NEW MIRACLES FOR OLD

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 174, 26 July 1938, Page 10

NEW MIRACLES FOR OLD

Travelling through the Nile Delta and the Sinai Peninsula, where Moses worked his miracles in Biblical times, the writer, Lewis Golding, the famous novelist, observed many things that convinced him that miracles happen even to-day. J WANT to tell of a great experience that occurred to me lately. I have been as cynical and sceptical as most young men of my generation. It seemed to me that the terror and dismay of this new age which has come upon us, being man-made, could be unmade by man. There was no hope anywhere else, excepting in mircle. And apart from a few hysterical anti-suggested cures (I said to myself) the age of miracles is long since over. If there ever was such an age, I shrewdly added. But I have only lately come back from a world of miracles. I have heard them with my own ears. I have seen them with my own eyes. My heart is filled with a new faith again* This new knowledge came to me on a journey I have lately been making, in the steps of Moses, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. The whole of my journey was in the track of the miracles that he wrought according to the old Book, for the glory of the Lord, and for the confusion of His enemies. By the time the journey was over, I was convinced the narrative was in many ways a rendering of actual fact not the less actual for being couched in terms of sublime poetry. My journey started at the place where his sister placed the infant Moses in an ark of bulrushes amid the whispering reeds of an island in the Nile River. (Tradition is insistent on the name of Roda Island, in the upper reaches of Cairo). My journey continued in the desert fringes of the Nile Delta, where once the mighty Palace of Raineses, the Oppressor of Israel, rose into Heaven. At this very moment a distinguished archaeologist, by name Professor Montet, of Strasburg University, is uncovering its ruins, in the jackalhaunted dunes by San el Hagar.

Tour Through Nile Delta

and Sinai Peninsula

There it was, in the Field of Zoan, as the Bible calls that place, that Moses, who had learned strange magic in the colleges of Heliopolis, and magic still stranger and far more potent in the breathless desert of Midian—there it was that Moses cracked the ten-fold whip of his plagues. 1 learned from the lips of the savants there that sometimes, still, pestilences will suddenly rage, that will wipe out the children of the local peasants overnight. They sometimes find it impossible to obtain service among the peasants, the fellaheen, for a plague of boils has spread abroad. Sometimes the whole air is opaque with a plague of gnats, or the whole land is caked with frogs that come crawling from the marshy banks of Lake Manzala. Or locusts swarm in their million millions ... all exactly as it was more than three thousand years ago, when again and again Pharaoh hardened his heart. A very weird and haunted country it was, I assure you, that region among the dunes, unsteady with ghosts and ful of dim wailings at night, when the eyes of the wild cats blazed like evil flares among the tangled tamarisk. There, from San el Hagar in the Nile Delta, the Israelites went forth upon their Exodus, and 1 followed in their trail into the magical world of Sinai, where the Burning Bush burned and was not consumed, where the Israelites aU manna that fell from heaven, and were hungry no more. And 1, too, at this latter end of history, in those same places saw a bush that burned and was not consumed.

I, too, ate manna, which, “when the dew was gone up,” lay “upon the face of the wilderness, a small round thing, small as the hoar frost on the ground.” I say that you, too, may see these things for yourself, though heaven knows you will have to make your journey quickly if you, too, would wish to see these regions exactly as Moses and his people saw them all those thirty centuries ago. For the Sinai Peninsula lies on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal and there is no doubt at all that strategic considerations are going to alter radically the aspect of the Canal country before very few years are over. There will be military roads. There will be pipe-lines. There will be aerodromes. There will, if you like, be new miracles foi old. What do 1 mean by miracles? It is a matter which whole libraries could not exhaust, so I’m not likely to get to the bottom of .it in a line or two. A miracle takes place apparently irrespective of the laws of cause and effect. A miracle to me might not be a miracle to the next man. As, for instance, when I turned on the switch of a portable wireless in the sinai Wilderness, the music that came from that small box seemed so miraculous to the Bedouins who were conducting me during that part of the journey, that they fell upon their foreheads in the hot sand, and called “Allah! Allah!” demanding that he should not abandon them during this fearsome wonder. Now these same Bedouins have long taken it for granted that the monks who live in the age-old Convent

under Mount Sinai control the weather; but when I, for my part, saw one of those monks lift his right hand and heard thunder and saw a flash of lighting in the sky, I said to myself: “I am the victim of some illusion! This is some trickery of auto-sugges-tion!” But I am not the only traveller who has witnessed a similar phenomenon. Mr. Geoffrey Gorer records exactly the same miracle in his “Africa Dances,” though there the thunder and lightning were magically induced into a sky that overspread not the empty waste of Sinai but the tangled complex of a West Coast jungle No, I am not sure any longer that those happenings were mere autosuggestion. I more than once heard of water gushing from smitten rocks in those dread valleys, exactly as it gushed when Moses struck one with a rod many long centuries ago. That same phenomenon, whether natural or supernatural, is described by Major Jarvis, late Governor of Sinai, in his sober and scholarly volume, “Sinai Yesterday and To-day.” I declare in all seriousness that I have eaten manna that had fallen upon the ground. I have seen the Burning Bush, held in the grip of a roaring flaming wind, and then left slack again, unconsumed, as the wind moved on. My wanderings have made me not more sceptical of miracles, but more credulous of them. The world is as full of nightmare foi all of us as, it was for the older Israelites in the land of Rameses, when he demanded that their children be thrown into the river or built up in the angle of his walls. But miracle arose to save them, growing into a hurricane out of a blown puff of sand. That miracle, as my own eyes have witnessed, has not wholly died in the land where it functioned.

The miracle may still arise, will still arise, to save us from the new dismay and the new horror. But there must be faith, as there was in the old time. And the mountains will be moved again, and the waters crossed.