The Israelites Track from the Red Sea to Mount Sinai

by Algernon Blackwood

To visit the Holy Land is a risk that many people prefer not to run; they would rather keep the picture of Jerusalem in their minds than witness the degradation of an ideal Jerusalem where humbug preys upon credulity at so many shillings per “holy site.” Indeed, the faith and ignorance of a Russian pilgrim seem necessary if one would retain unspoilt the childhood’s glamour of many scenes of scriptural association. In spite of drawbacks, however, the ever-increasing facilities of travel draw thousands and thousands to Palestine, many of whom return with faith stimulated and imagination strangely vivified. For the danger of disillusion is confined more or lest to the cities, whose vulgar modernisation so utterly destroys any glamour of the past. The country, the atmosphere, the climate remain unchanged. To follow the route of the Israelitish Exodus, for instance, challenges comparison less crudely. To visit the scenes of the Forty Years’ Wandering in the Wilderness, as Mr. Sutton did⁠—My Camel Ride from Suez to Mount Sinai (Century Press) apparently holds less risk of disillusionment. For the Desert does not change; the granite peak of Sinai may have crumbled, but it has not yet a funicular railway to bring it up to date; and no tramway line makes convenient, though hideous, the desolate shores of the wonderful Red Sea.

With a thrill of reverent awe, most artlessly confessed to, he looked upon the rock that Moses smote for water, the slope where grew the brilliant Burning Bush, the grey, waste plain where the Golden Calf enflamed the idolators, and the bleak, limestone heights whence Moses watched the battle against the Amalekites while Aaron and Hur held up his aching arms. With the eyes of the spirit he saw all this seeking guidance nightly in his tent with prayer. He saw it, as Stephen Graham saw the Russian Pilgrims at Jerusalem, from within. And, being thus in the proper devotional frame of mind, his simple account of it reconstructs the past as no critical or scientific report could possibly do. Readers can realise what the Children of Israel felt⁠—their impatience, their boredom, their weary limbs, their cursing and despair in all the desolate encampments on the way.

Mr. Sutton followed the actual route, as Dean Stanley did in 1853, and his account claims only to be “jottings from my diary” and were made from day to day without any thought of publication; so, while the narrative seems colourless, and often naive, its lack of picturesque detail is amply atoned for by the sixty-six full-page photographs which give a mast vivid idea of what the fortnight’s journey on camel-back involved. From Cairo by train to Ismalia, thence to Suez and across the Red Sea from the Valley Of Moses, some eight miles down the coast⁠—and then, by easy camps, always prepared in advance by Cook’s dragoman, to Mount Sinai and its monastery. A good map shows the route, while the brief description and the striking photographs persuade the reader that he has almost witnessed a swift cinematograph performance. Formalities were considerable, it seems; a permit from the War Office had to be obtained, while the necessary camels and Bedouin for the journey were engaged by contract from no less a personage than the Archbishop of Sinai! All the Arab tribes, from Suez to Sinai, are under the control of the Sinai convent, each tribe in turn supplying travellers with camels. The dragoman, in this instance, was typical of his race, and the actual start was attended with as many difficulties and delays as those the Israelites themselves experienced. For Mr. Sutton made the mistake of believing that when Iesa said a thing was done, it had been done!

From the journey itself one gets a vivid impression of a desolate and howling wilderness, “howling” with wind, not savage animals; of waterless wadis, unbroken by any sign of plant or creature life, their sandy floors strewn with gigantic boulders that earthquakes have shaken down from the surrounding peaks; of occasional delightful oases where the wells, though sometimes brackish, were plentifully filled; of crystal atmosphere, fierce heat, and gorgeous sunsets. The temperature varied between 45 deg. Fahr. and 104 deg. Fahr.; often the track (made by camels only) was flat enough to allow a motorcar to travel smoothly; the average camel pace was three miles an hour, and Mr. Sutton calculated that his mount performed “a uniform five thousand swayings backwards and forwards per hour,” involving much muscular inconvenience to a rider who had never been on camel back before. From little details such as these the reader pictures the daily trek and thinks of the host of weary Israelites on foot, with insufficient food, harassed by Amalekites and other disagreeable people, and blaming their leader for leaving behind the tempting fleshpots of their Egyptian slavery.

The loneliness was, of course, complete, an occasional Bedouin being the only humanity the little party encountered, except once, when, nearing Sinai, they came across two Englishmen sleeping in the open without tents or retinue, while they hunted for turquoises and kept a weather eye alert for ibex. One has a longing to know more about these two lonely Englishmen on their adventurous quest, but information ts not forthcoming.

The mountains stand out boldly on this trip⁠—not only the great bleak range of Sinai, but other hills as well, with naked ridges, gaunt cliffs and peaks of extraordinary formation. The colouring was most striking. Red granite mountains in the glory of the desert dawn must be seen to be believed; but it was the limestone strata that provided the weirdest framework of this desolate wilderness, For the limestone varied between yellow and brilliant whitish yellow to deep, forbidding black (“like refuse from a coal mine”) where it has been calcined, and when the sunset bathed it all in the amazing splendours of fiery light, the effect was strange and terrible.

The afterglow in desert country can neither be painted nor described. The granite and limestone, too, were varied sometimes by veins of red-brown porphyry, black diorite, and glittering slabs of gypsum, transparent as crystal. There was certainly no lack of brilliant colouring to make up for the comforting greens of absent foliage, while at might in moonlight the effect was of some enchanted fairyland of purest silver. And in this setting Mr. Sutton reconstructed for his inner eye the procession of the great Jewish host, the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, the route by which Moses descended from communing with his Deity, smashing the tables of stone and strewing the powdered fragments “on the surface of the brook which descends from a spring on the western slopes of the Sufsafa.” Beneath the “Mountain of Conversation” in the Wadi Feiran, which by Arab tradition is the mountain where God conversed with Moses, the Arabs still sacrifice to the memory of the Hebrew prophet, “O mountain of the conversation of Moses we seek thy favour! Preserve thy good people and we will visit thee every year.”

The account of the visit to the Monastery of Sinai at their journey’s end is interesting reading. They were courteously received by the monks, who now number only twenty-five instead of, as formerly, four hondred, and pitched their tent in a convenient spot outside. After attending a service in modern Greek, “three of the monks called and joined us at tea, when we had a most interesting talk with them about evangelising their Muslim ‘slaves,’ i.e., descendants of one hundred Roman and one hundred Egyptian slaves, presented to the Monastery by Justinian in the sixth century. They said that up till the English rule in Egypt their lives were in danger, one of the monks having been shot through the chapel window while celebrating Mass. Now, thanks to the English, all the country was peaceful and quiet, but yet they had not dared to mention Christianity to their Muslim dependents for fear of raising antagonism.” A visit to the Charnel House is also mentioned, where the bones of the monks lie carefully piled up since the sixth century, but the bishops’ bones are kept in boxes apart.

At the beginning of the book there is an interesting discussion of the various routes by which it is suggested the escaping Israelites crossed the Red Sea, and at the end, in an Appendix, the author gives an estimate of the actual number of the host. He apparently agrees with Dr., Hoskins of the American Mission, Beyrout, and author of From the Nile to Nebo, that the estimate of 100,000 souls is most probably the correct one, The problem of feeding such an army in the desert Mr. Sutton describes might be of a kind to tempt the genius of Lord Kitchener!