Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/336

228 the 9th we arrived at Tor, a small straggling village, with a convent of Greek Monks, belonging to Mount Sinai. Don John de Castro * took this town when it was walled, and fortified, soon after the discovery of the Indies by the Portuguese; it has never since been of any consideration. It serves now, only as a watering-place for ships going to, and from Suez. From this we have a distinct view of the points of the mountains Horeb and Sinai, which appear behind and above the others, their tops being often covered with snow in winter.

are three things, (now I am at the north end of the Arabian Gulf,) of which the reader will expect some account, and I am heartily sorry to say, that I fear I shall be obliged to disappoint him in all, by the unsatisfactory relation I am forced to give,

first is, Whether the Red Sea is not higher than the Mediterranean, by several feet or inches? To this I answer, That the fact has been supposed to be so by antiquity, and alledged as a reason why Ptolemy's canal was made from the bottom of the Heroopolitic Gulf, rather than brought due north across the Isthmus of Suez; in which last case, it was feared it would submerge a great part of Asia Minor. But who has ever attempted to verify this by experiment? or who is capable of settling the difference of levels, amounting, as supposed, to some feet and inches, between two points 120 miles distant from each other, over a desert that has no settled surface, but is changing its height every Rh