TO SINAI AND BACK.*
THERE are some things in the world it is difficult to render un- interesting, and the places where the highest aspirations of the human race were cradled will always be among the number. It is utterly in vain that one traveller after another visits Palestine, and assures us there is no beauty in the land that we should desire it ; its nakedness has been clothed with a history woven of all that is deepest, highest, and most human in our common nature. But as we are apt to suspect the depth of an emotion which finds many words in which to express itself, specially if it betray the faintest rhetorical effort, so nothing throws us back, half in relief, half in self-defence, upon the bare rocks and unlovely hillsides of the Holy Land, like the stilted talk of travellers who are profes- sional bookmakers, or the style of those who, unaccustomed to public speaking, think their subject demands an audience, and with the awkwardness which always accompanies a self- assertiveness born of shyness, present well-known truisms as if they were the offspring of their own creative genius. Not a little of both faults is visible in the pages before us, and greatly disfigures what might prove, at least to the uninitiated, a really valuable book. Mr. Beamont has a good deal to say, has carefully collected his information as he went along, and has compressed no small mass of facts into his one volume. But before being able fully to appreciate what he really has to tell us, we are obliged to get our ears acccustomed to the jar of such sen- tences as these :—" The lamps of heaven and those of earth, these soon to close their eyes for the day, and those to open theirs on other realms, were both shining brightly in the crisp air, as wended my way to the railway-station in the early morning." We were wont to imagine the use of a simile was to allow the subject to gather fuller clearness from the similitude, but hero we understand at once only, that the writer feels the necessity of say- ing something fine as an opening sentence, but are not a wit the wiser as to his meaning until we have read the sentence thrice, when we ascertain that we have spent our energies only to discover that the gas was not out, and the stars were shining, which, taken in conjunction with the fact that the air was frosty, might enable us dimly to guess the time of year in which such a conjunc- tion of circumstances would be likely to occur. And may we not be pardoned for suspecting what will be the substance of the book when its opening pages contain such miserable padding as this ?- "Nov. 11.—I heard two good sermons from Mr. Meyer, the chaplain at Marseilles, in one of which he said that Mahomet was the falling star mentioned in the ninth chapter of the Apocalypse. Our neighbours love to represent John Bull with a goodly rotundity of person, but I have seen more Frenchmen with fat paunches than I ever saw Englishmen so dis- tinguished at home. In this city I once knew five bachelor brothers, who had the misfortune to lose their mother, who had presided over their house and table. It was necessary that some lady should take her place, and they held a family conference to see how this could be brought about, when they decided that one of them should marry. None of them would volunteer for this service, the eldest pleading exemption for his age and the youngest for his youth, and some of the others because, as they said, the hardest burden was always thrown on them, so it was decided to determine the matter by lot. The lot fell upon the third brother, who, acquiescing in his fate, married a wife, who took the head of the table, and everything went on as before. Monumental honours used to bo paid to saints ; they are now paid to genius, and on this prin- ciple a statue has just been erected at Marseilles to Puget, a local sculptor. From my room up six high flights of stairs, I look out on miles of rod roofs, and a whole forest of staring towers and chimneys. Treading on the uncarpeted and tiled floor of a French bedroom with bare feet makes the teeth chatter like dipping the toes into cold water."
At one moment, while waiting for the train, Mr. Beamont evidently rubs his hands nervously, feeling his reader is waiting too, and tries to fill up the moments by retailing some execrable jokes, as, for instance, that he had been warned if he went to the tropic of Cancer not to come back crabbed. Later on, too, in these pages, he says, as though Bacon's epigram had never been written, and he were giving utterance to a new idea, " Dismissing these fables, however, let us see whether we, the true, as our ancestors were the pseudo-ancients, (for is not the world older now than it ever was before ?) &c." Or, as an instance of the stilted writing of which we have spoken, "The tents were fixed, and we exchanged with great thankfulness that canopy which is infinitely grander than any monarch's for the canvas shelter which satisfies the wandering Bsdouin." Yet all these defects and the even more annoying habit of introducing some essentially common- place quotation about every other page are really only faults of style, and the time comes when, wandering among obelisks and ruins, Mr. Beamont steeps his mind in memories of the past, till saturated with fresh thought, he slips the skin of the artificial style which has so thinly covered his poverty of subject, and ■ 7'o Sinai and Syene and Back in 1860 and 1861. By William Beamont, Esq. London: Smith, Elder, and 00. 1871. crowds his notes with clear-cut details. There is no criticism so utterly bad as that " which damns with faint praise," but our author has no need to fear such mood. We have fairly warned the reader of the faults of this book; its style is as bad as it can well be; for the rest, if he has had much and careful experience in Eastern travel, he may safely pass the book by ; if not, he will find it full of valuable memoranda, the result of unusually careful observation ; —as when the author, alluding to the circumstances that when Joseph ruled Egypt, and his brethren came down to buy corn, their money was " in full weight," takes occasion to make some notes on Egyptian coinage, suggesting that this money was probably specie in small pieces of a given size made up in bags, such as are seen in old Egyptian pictures, since, he adds, " Egypt had no coinage of her own till Aryandes, the satrap of Darius in Egypt, near the time of the battle of Marathon, issued silver Darics in imitation of Persian gold coins of that name about the year 489 B.C., and had the indiscretion to put his own name upon them, which led to his ruin ; and this coinage, which the Persian satrap began," he adds, " was but the commencement of that long series of Egyptian coins whichl as has been well observed, are the lenses of the historical telescope, and bring the events of the past before us in a most instructive form."
The granite obelisk of Heliopolis, which was one of the first objects visited by Mr. Beamont, has been too often described to attract any special attention, and yet it would be impossible for any student of history to look upon it with an indifferent eye, and we cannot perhaps select a fairer specimen of Mr. Beamont's narrative, with its merits and defects, than his description of this obelisk :—
" This obelisk, all that now remains of the groat city of On, was oreeted about two hundred years after Abraham's visit to Egypt, but his great-grandson, Joseph, saw it soon after it was first set up, and it was doubtless soon afterwards by Jacob the patriarch's grandson, by Joseph's brethren, by Moses and Aaron, by Jeremiah, who ended his days in exile in Egypt, and by many other saints of the Old Testament, as well as by Joseph, and Mary, and numerous other saints of the New Testament, and, above all, by our blessed Redeemer himself. In the city of On (the old Egyptians seem to have had a notion of making orthography teach geography, for this oity at one end of Egypt had its name spelt exactly the reverse of that great city, No, at the other) there was a temple of the Sun, to which the obelisk was an approach. It stood on the site of the house of that Potiphor, whose daughter, without being a convert to her faith,—for wo road that his language was ever 'I fear God,'—Joseph took to wife (Gen. xlii. 18). The name Zaphnath- paaneah, which Pharaoh bestowed upon him, has been differently interpreted. Some think that it is fleer from adultery,' and others that it is merely ' Joseph the Phenieian.' But Pharaoh might have given him a greater distinction than the first, and might have called him the preserver from famine, for his policy in storing up corn finds imitators in France even at this day. On was a city of many names. It was the Avon of Ezekiel (xxx. 17), the Both-shemesh of Jeremiah (xliii. 13), the Ain-shoms or fountain of the sun, and lastly Heliopolis, his oity. Turning from sacred to profane history for the other great names who have visited On, we shall find amongst them Alexander the Great, who entered Egypt by this route ; Plato, who was accompanied by Euripides, and who had a house here which was shown down to the time of Strabo ; Eudoxus, the astronomer, who had an observatory here Thalos, who here gained his knowledge of eclipses, and learnt from the priests that the year consisted of throe hundred and sixty-five days ; Horodotus, who gathered here the most amusing of his stories ; Chry- sippus, one of the earliest physicians, whose studios were pursued at this plaoo ; Pythagoras, who, after living here twenty years, and learn- ing much of his doctrine at Heliopolis, was taken prisoner, and carried off from thence into Persia ; Agoailaus, who, though a king, astonished the Egyptians by his disinterestedness and his simple habits of life ; Anaxagoras, to whom the groat Pericles was Indebted for his taste and learning ; and I know not how many other great heathens were all in some degree indebted for what they knew to Heliopolis, which was a piton of such importance that of the thirty judges who judged Egypt,. it furnished no less than ten."
Nothing changes in Egypt. The traveller looking around bum must often be half tempted to believe that the page we call human history is but a short parenthesis to the great book of nature, after all, and can forcibly realize how a thousand years may be 'as: one day. Take, for instance, the great quarry at Syeue whence, remarks Mr. Beamont, the principal obelisks of Egypt and the rest of the world have come, and from which material syenite has its name. Ia the quarry, he says, there lay, semi-detached and looking as fresh as if the workmen had only left it yesterday and would• return to it to-morrow, a mass of granite eloveu feet square and ninety-five feet long. We do not know the Pharaoh who gave- the order for it, or for what temple it was intended, but we may infer that more than two thousand years ago some calamity over- took him, and the work has ever since been suspended.
The Nilorneter which is on the island of Rhoda was visited by Mr. Bement. It looks, he says, like a square bath sunk deep into the ground, and has a roof supported by four pointed arches, on which there is an inscription in the same kind of Cutic charac- ters as those found in the Cuerdale coins, and which went out of use
in the ninth century. Ho thence infers this building cannot be of later date, and that if so, its pointed arches are earlier by two cen- turies than the cathedral of Cefalu in Sicily, which was built in A.D. 1132, and is believed to have the earliest pointed arches in Europe. Egyptian symbolism as displayed in its architecture is a study which for many minds has a strong fascination. Later ou in these pages we meet with a description of the gateway of the great temple of Karnac, which towers up seventy feet high. The Arabs, Mr. Boamont tells us, have a saying that " the arch knows no rest,"—an epigram of consider- able force and beauty ; and it is this, he considers, " and not their ignorance of its powers, that has made the Egyptians in all their massive works prefer a flat entablature, which symbolizes to their minds, but in a different sense, the eternal repose of the first French revolutionists." There may be some truth at the bottom of this, but the association of an Egyptian architect and a French revolutionist by a tie, however slender or remote, seems strangely incongruous.
Our author evidently found it difficult to tear himself away from Karnac, and lingers, tracing link after link in its stones of a civilization which has passed away, but which must have had in it more of leisure and of earthly hope than characterizes any later forms of life. We build with a very present consciousness of the rapidly changing conditions under which we live, yet Egypt is emphatically a land of graves. At every turn there is such pre- paration for ample sepulchre as, in our author's mind at least, to give fresh force to the angry question of the Israel- ites, " Are there no graves in Egypt, that thou halt brought us out to die in the wilderness? " Much of Mr. Bearnont's time was spent in wandering in this same wilderness through one wady after another ; and in all, he says, there was such a great similarity of feature as to puzzle a stranger, though ho has no doubt a Bedouin set down blindfold in their midst would know where he was, as well as a Londoner knows one great square from another. As a matter of course, he went to the convent of Mount Sinai, and was admitted by the looped chain by which strangers are hoisted up some thirty feet, and landed through a hole in the wall. There is always an amount of interest and curiosity attached to this wan- dering in the desert, touching at all the various places where scenes were enacted which seem in some sort at least to have regu- lated the* course of the world's subsequent history, and Mr. Beamont tells this part of the narrative with a fair amount of
vigour, but there is nothing strikingly fresh or that has not often been previously recorded. The last chapter of this book gives us an account of Alexandria carefully culled from various sources, but much of which will be familiar to the general reader, though he may possibly not know that when Amru took the city in the year A.D. 622, he reported it to contain 4,000 palaces, a like number of baths, 400 theatres, 12,000 provision-shops, and 40,000
tributary Jews. While observing through all these pages the slow pace of time in Eastern history, a little incident recalls us suddenly to the different rate at which events are transpiring at home. A single entry in our author's journal on his way to Marseilles in November, 1860, stands thus :—
" Nov. 9.—To-day I passed through Dijon and Lyons, the one famed for its wines, and the other for its silks, When the Emperor and Empress lately passed through these places a hundred dozens of the choicest wines of Dijon wore presented to the Emperor by a hundred of its wino merchants, and a hundred of the richest silk dresses of Lyons were presented to the Empress by a hundred of its silk merchants. Trnly, the French understand well how to compliment royalty."
As Mr. Beamont approaches Europe he draws his artificial skin over him again, and returns to his stilted style, to poor jokes and forced sentiment. We advise all readers who wish to enjoy his work to skip its first and last chapters.
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