However that may be, Norton's Abyssinian pumps, for which I had vainly applied at Cairo, would doubtless discover the prime necessary in the Wadys, many of the latter being still damp and muddy. Moreover, the crible continue à grilles filtrantes, the invention of MM. Huet and Geyler, introduced, we are told, into the mechanical treatment of metals, a principle which greatly economizes fluid. Founded upon the fact that sands of nearly the same size, but of different densities, when mixed in liquid and subjected to rapid vertical oscillation, range themselves by order of weight, the heavier sinking and not allowing passage to lighter matter, the new sieve offers the advantages of a single and simple instrument, with increased facility for treating poor "dirt." Finally, as I shall show, the country is prepared by nature to receive a tramway; and the distance to the sea does not exceed fourteen miles, liberally computed.[27]
Either the rain-water affected the health of the party, or it suffered from the excessive dryness and variations of the atmosphere, eight to nine hundred feet above sea-level (aner. 29.10), ranging in the tents between 92 degrees by day and 45 degrees at night, a piercing, killing temperature in the Desert. Moreover, the cold weather is mostly the unwholesome season in hot lands, and vice versâ: hence the Arab proverb, Harárat el-Jebel, wa lá Bard-há ("The heat of the hills and not their cold"). Old Haji Wali lost his appetite, complained of indigestion, and clamoured to return home; Ahmed Kaptán suffered from Sulb ("lumbago") and bad headache; whilst Lieutenant Yusuf was attacked by an ague and fever, which raised the mouth thermometer to 102 degrees—103 degrees, calling loudly for aconite. These ailments affected the party more or less the whole way, but it was not pleasant to see them begin so soon. When our work of collecting specimens—three tons from the Jebel el-Abyaz, and three from the Filon Husayn—was finished, I resolved upon returning to the coast and treating our loads at the Sharmá water. We reached the valley mouth on December 30th, and we greatly enjoyed the change from the harshness of the inland to the mildness of the seaboard air.
We stayed at Sharmá, much disliking its remarkably monotonous aspect, for another week, till January 7, 1878. Yule, "the wheel," despite the glorious tree-logs and roaring fires, had been a failure at the White Mountain. The Dragoman had killed our last turkey, and had forgotten to bring the plum-pudding from El-Muwaylah: there was champagne, but that is not the stuff wherewithal to wash down tough mutton. New Year's Day, on the other hand, had all the honours. Its birth was greeted with a flow of whisky-punch, wherein wine had taken the place of water; and we drank the health of his Highness, the Founder of the Expedition, in a bottle of dry Mumm. The evening ended with music and dancing, by way of "praying the Old Year out and the New Year in." Mersál, the Boruji, performed a wild solo on his bugle; and another negro, Ahmed el-Shinnáwi, played with the Nái or reed-pipe one of those monotonous and charming minor-key airs—I call them so for want of a word to express them—which extend from Midian to Trafalgar, and which find their ultimate expression in the lovely Iberian Zarzuela.[28] The boy Husayn Genínah, a small cyclops in a brown felt calotte and a huge military overcoat cut short, caused roars of laughter by his ultra-Gaditanian style of dancing. I have also reason to suspect that a jig and a breakdown tested the solidity of the plank table, while a Jew's harp represented Europe. In fact, throughout the journey, reminiscences of Mabille and the Music Halls contrasted strongly with the memories of majestic and mysterious Midian. And, to make the shock more violent, some friend, malè salsus, sent me copies of the cosmopolitan Spectator and the courteous Mayfair, which at once became waste paper for Bedawi cartridges.
Our Rosh há Shanah ("New Year's Day") was further distinguished by the discovery of a vein and outcrop of metalliferous quartz, about half an hour's walk, and bearing nearly east (80 degrees mag.) from camp. We followed the Wady Sharmá, and found above its "gate" the masonry-foundation of a square work; near it lay the graves of the Wild Men, one with the normal awning of palm-fronds honoris causâ. There were signs of stone-quarrying, and at one place a road had been cut in the rock. Leaving on the north the left side of the watercourse, with its rushes (Scirpus), and huge-headed reeds (Arundo donax), its dates and Daums—the two latter often scorched and killed by the careless Bedawi—we struck into a parallel formation, the Wady el Wuday, bone-dry and much trodden by camels. Arrived at the spot, we found that the confused masses of hill subtending the regular cliff-line of the old coast, are composed of grey granite, seamed with snowy quartz, and cut by the usual bands of bottle-coloured porphyritic trap, which here and there becomes red. Some of the heights are of greenish-yellow chloritic felspar, well adapted for brick-making. The surface of the land is scattered with fragments of white silex and fine red jasper, banded with black oligistic iron: this rock, close, hard, and fine enough to bear cutting, appears everywhere in scatters and amongst the conglomerates. Only one fossil was picked up, a mould so broken as to be quite useless.
We also followed out M. Marie's find, to which he had been guided by a patch of red matter, conspicuous on the road from Tiryam to Sharmá. For forty minutes we skirted the seaward face of the old cliff, a line broken by many deep water-gashes and buttressed by Goz, or high heaps of loose white sand. We then turned eastwards or inland, ascended a Nakb ("gorge"), and saw, as before, the corallines and carbonates of lime altered, fused, scorified, and blackened by heated injections; the grey granite scored with quartz veins, running in all rhumbs; and the porphyritic trap forming crests that projected from the sands. The cupriferous stone struck east-west, with a dip to the south; the outcrops, visible without digging, measured fifteen to twenty metres long, by one to one and a half in breadth.
New Year's Day also restored to us the pup "Páijí." When quite a babe, it had walked up to me in the streets of Cairo, evidently claimed acquaintanceship, and straightway followed me into Shepheard's, where; having a certain sneaking belief in metempsychosis, I provided it with bed and board. During our third march to the White Mountain, being given to violent yelps, which startled both mules and camels, the small thing had been left to walk, and had apparently made friends with an Arab goatherd. After nine days' absence without leave, "Páijí" reappeared, with dirty rags tied round its bony back and wasted waist, showing an admirable skeleton, and making the most frantic demonstrations of joy. The loss of the poor little brute had affected all our spirits: we thought that the hyenas and the ravens had seen the last of it; and it received a warm welcome home.
M. Lacaze, unlike the rest, took a violent fancy for the Wady Sharmá: the water-scenery enchanted him. His sketches were almost confined to the palm-growth, and to the greenery so unexpected in arid Midian, where, according to the old and exploded opinion, Moses wrote the Book of Job. The idea of Arabia is certainly not associated with flowing rills, and waving trees, and rustling zephyrs. Every morning I used to awake surprised by the song of the Naiad, the little runnel whimpling down its bed of rushes, stone, and sand; and the response of the palms making music in the land-breeze.
Finally, on New Year's Day, Lieutenant Amir, guided by Shaykh Furayj, and escorted by soldiers and miners, made a three days' trip to the Wady 'Urnub. There he surveyed a large isolated "Mará," or quartz-hill, some twenty-two to twenty-five direct miles south-east of the main outcrop; thus giving a considerable extent to the northern mining-focus. This feature is described as being four or five times larger than the Jebel el-Abyaz (proper); and the specimens of quartz and grey granite proved it to be of the same formation. It showed a broken outline, with four great steps or dykes, which had apparently been worked. In the basal valleys, and spread over the land generally, was found a heavy yellow sand, calcareous and full of silex: the guide called it Awwal Hismá (the "Hismá frontier").
Our travellers returned by a parallel line, southerly and more direct. In the Wady 'Urnub, the Ma'ázah of the Salímát clan received them with apparent kindness, inwardly grumbling the while at their land being "spied out;" and they especially welcomed Furayj, who, being a brave soldier, is also noted as a peacemaker. All the men were armed, and wore the same dress as the Huwaytát; like these, they also breed camels and asses—that is, they are not cow-Arabs. Certain travellers on the Upper Nile have distributed the Bedawin into these two groups; add horse-Arabs and ass-Arabs, and you have all the divisions of the race as connected with the so-called "lower animals." About three hours (= eleven miles) from Sharmá camp, some pyramids of sand were pointed out in the Wady Rátiyah: the Bedawin call one of them the Goz et-Hannán ("Moaning Sand-heap"). They declare that when the Hajj-caravan passes, or rather used to pass, by that way, before the early sixteenth century, when Sultán Selim laid out his maritime high-road, a Naubah ("orchestra") was wont to sound within its bowels. This tale, which, by-the-by, is told of two other places in Midian, may have been suggested by the Jebel el-Nákús ("Bell Mountain") in Sinai-land; but as the Arabs perform visitation and sacrifice to the "Moaning-heap," the superstition probably dates from ancient days. Ruins are also reported to exist in the Jebel Fa's, the southern boundary of the 'Urnub valley; and, further south, in the Jebel el-Harb, I was told by some one whose name has escaped me, of a dolmen mounted upon three supports. Lieutenant Amir also brought copper ore from the Wady 'Urnub, and from the Ras Wady el-Mukhbir specimens of a metal which the Arabs use as a kohl or collyrium. It proved, however, iron, not antimony; and the same mistake has been made in the Sinaitic Peninsula.
At Wady Sharmá we rigged up, under the superintendence of M. Philipin, a trough and a cradle for washing the black sands, the pounded quartz of the Jebel el-Abyaz, and the red sands; these latter had shown a trace of silver (1/10000) to the first Expedition. We mixed it with mercury and amalgamed it in goatskins; the men moved them to and fro; but, of course, the water evaporated, and the mass speedily became dry. The upper or superficial white yielded only, as far as our engineer could judge, a little copper and bright knobs of pyrites. The Negros, or iridized formations, of the "Filon Husayn" on a lower horizon, gave the dubious result already alluded to. All the experiments were conducted in the rudest way. Of course, a quantity of metal may have escaped notice; and a fair proportion of the powdered stone was reserved for scientific treatment in Europe.