... dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserved of maiden's hearts ...
Mummies were therefore broken up as soon as found, and sold piecemeal; sometimes also to painters, who by means of them obtained certain shades of brown otherwise unattainable. There was, nevertheless, an Englishman, named John Sanderson, who brought one away intact, besides six hundred pounds of fragments to sell to London apothecaries, in spite of mummy being contraband export from Egypt.
AT MOUNT SINAI
A third, and the chief, excursion was to Sinai and the Red Sea. It is no exaggeration to say that for most it was a terrible experience; there were many who visited Mohammedan lands often and some who saw Jerusalem more than once, but not one went a second time to Sinai. No big caravans travelled that way, few were the merchants who traded to Suez; it meant, then, being subject to the pleasure of the Arabs. There privation was the best that could be looked for, they were dependent for their lives and the endurance of life on their own enforced liberality and the chance of forbearance from others; and very thankful must they have been when they caught sight of the two great towers, since pulled down, which stood in the suburbs of Cairo for landmarks to those coming from Suez, although they might expect to receive a welcome, as they had probably had a send-off, from the boys of Cairo in the shape of dirt, bricks, and bad lemons. Two Germans were reduced to such a state as to become subject to hallucinations.
Especially strange did the journey seem to a Russian who passed by the Cairo route to Jerusalem. So totally different a desert from those he knew,—neither forests nor vegetation, no people, no water; nothing but sand and stones, except for the Red Sea. And it happens that here, in particular, does he show how far more second-hand was his knowledge of the Bible stories than was that of other Europeans. The function of the cloud which is said to have accompanied the Israelites by day on their flight was, to him, to hide them from pursuers, and at the Red Sea there were still visible to him the twelve ways that Moses had opened up for his people, one for each tribe, marked on the surface of the water by a deeper tint, and the prints of Pharaoh's chariot-wheels were as indelible as ever for him, whereas Christians from farther west ceased to see them soon after the beginning of the sixteenth century. Some facts were even more exclusively his own, as that Pharaoh's soldiers were changed into fish after their drowning; and were to be known when caught by having human heads, men's teeth and noses, though their ears had grown to fins; nobody eats them. Pharaoh's horses were likewise fishified; hairy fish with skins as thick as your finger.
It goes without saying that every scene from Hebrew history was localised to a square foot; but there was, besides, a rock to be seen written over in characters that none could decipher, yet identified by tradition as the writing of Jeremiah the prophet done with his finger. This rock was near the monastery. Hither came the pilgrim, to find the gate barred, whether he had sent word of his approach or not; the monastery was surrounded as a rule by two or three hundred Arabs, howling day and night, and sometimes threatening, for food; let down every now and then from a window high up. Once inside, there was the monks' well to see, the very same one at which Moses watered Jethro's sheep, and a chapel behind the choir built over the spot where had stood the burning bush that Moses saw; with Our Lady and her Baby standing in the middle thereof unharmed, say the Russian pilgrims. Then to bed; and in the morning, after being wakened, maybe, by a monk calling his brethren to "offices" by striking spears of wood and iron with a stick, for bell they had none, a start would be made up what was assumed to be Mt. Horeb, at the foot of which, on the side nearest Cairo, lay the monastery. Not far from the top were four chapels, one dedicated to St. Elijah, at the back of which was the grotto where he hid from Jezebel, forty days, fasting. At the top was the rock behind which Moses lay while God passed, and, hard by, the church of the Holy Summit and a mosque—it was a pilgrimage place for Mohammedans, too. Then down again the farther side to the valley between Mts. Horeb and Sinai, to the hospice where pilgrims stayed the night.
Before reaching Sinai, and after leaving it, these travellers are in the habit of making assertions so flatly contradictory that some of them will be hardly put to it on Judgment Day; but when at Sinai, there is only one opinion—to get to the top thereof was the most terrific struggle they had ever gone through. Only one account has the least suggestion of enjoyment in it, Della Valle's; and yet his ascent was made under worse conditions than any other's.