Travels in Syria and the Holy Land

by John Lewis Burckhardt

As we approached the summit of the mountain we saw at a distance a small flock of mountain goats feeding among the rocks. One of our Arabs left us, and by a widely circuitous road endeavoured to get to leeward of them, and near enough to fire at them; he enjoined us to remain in sight of them, and to sit down in order not to alarm them. He had nearly reached a favourable spot behind a rock, when the goats suddenly took to flight. They could not have seen the Arab, but the wind changed, and thus they smelt him. The chase of the Beden, as the wild goat is called, resembles that of the chamois of the Alps, and requires as much enterprise and patience. The Arabs make long circuits to surprise them, and endeavour to come upon them early in the morning when they feed. The goats have a leader, who keeps watch, and on any suspicious smell, sound, or object, makes a noise which is a signal to the flock to make their escape. They have much decreased of late, if we may believe the Arabs, who say that, fifty years ago, if a stranger came to a tent and the owner of it had no sheep to kill, he took his gun and went in search of a Beden. They are however even now more common than in the Alps, or in the mountains to the east of the Red sea. I had three or four of them brought to me at the convent, which I bought at threefourths of a dollar each. The flesh is excellent, and has nearly the same flavour as that of the deer. The Bedouins make waterbags of their skins, and rings of their horns, which they wear on their thumbs. When the Beden is met with in the plains the

[p.572] dogs of the hunters easily catch him; but they cannot come up with him among the rocks, where he can make leaps of twenty feet.

The stout Bedouin youths are all hunters, and excellent marksmen; they hold it a great honour to bring game to their tents, in proof of their being hardy mountain runners, and good shots; and the epithet Bowardy yknos es-szeyd [Arabic], a marksman who hunts the game, is one of the most flattering that can be bestowed upon them. It appears, from an ancient picture preserved in the convent, which represents the arrival of an archbishop from Egypt, as well as from one of the written documents in the archives, that in the sixteenth century all the Arabs were armed with bows and arrows as well as with matchlocks; at present the former are no longer known, but almost every tent has its matchlock, which the men use with great address, notwithstanding its bad condition. I believe bows are no longer used as regular weapons by the Bedouins in any part of Arabia.

After a very slow ascent of two hours we reached the top of Mount St. Catherine, which, like the mountain of Moses, terminates in a sharp point; its highest part consists of a single immense block of granite, whose surface is so smooth, that it is very difficult to ascend it. Luxuriant vegetation reaches up to this rock, and the side of the mountain presented a verdure which, had it been of turf instead of shrubs and herbs, would have completed the resemblance between this mountain and some of the Alpine summits. There is nothing on the summit of the rock to attract attention, except a small church or chapel, hardly high enough within to allow a person to stand upright, and badly built of loose uncemented stones; the floor is the bare rock, in which, solid as it is, the body of St. Catherine is believed to have been miraculously buried by angels, after her martyrdom at Alexandria. I saw inscribed here

[p.573] the names of several European travellers, and among others that of the unfortunate M. Boutin, a French officer of engineers, who passed here in 1811.[M. Boutin came to Egypt from Zante; he first made a journey to the cataracts of Assouan, and then went to Bosseir, where he hired a ship for Mokha, but on reaching Yembo, Tousoun Pasha, the son of Mohammed Ali, would not permit him to proceed, he therefore returned to Suez, after visiting the convent of Sinai, and its neighbouring mountains. After his return to Cairo, he went to Siwah, to examine the remains of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, carrying with him a small boat built at Cairo, for the purpose of exploring the lake and the island in it, mentioned by Browne. He experienced great vexations from the inhabitants of Siwah; and the boat was of no use to him, owing to the shallowness of the lake, so that after a residence of three days at the Oasis, where he seems to have made no discoveries, he returned to Cairo in the company of some Augila merchants. On his way he passed the wood of petrified date trees discovered by Horneman; his route, I believe, was to the south of that of Horneman, and nearer the lesser Oasis. I had the pleasure of seeing him upon his return from Siwah, when I first arrived at Cairo. He remained two years in Egypt, and then continued his travels towards Syria, where he met with his death in 1816, in the mountainous district of the Nosayris, west of Hamah, having imprudently exposed himself with a great deal of baggage, in company only of his interpreter and servant, and without any native guide, to the robbers of that infamous tribe. He was a lover of truth, and a man of observation and enterprize; the public, therefore, and his own government, have to regret his death no less than his friends.] From this elevated peak a very extensive view opened before us, and the direction of the different surroundings chains of mountains could be distinctly traced. The upper nucleus of the Sinai, composed almost entirely of granite, forms a rocky wilderness of all irregular circular shape, intersected by many narrow valleys, and from thirty to forty miles in diameter. It contains the highest mountains of the peninsula, whose shaggy and pointed peaks and steep and shattered sides, render it clearly distinguishable from all the rest of the country in view. It is upon this highest region of the peninsula that the fertile valleys are found, which produce fruit trees; they are principally to the west and south-west of the convent at three or four hours distant.

[p.574] Water too is always found in plenty in this district, on which account it is the place of refuge of all the Bedouins when the low country is parched up. I think it very probable that this upper country or wilderness is, exclusively, the desert of Sinai so often mentioned in the account of the wanderings of the Israelites. Mount St. Catherine appears to stand nearly in the centre of it. To the northward of this central region, and divided from it by the broad valley called Wady El Sheikh, and by several minor Wadys, begins a lower range of mountains, called Zebeir, which extends eastwards, having at one extremity the two peaks called El Djoze [Arabic], above the plantations of Wady Feiran, and losing itself to the east in the more open country towards Wady Sal. Beyond the Zebeir northwards are sandy plains and valleys, which I crossed, towards the west, at Raml el Moral, and towards the east, about Hadhra.This part i the most barren and destitute of water of the whole country. At its eastern extremity it is called El Birka [Arabic]. It borders to the north on the chain of El Tyh, which stretches in a regular line eastwards, parallel with the Zebeir, beginning at Sarbout el Djeinel. On reaching, in its eastern course, the somewhat higher mountain called El Odjme [Arabic], it separates into two; one of its branches turns off in a right angle northward, and after continuing for about fifteen miles in that direction, again turns to the east, and extends parallel with the second and southern branch all across the peninsula, towards the eastern gulf. The northern branch, which is called El Dhelel [Arabic], bounds the view from Mount St. Catherine. On turning to the east, I found that the mountains in this direction, beyond the high district of Sinai, run in a lower range towards the Wady Sal, and that the slope of the upper mountains is much less abrupt than on the opposite side. From Sal, east and north-east, the chains intersect each other in many irregular masses

[p.575] of inferior height, till they reach the gulf of Akaba, which I clearly distinguished when the sun was just rising over the mountains of the Arabian coast. Excepting the short extent from Noweyba to Dahab, the mountains bordering on the gulf are all of secondary height, but they rise to a considerable elevation between those two points. The country between Sherm, Nabk, and the convent, is occupied also by mountains of minor size, and the valleys, generally, are so narrow, that few of them can be distinguished from the point where I stood, the whole country, in that direction, appearing an uninterrupted wilderness of barren mountains. The highest points on that side appear to be above Wady Kyd, above the valley of Naszeb, and principally the peaks called Om Kheysyn [Arabic] and Masaoud [Arabic].

The view to the south was bounded by the high mountain of Om Shomar [Arabic], which forms a nucleus of itself, apparently unconnected with the upper Sinai, although bordering close upon it. To the right of this mountain I could distinguish the sea, in the neighbourhood of Tor, near which begins a low calcareous chain of mountains, called Djebel Hemam (i.e. death), not Hamam (or bath), extending along the gulf of Suez, and separated from the upper Sinai by a broad gravelly plain called El Kaa [Arabic], across which the road from Tor to Suez passes. This plain terminates to the W.N.W. of Mount St. Catherine, and nearly in the direction of Djebel Serbal. Towards the Kaa, the central Sinai mountains are very abrupt, and leave no secondary intermediate chain between them and the plain at their feet. The mountain of Serbal, which I afterwards visited, is separated from the upper Sinai by some valleys, especially Wady Hebran, and it forms, with several neighbouring mountains, a separate cluster terminating in peaks, the highest of which appears to be as high as Mount St. Catherine. It borders on the Wady Feiran and the chain of Zebeir.

[p.576] I took the following bearings, from the summit of Mount St. Catherine. These, together with those which I took from the peak of Om Shomar and from Serbal, and the distances and direction of my different routes, will serve to construct a map of the peninsula more detailed and accurate than any that has yet been published.

El Djoze [Arabic], a rock distinguished by two peaks above that part of
Wady Feiran where the date groves are, N.W. b. N.