824 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



4 



V2 inch, while in Upper Egypt the precipitation of moisture is far 

 less ; there are adults who say they have never seen rain. 



I noticed, on the other hand, unmistakable signs of recent 

 rains, such as dried mud-puddles, rain-drop prints, etc., at several 

 points, near Cairo, east of Thebes (Wadi Bab-el-Molook), and in 

 the peninsula of Sinai, and I was impressed with the belief that 

 more rain falls in Egypt than is usually supposed. A local 

 shower passing over a sandy, gravelly region, makes but little 

 impress on it ; and there is no corps of trained observers, out- 

 side of Cairo and Alexandria, to record the phenomenon. On 

 visiting the Khedivial Astronomical Observatory just out of 

 Cairo, I was cordially received by the director, Mr. T. Esmatt, 

 a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris, and for three 

 years an assistant in the Naval Observatory at "Washington. 

 I take pleasure in mentioning his politeness and courtesy, but I 

 can not omit pointing out a weakness : he took me to the roof of 

 the building to see the meteorological instruments, and I noted 

 that the rain-gauge was quite full of water ; this again gave me 

 reason to regard Egypt as a rainy country. (The last shower fell 

 one month previously.) 



During my journey in the desert (March 13th to April 8th) 

 rain fell three times in my vicinity : twice the fall was insignifi- 

 cant, lasting only two or three minutes, but on March 19th rain 

 fell abundantly in Wadi Feiran, from 7.15 a. m. to 9.30 a. m. 

 Heavy mists had obscured the peaks bordering this extensive 

 valley nearly all the preceding day ; the temperature during this 

 rainfall was 52, elevation about nineteen hundred feet. 



That heavy falls of rain and even of snow occur in December 

 and January in the Sinai region, is reported by many travelers ; in 

 the defile of Nakb-el-Hawi (five thousand feet), crossed by pilgrims 

 en route for the sacred mountain, the winter rains make veritable 

 torrents ; in 1867 the water rose to such a height in the valley ad- 

 joining, Wadi Selaf, as to wash away a camp of Bedouins, causing 

 a loss of forty lives and of numerous cattle (Baedeker). Captain 

 Palmer describes also a sudden precipitation so copious as to fill 

 the bottom of Wadi Feiran to the depth of several feet, causing 

 the party to seek high ground. That the Oasis of Feiran was 

 once the site of a village of anchorites and monks sufficiently im- 

 portant to become an episcopal see, is known to students of his- 

 tory ; this was in the second to the sixth century a. d. A few cut 

 stones, the capital of one column, and ruined sites, alone remain 

 to indicate the locality. 



Powerful winds sweep across the plains and through the val- 

 leys of Arabia Petrsea, with a violence and continuity that I have 

 not elsewhere experienced. In the spring months the prevail- 

 ing wind in the desert is from the north and northwest, down 



