Chapter 38

[p.454] On quitting the wells we turned off in the direction of Suez, our route lying W.N.W. There are no traces of a road here, for the track of caravans is immediately filled up by the moving sands, which covered the plain as far as I could discern, and in some places had collected into hills thirty or forty feet in height. At ten hours from our setting out in the morning we entered a plain covered with flints, and again fell in with the Hadj road. Here we took a W. by N. direction. At the end of eleven hours the plain was covered with a saline crust, and we crossed a tract of ground, about five minutes in breadth, covered with such a quantity of small white shells, that it appeared at a distance like a strip of salt. Shells of the same species are found on the shores of the lake of Tiberias. Once probably the sea covered the whole of this ground. At twelve hours and a half Suez bore S. about an hour and an half distant from us. To our right we saw marshy ground extending northwards, which the people informed me was full of salt; it is called, like all salt marshes, Szabegha (Arabic). At the end of thirteen hours we crossed a low and narrow Wady, perhaps the remains of the canal of Ptolemy; and at fourteen hours and a half, alighted in Wady Redjel (Arabic), where there were many Talh trees, and plenty of food for our camels.

September 2d.—We continued to travel over the plain, route W. by N. In two hours we reached Adjeroud (Arabic), an ancient castle, which has lately been completely repaired by Mohammed Ali, who keeps a garrison here. There are two separate buildings, the largest of which is occupied by the soldiers, and the smaller contains a mosque with the tomb of a saint; they are both defended by strong walls against any attack of the Arabs. Here is also a copious well, but the water is very bitter, and can be used only for watering camels. The garrison is supplied from the wells of Mousa, opposite to Suez. Our road was full of the aromatic

WADY MOUSA

[p.455] herb Baytheran (Arabic), which is sold by the Arabs at Ghaza and Hebron.

Beyond Adjeroud many Wadys cross the plain. To the left we had the chain of mountains called Attaka. At the end of five hours, and about one hour to the right of the road, begins the chain of low mountains called Oweybe (Arabic), running parallel with the Attaka. Our route lay W. by N. At eight hours the Attaka terminated on our left, and was succeeded by a ridge of low hills. The plain here is sandy, covered with black flints. We again passed several Wadys, and met two large caravans, transporting a corps of infantry to Suez. At the end of ten hours and a half we stopped in Wady Djaafar (Arabic), which is full of low trees, shrubs, and dry herbs. From hence a hilly chain extends north-eastwards.

September 3d.—After a march of six hours along the plain, the ground began to be overspread with Egyptian pebbles. Route W. We passed several Wadys, similar to those mentioned above when describing Wady Rowak. At nine hours, we descried the Nile, with its beautiful verdant shores; at eleven hours began a hilly tract, the last undulations of Djebel Makattam; and in thirteen hours and a half we reached the vicinity of Cairo. Here my Arab companions left me, and proceeded to Belbeis, where, they were informed, their principal men were encamped, waiting for orders to proceed to Akaba. I discharged my honest guide, Hamd Ibn Hamdan, who was not a little astonished to see me take some sequins out of the skirts of my gown. As it was too late to enter the town, I went to some Bedouin tents which I saw at a distance, and entered one of them, in which, for the first time, I drank of the sweet water of the Nile. Here I remained all night. A great number of Bedouins were at this time collected near Cairo, to accompany the troops which were to be sent into Arabia after the Ramadhan.

CAIRO

[p.456] September 4th.—I entered Cairo before sunrise; and thus concluded my journey, by the blessing of God, without either loss of health, or exposure to any imminent danger.

[p.457]

JOURNAL OF A TOUR

IN THE

PENINSULA OF MOUNT SINAI,

IN THE SPRING OF 1816.

ABOUT the beginning of April 1816 Cairo was again visited by the plague. The Franks and most of the Christians shut themselves up; but as I neither wished to follow their example nor to expose myself unnecessarily in the town, I determined to pass my time, during the prevalence of the disease, among the Bedouins of Mount Sinai, to visit the gulf of Akaba, and, if possible, the castle of Akaba, to which, as far as I know, no traveller has ever penetrated. Intending to pass some days at the convent of Mount Sinai, I procured a letter of introduction to the monks from their brethren at Cairo; for without this passport no stranger is ever permitted to enter the convent; I was also desirous of having a letter from the Pasha of Egypt to the principal Sheikh of the tribes of Tor, over whom, as I knew by former experience, he exercises more than a nominal authority. With the assistance of this paper, I hoped to be able to see a good deal of the Bedouins of the peninsula in safety, and to travel in their company to Akaba. Such letters of recommendation are in general easily procured in Syria and Egypt, though they are often useless, as I found on several occasions during my first journey into Nubia, as well as in my

KAYT BEG

[p.458] travels in Syria, where the orders of the Pasha of Damascus were much slighted in several of the districts under his dominion.

A fortnight before I set out for Mount Sinai I had applied to the Pasha through his Dragoman, for a letter to the Bedouin Sheikh; but I was kept waiting for it day after day, and after thus delaying my departure a whole week, I was at last obliged to set off without it. The want of it was the cause of some embarrassment to me, and prevented me from reaching Akaba. It is not improbable that on being applied to for the letter, the Pasha gave the same answer as he gave at Tayf, when I asked him for a Firmahn, namely, that as I was sufficiently acquainted with the language and manners of the Arabs, I needed no further recommendation.

The Arabs of Mount Sinai usually alight at Cairo in the quarter called El Djemelye, where some of them are almost constantly to be found. Having gone thither, I met with the same Bedouin with whom I had come last year from Tor to Cairo; I hired two camels from him for myself and servant, and laid in provisions for about six weeks consumption. We left Cairo on the evening of the 20th of April, and slept that night among the ruined tombs of the village called Kayt Beg, a mile from the city. From this village, at which the Bedouins usually alight, the caravans for Suez often depart; it is also the resort of smugglers from Suez and Syria.

April 21st.—We set out from Kayt Beg in the course of the morning, in the company of a caravan bound for Suez, comprising about twenty camels, some of which belonged to Moggrebyn pilgrims, who had come by sea from Tunis to Alexandria; the others to a Hedjaz merchant, and to the Bedouins of Mount Sinai, who had brought passengers from Suez to Cairo, and were now returning with corn to their mountains. As I knew the character of these Bedouins by former experience, and that the road was perfectly

DERB EL ANKABYE

[p.459] safe, at least as far as the convent, I did not think it necessary this time to travel in the disguise of a pauper. Some few comforts may be enjoyed in the desert even by those who do not travel with tents and servants; and whenever these comforts must be relinquished, it becomes a very irksome task to cross a desert, as I fully experienced during several of my preceding journeys.

The Bedouins of Sinai, or, as they are more usually denominated, the Towara, or Bedouins of Tor, formerly enjoyed the exclusive privilege of transporting goods, provisions, and passengers, from Cairo to Suez, and the route was wholly under their protection. Since the increased power of the Pasha of Egypt, it has been thrown open to camel-drivers of all descriptions, Egyptian peasants, as well as Syrian and Arabian Bedouins; and as the Egyptian camels are much stronger, for a short journey, than those of the desert, the Bedouins of Mount Sinai have lost the greater part of their custom, and the transport trade in this route is now almost wholly in the hands of the Egyptian carriers. The hire of a strong camel, from Cairo to Suez, was at this time about six or eight Patacks, from one and a half to two Spanish dollars.

The desert from Cairo to Suez is crossed by different routes; we followed that generally taken by the Towara, which lies mid-way between the great Hadj route, and the more southern one close along the mountains: the latter is pursued only by the Arabs Terabein, and other Syrian Bedouins. The route we took is called Derb el Ankabye [Arabic].

We proceeded on a gentle ascent from Kayt Beg, and passed on the right several low quarries in the horizontal layers of soft calcareous stone of which the mountain of Mokattam, in the neighbourhood of Cairo, is composed; it is with this stone that the splendid Mamelouk tombs of Kayt Beg are built. At the end of

EL MOGAWA

[p.460] an hour, the limestone terminated, and the road was covered with flints, petrosilex, and Egyptian pebbles; here are also found specimens of petrified wood, the largest about a foot in length. We now travelled eastward, and after a march of three hours halted upon a part of the plain, called El Mogawa [Arabic], where we rested during the mid-day heat. Beyond this spot, to the distance of five hours from Cairo, we met with great quantities of petrified wood. Large pieces of the trunks of trees, three or four feet in length, and eight or ten inches in diameter, lay about the plain, and close to the road was an entire trunk of a tree at least twenty feet in length, half buried in sand. These petrifactions are generally found in low grounds, but I saw several also on the top of the low hills of gravel and sand over which the road lies. Several travellers have expressed doubts of their being really petrified wood, and some have crossed the desert without meeting with any of them. The latter circumstance is easily accounted for; the route we were travelling is not that usually taken to Suez. I have crossed this desert repeatedly in other directions, and never saw any of the petrifactions except in this part of it. As to its really being petrified wood there cannot be any reason to doubt it, after an inspection of the substance, in which the texture and fibres of the wood are clearly distinguishable, and perfectly resemble those of the date tree. I think it not improbable, that before Nechos dug the canal between the Nile and the Red sea, the communication between Arsinoe or Clysma and Memphis, may have been carried on this way; and stations may have been established on the spots now covered by these petrified trees; the water requisite to produce and maintain vegetation might have been procured from deep wells, or from reservoirs of rain water, as is done in the equally barren desert between Djidda and Mekka. After the completion of the canal, this route was perhaps neglected, the trees, left without a

EL MOGRAH

[p.461] regular supply of water, dried up and fell, and the sands, with the winter rains and torrents, gradually effected the petrifaction. I have seen specimens of the petrified wood of date trees found in the Libyan desert, beyond the Bahr bala ma, where they were observed by Horneman in 1798, and in 1812, by M. Boutin, a French officer, who brought several of them to Cairo. They resemble precisely those which I saw on the Suez road, in colour, substance, and texture. Some of them are of silex, in others the substance seems to approach to hornblende.

We continued our route E. by S. over an uneven and somewhat hilly country covered with black petrosilex; and after a day’s march of eight hours and a quarter, we halted in a valley of little depth, called Wady Onszary [Arabic], where our camels found good pasture. Close by are some low hills, where the sands are seen in the state of formation into sand- rock, and presenting all the different gradations between their loose state and the solid stone. I saw a great quantity of petrified wood upon one of these hills, amongst which was the entire trunk of a date tree.

April 22d.—From Onszary we travelled E. by S. for one hour, and then E. At the end of three hours, the hilly country terminates, beyond which, in this route, no petrified wood is met with; we then entered upon a widely extended and entirely level plain, called by the Bedouins El Mograh [Arabic], upon which we rested after a march of five hours and a half. While we were preparing our dinner two ostriches approached near enough to be distinctly seen. A shot fired by one of the Arabs frightened them, and in an instant they were out of sight. These birds come into this plain, from the eastward, from the desert of Tyh; but I never heard that the Bedouins of this country take the trouble of hunting them. The plain of Mograh is famous for the skirmishes which have taken place there, for the caravans that have been plundered in

DAR EL HAMRA

[p.462] crossing it, and for the number of travellers that have been murdered on it. In former times, when this desert was constantly over- run by parties of robbers, the Mograh was always chosen by them as their point of attack, because, in the event of success, no one could escape them on a plain where objects can be distinguished in every direction to the distance of several hours. Even at present, since the route has been made more secure by the vigilance of the Pasha of Cairo, robberies sometimes happen, and in the autumn of 1815 a rich caravan was plundered by the Arabs Terabein.[These Arabs, under their Sheikh Abou Djehame [Arabic], made an excursion about the same time over the mountains towards Cosseir, and plundered a caravan of pilgrims and merchants who were going to Kenne. The Sheikh was seized on his return by the Maazy tribe and carried to Cairo, where he remained a year in close confinement, and after having delivered part of his booty into the treasury of the Pasha, was released a few days before I set out.]

The desert of Suez is never inhabited by Bedouin encampments, though it is full of rich pasture and pools of water during winter and spring. No strong tribes frequent the eastern borders of Egypt, and a weak insulated encampment would soon be stripped of its property by nightly robbers. The ground itself is the patrimony of no tribe, but is common to all, which is contrary to the general practice of the desert, where every district has its acknowledged owners, with its limits of separation from those of the neighbouring tribes, although it is not always occupied by them.

In the afternoon we proceeded over the plain, and in eight hours and three quarters arrived opposite to the station of the Hadj, called Dar el Hamra which we left about three miles to the north of us, and which is distinguished by a large acacia tree, the only one in this plain. At the end of nine hours and a half, and about half an hour from the road, we saw a mound of earth, which,

WADY EMSHASH

[p.463] the Arabs told me, was thrown up about fifty years ago, by workmen employed by Ali Beg, then governor of Egypt, in digging a well there. The ground was dug to the depth of about eighty feet, when no water appearing the work was abandoned. At eleven hours and a quarter, our road joined the great Hadj route, which passes in a more northerly direction from Dar el Hamra to the Birket el Hadj, or inundation to the eastward of Heliopolis, four hours distant from Cairo, upon the banks of which the pilgrims encamp, previous to their setting out for Mekka. Between this road, and that by which we had travelled, lies another, also terminating at Kayt Beg. The southernmost route, which, as I have already mentioned, is frequented only by the Arabs Terabein, branches off from this common route at about six hours distant from Suez, and is called Harb bela ma (the road without water); it is very seldom frequented by regular caravans, being hilly and longer than the others, but I was told that notwithstanding its name, water is frequently met with in the low grounds, even in summer. Just beyond where we fell in with the Hadj route, we rested in the bed of a torrent called Wady Hafeiry [Arabic], at the foot of a chain of hills which begin there, and extend to the N. of the route, and parallel with it towards Adjeroud. Our camels found abundance of pasture on the odoriferous herb Obeitheran [Arabic], Santolina fragrantissima of Forskal, which grew here in great plenty.

April 23d.—Our road lay between the southern mountain and the abovementioned chain of hills to the north, called Djebel Uweybe [Arabic], direction E.S.E. In three hours we passed the bed of a torrent called Seil Abou Zeid [Arabic], where some acacia trees grow. The road is here encompassed on every side by hills. In four hours and a half we reached, in the direction E. by S. Wady Emshash [Arabic], a torrent like the former, which in winter is filled by a stream of several feet in depth.

BIR SUEZ

[p.464] Rains are much more frequent in this desert than in the valley of Egypt, and the same remark may be made in regard to all the mountains to the southward, where a regular, though not uninterrupted rainy season sets in, while in the valley of the Nile, as is well known, rain seldom falls even in winter. The soil and hills are here entirely calcareous.

We had been for the whole morning somewhat alarmed by the appearance of some suspicious looking men on camels at a distance in our rear, and our Bedouins had, in consequence, prepared their matchlocks. When we halted during the mid-day hours, they also alighted upon a hill at a little distance; but seeing us in good order, and with no heavy loads to excite their cupidity, they did not approach us. They, however, this evening, fell upon a small party of unarmed Egyptian peasants who were carrying corn to Suez, stripped them, took away their camels and loads, and the poor owners fled naked into Suez. It was afterwards learnt that they belonged to the tribe of Omran, who live on the eastern shore of the gulf of Akaba. Without establishing regular patrols of the Bedouins themselves on this road, it will never be possible to keep it free from robbers.

At six hours and a half begins a hilly country, with a slight descent through a narrow pass between hills, called El Montala [Arabic], a favourite spot for robbers. At seven hours and a half we passed Adjeroud [Arabic], about half an hour to our left; about two miles west of it is a well in the Wady Emshash, called Bir Emshash, which yields a copious supply of water in the winter, but dries up in the middle of summer if rains have not been abundant; the garrison of Adjeroud, where is a well so bitter that even camels will not drink the water, draws its supply of drinking water from the Bir Emshash. From hence the road turns S.E. over a slightly descending plain. At ten hours and a half is the well called Bir Suez, a

SUEZ

[p.465] copious spring enclosed by a massive building, from whence the water is drawn up by wheels turned by oxen, and emptied into a large stone tank on the outside of the building. The men who take care of the wheels and the oxen remain constantly shut up in the building for fear of the Bedouins. The water is brackish, but it serves for drinking, and the Arabs and Egyptian peasants travelling between Cairo and Suez, who do not choose to pay a higher price for the sweet water of the latter place, are in the habit of filling their water skins here, as do the people of Suez for their cooking provision. From an inscription on the building, it appears that it was erected in the year of the Hedjra 1018. We reached Suez about sunset, at the end of eleven hours and a half. I alighted with the Bedouins upon an open place between the western wall of the town, and its houses.

April 24th. In the time of Niebuhr Suez was not enclosed; there is now a wall on the west and south-west, which is rapidly falling to decay. The town is in a ruinous state; and neither merchants nor artisans live in it. Its population consists only of about a dozen agents, who receive goods from the ports of the Red sea, and forward them to their correspondents at Cairo, together with some shop-keepers who deal chiefly in provisions. The Pasha keeps a garrison here of about fifty horsemen, with an officer who commands the town, the neighbouring Arabs, and the shipping in the harbour. As Suez is one of the few harbours in the Red sea where ships can be repaired, some vessels are constantly seen at the wharf; the repairs are carried on by Greek shipwrights and smiths, in the service of the Pasha, who are let out to the shipowners by the commanding officer. Suez has of late become a harbour of secondary importance, the supplies of provisions, &c. for the Hedjaz being collected principally at Cosseir, and shipped from thence to Yembo and Djidda: but the trade in coffee and

[p.466] India goods still passes this way to Cairo. I saw numerous bales of spices and coffee lying near the shore, and a large heap of iron, together with packages of small wares, antimony, and Egyptian goods for exportation to Djidda, and ultimately to Yemen and India. The merchants complained of the want of camels to transport their goods to Cairo. The Pasha, who owns a considerable part of the imports of coffee, has fixed the carriage across the desert at a low price, and none of the agents venture to offer more to the camel drivers; the consequence of which is, that few are encouraged to come to Suez beyond the number required for the Pasha’s merchandize. A caravan consisting of five or six hundred camels leaves Suez for Cairo on the 10th of each lunar month, accompanied by guards and two field-pieces; while smaller ones, composed of twenty or thirty beasts, depart almost every four or five days; but to these the merchants are shy of trusting their goods, because they can never depend on the safety of the road; accidents however seldom happen at present, so formidable is the name of Mohammed Ali.

Before the power of this Pasha was established in Egypt, and during the whole period of the Mamelouk government, the Bedouins might be called complete masters of Suez. Every inhabitant was obliged t[o] have his protector, Ghafyr [Arabic], among the Bedouins of Mount Sinai, to whom he made annual presents of money, corn, and clothes, and who ensured to him the safe passage of his goods and person through the desert, and the recovery of whatever was plundered by the others. At that time the rate of freight was fixed by the Bedouins, and camels were in plenty; but, whenever the governors of Cairo quarrelled with the Bedouins, or ill- treated any of them at Cairo, the road was immediately interrupted, and the Bedouins placed guards over the well of Naba [Arabic], two hours distant from Suez, in the hills on the eastern side of the gulf, to prevent the people of the town from drawing from thence their