PREFACE.

SINAI and HOREB are names too well-known to all who read their Bibles, not to excite the most vivid curiosity respecting the localities which were chosen for the visible manifestations of Jehovah's Omnipotence. The reader will find that the description of these sublime mountains is an instructive commentary on the narrative of the inspired legislator of the chosen people. Indeed, every new visit to the East, all the fresh discoveries of its monuments, tend more and more to illustrate the incidents, and to confirm the veracity of the Old Testament.

The two volumes which are here condensed into one, were recommended to the notice of the translator by one of the most enlightened travellers that ever visited the East, as the most graphic description of oriental habits, and the best calculated to give "stay-at-home travellers" a correct notion of the manners and usages of the people who now inhabit the interesting regions visited by the author.

A further recommendation was the attention with which M. Dumas had examined those localities in the peninsula of Sinai, which were the scenes of the most awful events recorded in Holy Writ. But mixed with abundant excellence, the translator found much that was merely calculated to gratify French vanity, and something that was objectionable to English taste. He has therefore omitted the historical disquisitions respecting Buonaparte's expedition to Egypt, the assassination of Kleber, and the crusade of St. Louis, which were contributed by M. Dauzats, and served to swell the work work unnecessarily.

W. C. T.

LONDON, May 15, 1839.

EGYPT AND SINAI.

I. ALEXANDRIA.

On the 22nd of April, 1836, about six in the evening, we were interrupted during our dinner, by the cry of Land, land, raised on board the brig Lancier, which conveyed Messrs. Taylor, Mayer, and me-to Egypt. We hastily scrambled on deck, and under the last rays of the setting sun, saluted the ancient country of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies.

Alexandria is a sandy flat, an immense golden ribbon extended along the water's edge; at its extreme left, like the horn of a crescent, a point juts out, which you may call either Canopus or Aboukir, according as your thoughts turn on the defeat of Marc Antony or the victory of Murat. Near the town stand Pompey's pillar and Cleopatra's needle, the only relics of the Macedonian city. Between these two monuments, near a grove of palm-trees, is the palace of the viceroy, a wretched white edifice built by Italian architects. Finally, at the other side of the port is an immense square tower erected by the Arabs, at the foot of which Napoleon and

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his army disembarked. With respect to Alexandria, this ancient queen of Lower Egypt, ashamed no doubt of its slavery, conceals itself behind the waves of the desert, in the midst of which it rises like an island of stone in an ocean of sand.

All this prospect arose successively from the sea, as it were by magic, in proportion as we neared the shore; nevertheless we had not exchanged one word, so full were our minds of thought and our hearts of joy. One should be an artist,-should have long dreamed of such a voyage,-should have touched, as we had done, at Palermo and Malta, the two stages of the East,-then at the close of a lovely day, with a calm sea, amid the joyous cries of the sailors, should have seen appear in a horizon illumined as it were with the flame of a conflagration, naked and scorched, this ancient land of Egypt, the mysterious ancestor of the intellectual world, to which it has bequeathed as an enigma, the undiscoverable secret of its civilization. One must have seen all this, I say, with eyes wearied by Paris, to comprehend what we felt at the aspect of this coast, which resembles no other shore on the earth.

We only came to ourselves when we thought it necessary to make preparations for landing; but Captain Bellanger stopped us, smiling at our haste. The night, which so rapidly descends from heaven in eastern climates, was already beginning to dim