras Sufsafeh rises sheer two thousand feet from the plain where the tribes encamped at the giving of the law. The engineers were obliged to make their way along the giddy precipice at that fearful height barefoot and clinging to a rope let down from above and held at the other end by their companions, who had braced themselves against some projection farther back on the ridge.
The declivities of Serbal were more abrupt than those of Sinai; its narrow defiles were more jagged, and its labyrinthine valleys were choked up as if they had been swept by a wild torrent of confused boulders and broker stones. The labor of climbing from point to point over such enormous masses of ruin was very great. On the lower levels, where the mountains opera out into broad basins and dreary sand-plains, the air was hot and stiffing—sometimes still as death, and then again rushing through the heated funnels of the mountains in the suffocating blast of the simoom. The party suffered more from exhaustion on the low lands than they did from cold or fatigue mi the lofty heights. The bracing air and the wild and terrible scenery of the mountains made the climbers of the heights tireless as the eagles and as sure-footed as the roe.
In the end the long and laborious task was done, and well done. Every pass and valley where it was possible for the great host of the Hebrews to make their way to the mount of God was explored. Every turn, branch, elevation, depression and obstruction was laid down with mathematical accuracy upon maps to be seen and studied by millions who can never see the country itself. All the evidence which the desert can supply to help us in deciding upon the route of the Israelites and the scene of the giving of the law was gathered up.
It is a remarkable circumstance that the nine practical, cultivated men composing the expedition were unanimous in the conclusions to which they carne as to the main questions raised by the sacred story of the exodus and the desert-journey to the mount of God. They all agreed in the opinion that the children of Israel crossed the Gulf of Suez at or near the Wells of Moses; that they moved on southward past Ain Howarah and Gharundel to Tayibeh; that they turned to the right down to the plain of El Murkhah by the sea; that they continued their march along the salt-plain to Wady Feiran, where they turned again into the mountains and followed the course of that wady to Wady es Sheik, and thence on to Sinai and the great encampment in the curved plain of Er Rahah before the mount.
In this expedition there were two commissioned and four noncommissioned officers of the Royal Engineers, one naturalist, one linguist and one clergyman. They were not looking for evidences to support any peculiar theory as to the natural features of the country or any disputed interpretation of Scripture. Their object was to find out everything that can be known about the country, and to describe it in such clear and positive terms as can be best understood by those who have not seen it. They scaled every prominent peak, they traversed every important ravine and valley. They lodged in tents, traveled on foot, conversed with the inhabitants, gathered specimens of everything that lives and grows in the country, experienced every change of temperature and studied every aspect of earth and sky, and they were unanimous in the conclusion that the natural features and phenomena of the desert confirm and illustrate the truth of the sacred story given by Moses. The awful silence of the Sinaitic mountains recalls by contrast the thunders and the noise of the trumpet exceeding loud which made Moses and all the people in the camp exceedingly fear and quake. It is impossible for one who has not spent days and nights in the solitude of' the desert to conceive how awful is the sound of crashing thunder and warring tempests echoing from height to height and reverberating through the long, empty galleries of naked rock. The blue haze that hides the distant peaks at sunrise reminds the Bible reader of the morning when the cloud rested on the mount and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace.
The springs and wells found at long distances in the wanderings of the desert agree with the bitter waters of Marah and the twelve fountains of Elim and the gushing brook of Horeb and the watering-places where Moses led his flock in the days of his shepherd life. We find the burning bush in the thorny acacia, the shittim wood of the tabernacle in the sayal, the name of the camp Rithmah in the retem under whose shade Elijah flung himself down in despair to die.
The stunted pines that line the slender water-courses at Gharundel are so conspicuous among the dreary herbage of the desert that they may well have given the name Elim—the place of trees. The bright-green hyssop, still clinging to the face of the crags under which the tribes encamped, shows how naturally it was prescribed to be used in the sprinklings and purifications of the sanctuary.
In the wild, wandering Bedouin of to-day, jealous of all infringement upon his tribal territory, we have the living representative of the Amalekite that opposed the march of the Israelites at Rephidim. We see Moses himself in the venerable gray-beard sheikh, wearing one garment, walking all day barefoot over sharp flint-stones, rounded pebbles and hot sand, eating two or three dates and a handful of parched barley for supper and lying down to sleep upon the bare earth for the night. In the bronzed, barefoot women, leading their lean goats and starveling sheep along the desolate wadies in search of water, we see Jethro's daughters as Moses found them when he fled for refuge to the wilds of the desert.
The bare, turf-less graves that add loneliness to the pathways among the mountains and to the dreary stretch across the great waste of the wandering, are just such as the stricken tribes left behind them when they took up the march in the morning and followed the moving cloud to a new encampment. The rude domed houses, made of massive stones, standing in groups like beehives, with no windows and a door only high enough for a man to creep in on all Tours, carry us back to times as old as the exodus, and the circles of stones that are often found near them may mark the burial-place of some who saw the pillar of cloud and fire as it moved at the head of the host.
The whole Sinaitic peninsula is covered with traditions which refer to the great leader and lawgiver of Israel. The Wells of Moses, the Baths of Moses, the Mountain of Moses, the Cleft of Moses, the Valley of Moses and the Island of Moses show how deeply the sacred story has impressed itself upon the country and the inhabitants; and, in fact, everything which draws the inquiring traveler to this desert-world is so bound up with Moses and his great history that the whole stony waste may be considered his monument and the witness to his divine mission. The surveyor with compass and measuring-line, the naturalist with his keen search for every living thing, the linguist gathering up everything that can be learned from the tongues and traditions of men, the Bible student with the sacred record ever Open in his hand,—all agree in the conclusion that the testimony of Moses is true.