“Early to bed, and early to rise,
Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
It remained to be seen what the effect would be upon us.
The groom being left behind a short time for packing up the kitchen utensils, allowed us to get out of sight without his observing the direction we had taken; and, when mounted, he took a wrong course. It was therefore necessary to give chase towards the hills to recover him.
In an hour we reached two tul’hh (acacia or mimosa) trees, from which, I believe, the gum-arabic is obtained, and the stump of a third. These were the first that we had seen. Then descended, during about half an hour, to the broken walls of a town called Sufâh, below which commenced the very remarkable nuk’beh, or precipitous slope into the great Wadi ’Arabah. Before commencing this, however, we paused to survey the savage scenery around us, and the glorious expanse of the plain, which extends from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea, and is bounded on one side by the hills of Judæa, and on the other by the mountains of Edom,—on an average of 3500 feet above the level,—including Mount Hor, the most conspicuous peak among them. At that time, however, the range was capped with rolling mists of the morning.
This Sufâh is most likely the Zephath of Judges i. 17,—the frontier town of King Arad the Canaanite, which the tribes of Judah and Simeon destroyed, and called the site Hormah, (i.e., “devoted to destruction.”) If so, it is strange that the
Canaanitish name should outlive the one intentionally given by the early Israelites. Probably, the surrounding tribes never adopted the Hebrew name, and preserved the original one.
We were standing among crevasses of shivered mountains, whose strata are tossed about in fantastic contortions; and what we had yet to traverse below this, was something like a thousand feet of very slippery rock, lying in flakes, and sloping two ways at once. The greater length forms a rough line, at an angle of what seemed to the eye to be one of forty-five degrees,—not so steep as the Terâbeh that we came to afterwards, but longer and more perilous. Yet this is the only approach to Judæa from the desert for many leagues around. Was it here that King Amaziah destroyed his Edomite prisoners after his victory in the “valley of salt?” (2 Chron. xxv. 12.)
Half way down, one of our barrels of water slipped off a camel, and rolled into a chasm with noise and echoes like thunder. Wonderful to relate, it was not broken, and we were thankful for its preservation.
At the bottom of the precipice, just beyond the shingle or debris of the mountain, the captain and I rested, and drank some camels’ milk. This the Bedaween consider very strengthening. There were several tul’hh-trees in a torrent-bed beside us, and some neb’k. With some twine that we
gave him, and a stout thorn of tul’hh, one of our Arabs mended his sandal, which was in need of repair. We, having preceded the beasts of burthen over the slippery rock, sat watching them and the men creeping slowly down, in curved lines, like moving dots, towards us.