ASCENT OF THE LOWER RANGE OF SINAI. 
The whole career of the Israelites, from the passage of the Red Sea to their entrance 
into Palestine, was a display of miracle. Yet, such is the Divine adherence to the 
great law of free agency, that even Miracle was regulated by its action. The Divine 
Will might, obviously, at a word have transformed the native stiff-neckedness of the 
Israelite into perfect obedience, have extinguished his recollections alike of Egyptian 
enjoyment and Egyptian idolatry, and sent him at once into Palestine as its consecrated 
possessor. But those essential results, instead of being the work of Miracle, were 
left to be the work of Time. The nation was retained in the Wilderness until all 
the elder race had disappeared in the course of nature; until the recollections of their 
house, at once of temptation and bondage, had sunk with them into the grave; and 
until a new people had been formed, knowing no God but Jehovah; trained only by 
His law, guided only by His presence, and prepared to triumph only in His name. 
The Desert then remained a limit to them no more. The same resistless Power 
which had bound up a whole nation in this sterile and awful place of discipline, threw 
open its barrier, and the Israelite marched forth invigorated in his frame by the simple 
life of the Wilderness, and enlightened in his heart by its religion: a new and noble 
nature, prepared not only to conquer, but to govern ; not only to be the lord of Palestine, 
but to stand forth the model to the world. 
This Sketch gives a portion of the Israelite march to Sinai. The scene is thus 
graphically described:—“ The black and frowning mountains before us, the outworks 
as it were of Sinai, rose abrupt and rugged from their very base, eight hundred to a 
thousand feet in height, as if forbidding all approach to the sanctuary within. On 
the west of the Pass, the cliffs bear the name of Jebel-el-Haweit.At 12| o’clock, 
we began gradually to ascend towards the foot of the Pass before us, called by our Arabs 
Nukb Hawy (Windy Pass), and by Burckhardt Nukb er-Rahah, from the tract above 
it. We reached the foot at a quarter past one o’clock, and dismounting, commenced 
the slow and toilsome ascent along the narrow defile, about S. by E., between blackened, 
shattered cliffs of granite, some eight hundred feet high, and not more than two hundred 
and fifty yards apart, which every moment threaten to send down their ruins on 
the head of the traveller. Nor is this at all times an empty threat; for the whole 
Pass is filled with large stones and rocks, the debris of those cliffs. The bottom 
is a deep and narrow water-course, where the wintry torrent sweeps down with fearful 
violence. A path has been made for camels along the shelving piles of rocks, partly 
by removing the topmost blocks, and sometimes by laying down large stones side by 
side, somewhat in the manner of a Swiss mountain-road. But although I had crossed 
the most rugged passes of the Alps, and made from Chamouny the whole circuit of 
Mont Blanc, I never found a path so rude and difficult as that which we were now 
ascending. The camels toiled slowly and painfully along, stopping frequently; so 
that though it took them two hours and a quarter to reach the top of the Pass, the 
distance cannot be reckoned at more than one hour.” 1 
Biblical Researches, i. 129. 
