Geology of Mount Sinai and the adjacent Countries. 203 
all consisting of similar terrific masses of granite, wildly up- 
thrown from beneath by some awful convulsion, each capped 
with a similarly rounded weather-beaten summit, and each 
with the same precipitous sides. The appearance of the 
mountain itself was fearfully sublime, and the view from it, 
except where its intervening crags formed an impediment, 
all but boundless—the whole Peninsula lay at our feet. 
Though hazy, we could see very far up the Red Sea, towards 
Suez, making out different points of our route, and we looked 
across it far into the Egyptian Desert. Tur, and the coast 
downwards. also appeared through a cleft. The stern and 
steril mountains of the Peninsula lay below us, an intricate 
labyrinth, a confused sea of many coloured peaks, black, 
brown, red, and grey, with here and there a narrow valley of 
bright yellow sand, peeping through, Wadi-el-Sheikh being 
the most conspicuous opening; beyond these arose, irregu- 
- larly, the plateaux of the Great Desert and the ranges of El 
Tyh, which support it, all fading away into a misty heat, but 
for which the hills of Palestine might perhaps have been seen 
in the remotest distance. The solitudes of (the present) Sinai, 
a darker, bolder congregation of wild peaks lay to the right, 
stern and black, and awful in colouring, and cut off all view 
of the Gulf of Akaba in this direction. Nothing could be 
more desolate than the vast region, over which floated the 
scorching haze beneath us, from east to west, from north to 
south ; mountains, plains, valleys, and sea, formed by the 
slow abrasions and depositions of ages, and then fractured 
and up-heaved by the agency of fire, or protruded in molten 
masses through fissures thus created, seemed stamped by na- 
ture with eternal barrenness, and unfit for human habitation.’’* 
Having come back to the coast, a little north of Burdes, 
where red and yellow sandstone rocks are seen, then marine 
sand, grayel, and stones, extend from the low point Ras 
Burdes round the headland Ras Gihan close along the shore ; 
from the former point, the chain of the Araba mountains 
runs to the south, a little beyond the latter Ras. This pro- 
minent chain is of the same secondary or cretaceous lime- 
* Horty days in the Desert, p. 64. 
