Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/98

 their masters. If, in the times before our civil war, two millions of slaves had risen up in the night, and made an exodus from the South, their "house of bondage"; and if, in order to find a refuge far away — a lodge in some vast wilderness, where they could enjoy their freedom, with none to molest or make them afraid — they had started for some remote and almost uninhabited region of Northern Mexico; and, when marching on in great battalions, with their wives and little children, had been stopped in their progress by bands of Apache Indians; would it have been a great wrong for them to force their way?

Let the assailants of Moses sneer as they will. The more I see of the desert, the more the miracle of the Exodus grows upon me, and the more profound the reverence I feel for that stern old Hebrew Cromwell, who was the leader of the Israelites in that great crisis of their history. In all our marches the past week, that presence has never been absent. The figure of Moses is the one great figure which gives supreme interest to this land of desolation. When we pass through deep mountain gorges, the cliffs on either hand take on a new interest as I think that they have looked upon Moses as he passed by, perhaps with a countenance grave and downcast, bearing the burden of a nation on his mighty heart. Often doubtless did he lie down in these dark mountain recesses, with only a stone for a pillow, and look up to the stars shining in this clear Arabian sky, and wonder if the God whom he worshipped would carry him through. In the battle which was fought on this ground more than three thousand years ago, it was not only the Israelites fighting with the Amalekites: it was the battle of civilization with barbarism. Never was a truer, as well as more eloquent saying than that of a great student of history, Bunsen: that "History was born on the night when Moses led the Israelites out of the land