After marching about six miles, we entered a gorge called Umm el-Bíbán, "the Mother of Gates," formed by the stony spurs of the Wady bank: the number of birds and trees, especially in the syenitic valleys, showed that water could not be far off. At 10.10 a.m. a halt was called at the half-way place, a bay or hollow in the left cliff, El-Humayrah—"the Little Red"—an overhanging wall of ruddy grit some eighty feet high, with strata varying in depth from a few lines to as many fathoms, all differing in colour, and all honeycombed, fretted, and sculptured by wind and rain. Above the red grit, weathered into a thousand queer shapes, stood strata of chloritic sand, a pale yellow-green, and capping it rose the usual dull-brown carbonate of lime. Large fossil oysters lay in numbers about the base, suggesting a prehistoric feast of the Titans. Amongst them is the monstrous Tridacna (gigantea), which sometimes attains a growth of a yard and a half; one of these is used as a bénitier at the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. Amongst the layers were wavy bands of water-rolled crystals, jaspers, bloodstones, iron-revetted pebbles, and "almonds," which, in the Brazil, accompany and betray the diamond.[101] We had no time to make a serious search; but, when the metals shall be worked, it will, perhaps, be advisable to import a skilled prospecter from the Brazil or the Cape of Good Hope.
At noon we met the "heaven-sent, life-sustaining sea-breeze;" and now the broad and well-marked Wady Makná, with its rosy-pink sands, narrowed to a gut, flanked and choked on both sides, north and south, by rocks of the strangest tricolour, green-black, yellow-white, and rusty-red. The gloomy peak, which had long appeared capping the heights ahead, proved to be the culmination of a huge upthrust of porphyritic trap. Bottle-green when seen under certain angles, and dull dead sable at others, it was variegated by cliffs and slopes polished like dark mirrors, and by sooty sand-shunts disposed at the natural slope. Crumbling outside, the lower strata pass from the cellular to the compact, and are often metalliferous when in contact with the quartz: at these Salbandes the richest mineral deposits are always found. Set in and on the black flanks, and looking from afar like the gouts of a bloodstone, are horizontal beds, perpendicular spines, and detached blocks of felsitic porphyry and of rusty-red syenite, altered, broken, and burnt by plutonic heat. In places, where the trap has cut through the more modern formations, it has been degraded by time from a dyke to a ditch, the latter walled by the ruddy rocks, and sharply cut as a castle-moat. And already we could see, on the right of the Wady, those cones and crests of ghastly, glaring white gypsum, which we had called "the Hats."
These gloomy cliffs, approaching the maritime plain, sweep away to the south, and melt into the "Red Hills" visited on our first excursion. They are known as the Jebel el-'Abdayn—"of the Two Slaves:" this, perhaps, is the Doric pronunciation of the Bedawin for Abdín—"slaves." Presently we sighted the familiar features of the seaboard, described in my first volume, especially the Rughámat el-Margas to the north; and westward the Gulf of 'Akabah, looking cool and blue in the Arabian glare. After five hours and thirty minutes (= seventeen miles and a half) in the saddle we reached Makná.
I had thought of encamping near the "Praying-place of Moses," a fine breezy site which storms would have made untenable. As at Sharmá, camels must turn off to the right over the banks when approaching the mouth of the Wady Madyan, whose bed is made impassable by rocks and palm-thicket. We then proposed to pitch the tents upon the valley sands within the "Gate," but this was overruled by the Sayyid, who told grisly tales of fever and ague. Finally, we returned to our former ground, near the old conglomerates and the mass of new shells, which ledge the shore of the little harbour. Approaching it, we were delighted to see the gunboat Mukhbir steaming up, despite the contrary wind, from Sharm Yáhárr; she was towing the Sambúk, which brought from 'Aynúnah Bay our heavy gear, rations, and tools. This was a stroke of good luck: already we were on half rations, and provant for men and mules threatened to run short.
Our week at Makná (January 25—February 2) justified the pleasant impression left by the first visit, and enabled us to correct the inaccuracies of a flying survey.
This "Valley of Waters," with its pink and yellow (chloritic) sands, is bounded on the right near the sea by a sandbank about one hundred feet high, a loose sheet thinly covering the dykes of syenite and the porphyritic trap which in places peep out. Possibly it contains, like the left flank, veins of quartz, lowered by corrosion, and concealed by the sand-drift spread by the prevalent western winds. The high-level abounds in detached springs, probably the drainage of the Rughámat Makná, the huge "horse" or buttress of gypsum bearing north-east from the harbour. The principal veins number three. The uppermost and sweetest is the Ayn el-Tabbákhah; in the middle height is El-Túyuri (Umm el-Tuyúr), with the dwarf cataract and its tinkling song; whilst the brackish 'Ayn el-Fara'í occupies the valley sole. Besides these a streak of palms, perpendicular to the run of the Wady, shows a rain-basin, dry during the droughts, and, higher up, the outlying dates springing from the arid sands, are fed by thin veins which damp the rocky base. Hence, probably, Dr. Beke identified the place with the "Elim" of the Exodus: his artist's sketch from the sea (p. 340) is, however, absolutely unrecognizable.
The high-level spring and the middle water rise in sandy basins; course down deeply furrowed beds of grit; and, after passing through a tangle of vegetation, a dense forest of palms, alive and dead, and open patches sown with grain, wilfully waste their treasures in the upper slope of the right bank. This abundance of water has developed a certain amount of industry; although the Bedawin tear to pieces the young male-dates, whose tender green growth, at the base of the fronds, supplies them with a "chaw." A number of artificial runners has been trained to water dwarf barley-plots, whose fences of date-fronds defend them from sheep and goats; and further down the bank are the fruit trees which first attracted our attention.
The low-level water consists of two springs. The upper is the 'Ayn el-'Aryánah, springing from the sands under the date-trees which line the right and left sides: apparently it is the drainage of a gypsum "hat," called El-Kulayb, "the Little Dog"—in their Doric the Bedawin pronounce the word Galáib. Further down the bed, and divided by a tract of dry sand, is the 'Ayn el-Fara'i, which also rises from both banks, forms a single stream, sleeps in deep pellucid pools like fairy baths among the huge boulders of grey granite, and finally sinks before reaching the shore. When these waters shall again be regulated, as of old, they will prove amply sufficient for the vegetable and the mineral. Anton, the Greek, who everywhere saw the shop, was so charmed with the spot, that he at once laid out his establishment: here shall be the hotel; there the billiard and gambling room, and there the garden, the kiosk, the buvette—in fact, he projected a miner's paradise.
On the crest of this right bank, above the vegetation, lies the traditional Musallat Musá ("Moses' Oratory"), of which the foundations, or rather the base-stones, are in situ. The larger enceinte measures, without including two walls projecting from the north-east and north-west angles, an oblong of thirty-seven by twenty-five feet; and, as usual with Midianite ruins, it has been built of all manner of material. The inner sanctum opens to the west, the northern and southern basement-lines only remaining: the former is composed of eight blocks of gypsum resembling alabaster, five being larger than the others; and the southern of three. Upon these the Bedawin still deposit their simple ex-votos, oyster and other shells, potsherds, and coloured pebbles.[102]
The left or opposite bank, which wants water, is formed by the tall conglomerate-capped cliffs, which support the "Muttali'" or hauteville, and by the warty block called Jebel el-Fahísát. In "The Gold-Mines of Midian" (Chap. XII.) it is called El-Muzayndi, an error of my informants for El-Muzeúdi: the latter is the name of the small red hill north of our camp. I again visited the high town, which is about a hundred feet above the valley: presently it will disappear bodily, as its base is being corroded, like the Jebel el-Safrá of Magháir Shu'ayb. The walls still standing form a long room running north-south; and the two adjoining closets set off to the north-east and south-east. This sadly shrunken upper settlement covers the remnant of the rocky plateau to the east: there are also traces of building on the southern slopes. Ruined heaps of the usual material, gypsum, dot and line the short broad valley to the north, which rejoices in the neat and handy name, Wady Majrá Sayl Jebel el-Marú. Here, however, they are hardly to be distinguished from the chloritic spines and natural sandbanks that stud the bed. The only antiquities found in the "Muttali"' were a stone cut into parallel bands, and the fragment of a basalt door with its pivot acting as hinge in the upper part: it reminded me of the Græco-Roman townlets in the Haurán, where the credulous discovered "giant Cities" and similar ineptitudes. Our search for Midianite money was in vain; Mr. Clarke, however, picked up, near the sea, a silver "Taymúr," the Moghal, with a curiously twisted Kufic inscription. (A.H. 734).