Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/137

 Buddha was born! The ingenuity of unbelief must devise some other explanation. It is enough for us, as we come down from the Mount, to accept reverently the assurance that the Law which Moses gave to the Hebrews was written with the finger of God on tables of stone.

Such thoughts, suggested by such sights, gave a sacred interest to the hours that we stood on Mount Sinai, and filed our minds with a strange wonder as we left that hoary summit. We sent back the camels, and came down by a more direct but more precipitous descent, through the Valley of Jethro, so called because half way down the mountain, under a projecting rock, is a perpetual spring which bears that name. To this point no doubt Moses often climbed when he watched the flocks of Jethro, and sat for hours beneath the shade of the rock beside the cooling spring, and perhaps found the same graceful ferns that grow there still. In the association of everything about Sinai with the great Hebrew Lawgiver, it is pleasant to know that nature remains unchanged. These granite cliffs do not wear away by time, or but slowly in the lapse of ages. So the fern still grows, and the water flows, and we may gather to-day from the dripping rocks the same delicate maiden's hair which Moses gathered for the daughter of Jethro more than three thousand years ago.