Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/34

 though there were several large troughs for the convenience of watering cattle, it was not considered wholesome, and the people of the neighbourhood preferred the waters of the Ain el Mousa, or "Fountain of Moses," two leagues east of the city, which are lukewarm and sulphureous, and spout up like an artificial fountain from the earth,—a circumstance which Dr. Shaw thinks is no other way to be accounted for than by deducing their origin from the "great abyss!" The distance between Cairo and Suez is about ninety Roman miles, which the Israelites, according to Josephus, though the Scriptures are silent on the subject, traversed in three days, which, considering that they were encumbered with aged persons and children, Dr. Shaw thinks exceedingly improbable. The time employed in his own traject he does not mention; but observes that upon every little eminence on the road, as well as in the mountains of Libya near Egypt, great quantities of echini, as well as of bivalve and turbinated shells, were to be found, most of which corresponded exactly with their respective families still preserved in the Red Sea. The old walls of Suez, as well as the ruins of the village of Ain el Mousa, are full of fossil shells, which, as Xenophon remarks in the Anabasis, was the case with the walls of certain castles on the confines of Curdistan.

Having turned the point of the Red Sea at Suez, they proceeded towards the south, having the sea on their right, and the broken plain of the desert on the left. In the tongue of land improperly called the "Peninsula of Mount Sinai," lying between the Sea of Suez and the Gulf of Akaba, over which they were now moving, the danger, while the whole caravan kept together, was not great, as opportunities of plunder being unfrequent, robbers had not sufficient motives for establishing themselves there. The chances of danger being thus diminished, our traveller became imboldened to overstep the limits