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 of prudence, and yielding to his passion for collecting plants and other curiosities, lagged behind, or wandered from the caravan. Scarcely, however, had he tasted the sweets of feeling himself alone in the boundless wilderness, a pleasure more poignant and tumultuous than can be conceived by those who have never experienced it, than he beheld three robbers start up, as it were, from the sand, and rush upon him. Resistance was out of the question. The ruffians immediately seized him, and tearing off his clothes, mean and ragged as they were, two of them began to fight for the possession of them. Meanwhile he stood by, naked, a spectator of the fray, apprehensive that their natural ferocity being aggravated by strife and contention, they might terminate their quarrel by plunging their daggers in his heart. Providence, however, had otherwise determined. The third robber, taking compassion upon his forlorn and helpless condition, allowed him to escape; and after wandering about among the naked rocks and burning sands for some time, he fortunately overtook the caravan.

For several days the sky, as I have already observed, was serene, and the weather beautiful; but on their arriving at Wady Gharendel, a small stream which flows into the Red Sea, a few leagues south of Suez, they observed that the tops of the mountains, which now flanked their road on both sides, were at intervals capped with clouds, which sometimes remained stationary during the whole day. This disposition of the atmosphere was soon after succeeded by a violent tempest. A canopy of dark clouds extended itself over the earth—the lightning flashed incessantly—the thunder rolled along the sky—and the rain descended throughout the night with all the weight and fury of a tropical storm. Such tempests, however, are exceedingly rare in that part of Arabia, though they are not, as Burckhardt observes, at all uncommon in the Hejaz; nor, ac