Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/123

 

ON THE TOP OF MOUNT SINAI.

When we reached the Convent, I felt that I was "dead," and should leave my bones with those of the Israelites that fell in the wilderness; but the next morning, when the sun crept in through the iron bars of my window, I awoke with a dreamy sort of feeling, as half in doubt where or what I was. A Convent is a ghostly place, and one may easily get a feeling as if he were a pale wanderer in the shades below. Several times in the night I had been awaked by a deep sepulchral sound. It was not the Convent bell, but a stroke on a heavy bar of iron, which called the monks to prayer. This added to the strangeness of the place, so that whether I was in the body or out of the body, I could not tell. But daylight scatters the ghosts that have come about us in the night, so that when the sun was fully risen, I began slowly to come back to this world; and as I looked out of the window, and saw the camels lying in the yard of the Convent, I realized at last that we were at the foot of Mount Sinai, whose top we hoped to reach that very day.

It was nearly nine o'clock when we mounted and filed slowly out of the arched gateway. Our path led round to the rear of the Convent. At the end of the valley is a conical hill, on which it is said that Mahomet once had an audience with God; for the Moslems will have it that their Prophet was in no wise inferior to Moses. It is quite possible that the tradition is true, that in his youth, when a mere camel-driver, he wandered among these hills, and