NOWEYBA

[p.516] among the great Aeneze tribe; at least I never heard of any; but these Heywat Arabs are notorious for their bad faith, and never hesitate to kill those who do not travel under the protection of their own people, or their well known friends. Scarcely any other Bedouin robbers would have fired till they had summoned us to give up our baggage, and had received a shot for answer.

I had at first intended to visit, on my return, the upper mountains, to which there is a road leading through the Wady Mokabelat; but Ayd dissuaded me. He said that if the party from which we had just escaped meant to pursue us, they would probably lay in wait for us in some of the passes in that direction; as he did not doubt that it would be their belief, that we were bound for Tor or Suez, the nearest road to which places lies through the Wady Mokabelat. I yielded to his opinion, and we returned along the coast by the same road we had come. Hamds wound was not dangerous; I dressed it as well as I could, and four days afterwards it was nearly healed. We travelled a part of the night, and

May 10th,early the next morning we again reached Noweyba, the place where we had first reached the coast. We here met Ayds deaf friend. Szaleh had all the way, betrayed the most timorous disposition; in excuse for running away when we were attacked, he said that he intended to halt farther on in the Wady, in order to cover our retreat, and that he had been obliged to run after the camels, which were frightened by the firing; but the truth was, that his terrors deprived him of all power of reflection, otherwise he must have known that the only course, to be pursued in the desert, when suddenly attacked, is to fight for life, as escape is almost impossible.

Having been foiled in my hopes of visiting Akaba, I now wished to follow the shore of the gulf to the southward; but Szaleh would not hear of any farther progress in that direction, and insisted upon

WADY DJEREIMELE

[p.517] my going back to the convent. I told him that his company had been of too little use to me, to make me desirous of keeping him any longer; he therefore returned, no doubt in great haste, by the same route we had come, accompanied by the deaf man; I engaged Ayd to conduct us along the coast, Hamd being very ignorant of this part of the peninsula, where his tribe, the Oulad Sayd, never encamp.

The date trees of Noweyba belong to the tribe of Mezeine; here were several huts built of stones and branches of the trees, in which the owners live with their families during the date-harvest. The narrow plain which rises here from the sea to the mountain, is covered with sand and loose stones. Ayd told me that in summer, when the wind is strong, a hollow sound is sometimes heard here, as if coming from the upper country; the Arabs say that the spirit of Moses then descends from Mount Sinai, and in flying across the sea bids a farewell to his beloved mountains.

We rode from Noweyba round a bay, the southern point of which bore from thence S. by W. In two hours and three quarters from Noweyba we doubled the point, and rested for the night in a valley just behind it, called Wady Djereimele [Arabic], thickly overgrown with the shrub Gharkad, the berries of which are gathered in great abundance. Red coral is very common on this part of the coast. In the evening I saw a great number of shellfish leave the water, and crawl to one hundred or two hundred paces inland, where they passed the night, and at sun-rise returned to the sea.

During the last two days of our return from the northward I had found no opportunity to take notes. I had never permitted my companions to see me write, because I knew that if their suspicions were once raised, it would at least render them much less open in their communications to me. It has indeed been a constant