Maumee Express

MOUNT SINAI.

From Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, &c. By an American.

* * * * At eight o'clock I was breakfasting: the superior was again offering all that the convent could give, and urging me to stay a month, a fortnight, a week, at least to spend that day with him, and repose myself after the fatigues of my journey; but from the door of the little room in which I sat I saw the holy mountain, and I longed to stand on its lofty summit. Though feeble and far from well, I felt the blood of health again coursing through my veins, and congratulated myself that I was not so hackneyed in feeling as I had once supposed. I found, and I was happy to find, for the prospective enjoyment of my farther journey, that the first tangible monument in the history of the bible, the first spot that could be called holy ground, raised in me feeling that had not been awakened by the most classic ground of Italy and Greece, or the proudest monuments of the arts in Egypt.

Continuing our ascent, the old monk still leading the way, in about a quarter of an hour we came to a table of a rock standing boldly out, and running down almost perpendicular an immense distance to the valley. I was expecting another monkish legend, and my very heart thrilled when the monk told me it was the top of the hill on which Moses had sat during the battle of the Israelites and the Amalekites while Aaron and Hur supported his uplifted hands, until the sun went down upon the victorious arms of his people. From the height I could see, clearly and distinctly, every part of the battle-ground, and the whole vale of Rephidim and the mountains beyond; and Moses while on this spot, must have been visible to the contending from every part of the field on which they were engaged.

I stand upon the peak of Sinai—where Moses stood when he talked with the Almighty. can it be, or is it a mere dream? Can this naked rock have been the witness of that great interview between man and his Maker? where amid thunder and lightning, and a fearful quaking of the mountain, the Almighty gave to his chosen people the precious tables of his law those rules of infinite wisdom and goodness, which to this day, best teach man his duty towards his God, his neighbor, and himself!

The scenes of many of the incidents recorded in the Bible are extremely uncertain. Historians and geographers place the Garden of Eden, the paradise of our first parents, in different parts of Asia; and they do not agree upon the site of the Tower of Babel, the mountain of Ararat, and many of the most interesting places in the Holy Land; and among all the stupendous works of Nature, not a place can be selected more fitted for the exhibition of Almighty power. I have stood upon the summit of the giant Etna, and looked over the floating clouds beneath it, upon the bold scenery of Sicily, and the distant mountains of Calabria; upon the top of Vesuvius, and looked down upon the waves of lava, and the ruined and half recovered cities at its foot; but they are nothing compared with the terrific solitudes and bleak majesty of Sinai. An observing traveller has well called it "a perfect sea of desolation." Not a tree, or shrub, or blade of grass is seen upon the bare and rugged sides of innumerable mountains, heaving their naked summits to the skies, while the crumbling masses of granite all around, and distant view of the Syrian desert, with its boundless waste of sands from the wildest and most dreary, the most terrific and desolate picture that imagination can conceive.

The level surface of the very top, or pinnacle is about sixty feet square. At one end is a single rock about twenty feet high, on which, as said the monk, the spirit of God descended, while in the crevice beneath his servant received the tables of the law, I here, on the same spot where they were given, opened the sacred book in which those laws are recorded, and read them with a deeper interest of devotion, as if I were standing nearer and receiving them more directly from the Deity himself.