long, pointed with steel at both ends; his brother, too, wore a silk gown, and carried pistols and sword, and the rest were armed with swords and matchlock guns, and wore the common Bedouin dress-some of them almost no dress at all. We had moved some distance from the fortress without a word being uttered, for they neither spoke to me nor with each other. I was in no humour for talking myself, but it was unpleasant to have more than a dozen men around, all bending their keen eyes upon me, and not one of them uttering a word. With a view to making some approach to acquaintance, and removing their jealousy of me as a stranger, I asked some casual question about the road; but I might better have held my peace; for it seemed that I could not well have hit upon a subject more displeasing. My amiable companions looked as black as midnight, and one of them, a particularly swarthy and truculent-looking fellow, turned short round, and told me that I had too much curiosity, and that he did not understand what right a Christian had to come there and hunt out their villages, take down their names, &c. But the sheik came in as mediator, and told them that I was a good man, that he had been to my house in Cairo, and that I was no spy; and so this cloud passed off. I did not mean to go far that afternoon, for I had left the fortress merely to get rid of the crowd, and return to fresh air and quiet; and in less than an hour I again pitched my tent in the desert. Finding plenty of brush, we kindled a large fire, QUESTIONABLE PIETY. 43 and all sat down around it. It was a great object with me to establish myself on a good footing with my companions at the outset, and more fortunate on my second attempt, before one round of coffee and pipes was over, the sheik turned to me, and, with all the extravagance of Eastern hyperbole, said he thanked God for having permitted us again to see each other's face, and that I had been recovering since I saw his face; and, turning his eyes to heaven, with an expression of deep and confiding piety, he added, "God grant that you may soon become a strong man ;" and then the others all took their pipes from their mouths, and turning up their eyes to heaven, the whole band of breechless desperadoes added, "Wullah-Wullah"-God grant it. CHAPTER III. Prophecy and Fulfilment.-Unpleasant Suggestions.-The De- I HAD now crossed the borders of Edom. Standing near the shore of the Elanitic branch of the Red Sea, the doomed and accursed land lay stretched out before me, the theatre of awful prophecies and their more awful fulfilment; given to Esau as being of the fatness of the earth, but now a barren waste, a picture of death, an eternal monument of the wrath of an offended God, and a fearful witness to the truth of the words spoken by his prophets. "For my sword shall be bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my curse, to judgment." "From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness. They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and PROPHECY AND FULFILMENT. 45 brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be a habitation of dragons, and a court for owls. The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech-owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate. Seek ye out the book of the Lord, and read: no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them. And he hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided it unto them by line: they shall possess it for ever, from generation to generation shall they dwell therein." Isaiah xxxiv. I read in the sacred book prophecy upon prophecy, and curse upon curse against the very land on which I stood. I was about to journey through this land, and to see with my own eyes whether the Almighty had stayed his uplifted arm, or whether his sword had indeed come down “ upon Idumea and the people of his curse to judgment." I have before referred to Keith on the Prophecies, where, in illustrating the fulfilment of the prophecies against Idumea, "none shall pass through it for ever and ever," after referring to the singular fact that the great caravan routes existing in the days of David and Solomon, and under the Roman empire, are now completely broken up, and that the great hadji routes to Mecca from Damascus VOL. II.-B and Cairo, lie along the borders of Idumea, barely touching at and not passing through it, he proves by abundant references that to this day no traveller has ever passed through the land. The Bedouins who roam over the land of Idumea have been described by travellers as the worst of their race. "The Arabs about Akaba," says Pococke," are a very bad people and notori. ous robbers, and are at war with all others." Mr. Joliffe alludes to it as one of the wildest and most dangerous divisions of Arabia; and Burckhardt says, "that for the first time he had ever felt fear during his travels in the desert, and his route was the most dangerous he had ever travelled," that he had "nothing with him that could attract the notice or excite the cupidity of the Bedouins," and was "even stripped of some rags that covered his wounded ankles." Messrs. Legh and Banks, and Captains Irby and Mangles, were told that the Arabs of Wady Moussa, the tribe which formed my escort, were a most savage and treacherous race, and that they would use their Frank's blood for a medicine;" and they learned on the spot that " upwards of thirty pilgrims from Barbary had been murdered at Petra the preceding year, by the men of Wady Moussa ;" and they speak of the opposition and obstruction from the Bedouins as resembling the case of the Israelites under Moses, when Edom refused to give them passage through his country. None of these had passed through it, and unless the two Englishmen and Italian, before referred to, |