It is certain, from Deut. ix. 21, that "a running brook descended out of Mount Horeb" after Moses had smitten it, and that this brook became a broad stream in the valley beneath, upon whose waters Moses cast the dust of the golden calf, and which gave space for all the children of Israel to drink of the waters thus sprinkled. The stream of Wady Feiran runs now for six miles through the valley.

The expression

"He maketh the wilderness a standing water,"

is confirmed by an observation of Lepsius. "Soon after leaving the outskirts of Feiran," he says, "we saw before us a tall craggy peak called Buob, which almost intercepted the valley, and to the right and left a number of mounds of earth, from sixty to one hundred feet high; the largest and indeed the only ones I had seen since we left the valley of the Nile. They continued along the valley on both sides, and showed that there had once been an elevated basin here containing water—a lake which had not then found an outlet, for that is the only way so large a body of earth could have been deposited. The geographical position of the whole mountain range in this district, bears marks of the same phenomenon. All the streams from the east and north, some of them in large sheets of water, unite here at the end of Wady Feiran."

Do we not read the history of its miraculous source in Exod. xvii. in the hour when God said, "I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb. Take with thee the elders of Israel, and thy rod wherewith thou smotest the river; take it in thine hand and go." Was not this the converse miracle to that of the Red Sea ? The Lord bound the river by the rod of Moses, and

made a dry path through its billows, and again He burst rocky bars, and let flow "the fountain of Israel," which Paul tells us followed them in their wanderings, a type of Christ; they doubtless returned to its refreshing borders and also to the neighbouring Wady Hebron for a part at least of the thirty-eight years during which they did not journey to the Promised Land-during which time all of them who were older than twenty when they came out of Egypt, except Joshua and Caleb, made their graves in the scorching sands.

"It is impossible to conceive the weariness" (says Bartlett in his "Forty Days in the Desert") "that is felt by the solitary wanderer in this great and terrible wilderness. Ravine succeeds to ravine, each more forsaken and desolate than the last, with its bed of sand or gravel, overhung with mountains, whose bold, awful abrupt forms, with their colouring of brown, black, red, and yellow, glare under the fiery sun like a portion of some early world untenanted by man. The mechanical and silent footfall of the camel passes noiselessly from morn to night among the voiceless crags. It is then we re

member and realize the incidents of Israel's toilsome march, and understand their horror at being transported from verdant Egypt into the heart of solitudes so deep.

'So lonely 'tis that God Himself
Scarce seemeth there to be.'

The

"How blissful is the sudden change to WADY FEIRAN! Most like a poet's dream' it burst upon us. cliffs around still towering indeed bare and perpendicular, but instead of a gravelly valley there arose as by enchantment tufted groves of palm and fruit trees. Presently a stream of running water, rushing through the tarfa

trees, led us on to the shade and the unequalled verdure of the Valley of Feiran.

"There in the heart of the wilderness of rock and sand, when weary of the stunted bush and nauseous scanty pool, I pitched my tent beneath a group of palms which bent to shelter it; the spring came down the valley, and, rippling among green sedges, formed a small transparent basin at the foot of a fragment of limestone rock fallen from the mountain wall above, and was decorated like a natural altar with freshest foliage. The camels were scattered about the bowery thickets, cropping the thick blossom with avidity, and the Arabs revelled around.

"My oasis of palms were not a solitary group. On stepping out from my tent I was in an almost tropical wilderness. In the palm groves of Egypt the stumps are trimmed and straight, but here this most graceful of trees is all untended; its boughs spring direct from the earth and form tufts and avenues and over-arching bowers, through which sunlight falls tremblingly on the shaded turf. Among them some few branches shooting upright, lift high above the rest their lovely coronal of rustling fans and glowing branches of dates. Some droop to the ground like wavy plumes, others form mossy alleys resounding with the songs of birds. The wind plays over the rustling foliage with the gentlest murmurs; fig, pomegranate, and acacia mingle their foliage with the palm, and here in its season is seen the waving corn. Where else did Israel grow the corn that was ordered, in Lev. ii. 14, to be offered with their meat-offerings to the Lord?

"Now for the ownership and sole possession of such a stream, was it not probable that the sons of the desert would speedily strive?

"Then came Amalek,' says Moses, and fought with Israel in Rephidim,' Exod. xvii. 8."