SINAI PENINSULA

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4523, 14 January 1942, Page 7

SINAI PENINSULA

AREA OF THE EXODUS

MOUNT OF THE LAW

(By

P.G.)

Of all the civilisations which have passed and repassed Sinai, none has stayed to civilise it in any part, not even on the fringes of its main tracks, much less in that great silent block of central highland which the traveller sees only in distant prospects from either horn of the Red Sea. Its serrated, tangled ridges, tossed up blood-red against the evening sky of Aquaba, look repelling. It takes a geologist or a map-maker or a keen and sturdy hunter of the shy Sinaitic ibex, and the yet more elusive Sinaitic leopard, to go into the heart of those hills. But in comparison with the other deserts of Egypt the peninsula seems to the tourist a veritable “land flowing with milk and honey,” and a country of absorbing interest. In the Libyan wastes to the west of the Nile, and in many parts of the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea hills, the surveyor’s movements are hampered by the scarcity or complete absence of water, fuel and grazing. In Sinai these primary necessities are in abundance. SCHOLARS AND SAINTS The early literature on the country is extraordinarily voluminous. A compiled bibliography includes the names of over 450 historians, travellers and authors who have contributed to our knowledge of the peninsula, besides many anonymous maps and manuscripts. The greater bulk of this relates solely to the geography of the Exodus and Biblical Sinai, to the routes connecting Mount Sinai with Suez and Aquaba, and to that portion of the region bordering the Mediterranean across which so many the long period covered by Egyptian history.

As the traditional site of the wanderings of the Israelites and the Mountain of the Law, the country has for centuries been a magnet to the literati of the Old World; while countless numbers of devout Christians from south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor have made the pilgrimage to Gebel Musa and the renowned Convent of Saint Katherine.

At intervals during the last 100 years occasional travellers and men of science have examined limited portions of western and southern Sinai, but until quite recently the topography and geology of the peninsula as a whole remained inadequately known. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century Sinai was regarded as of little material account, ' though a convenient buffer between Egypt and the Turkish territories of Palestine and Arabia. Occupied by more or less turbulent Arab tribes, it was a source of trouble and expense to the authorities rather than a contributor of revenue to the coffers of the State. The only place of importance was Tor, the Government quarantine station for Egyptians making the pilgrimage to Mecca. Sinai and Tor were in those days almost synonymous. BLOSSOM IN WILDERNESS Saint Katherine, or, as she is called by the Greek Church, Santa Katerina, was a high-born maiden of Alexandria who suffered martyrdom about A.D. 310, and a legend arose that from her deathbed her body was carried by angels to Mount Sinai. The Monastery of Saint Katherine must be one of the most surprising, most beautiful and most interesting places in the world. The surprise lies in the fact that it is there at all. Here in the midst of thousands of square miles of naked wilderness, inhabited exclusively and sparsely by primitive nomads, one comes upon this ravine, surrounded by rugged mountains of indescribable austerity and loneliness, and finds a little enclave of cultivation and habitation of running water and mellowed dwellings and blossoming gardens. This community, once rich and numerous, now sadly shrunken, preserve, if not conspicuously in themselves, yet literally in their treasures, some of the rarest learning of a by-gone age.

It is strange that there are no independent Jewish traditions regarding Sinai. There is no record of it ever having been visited until in the Christian era there began an influx of hermits and anchorites. It was the depredations of the Saracens upon the hermits of Jebel Serbal that prompted an appeal by the brotherhood of Jebel Musa to the Emperor Justinian to build them a church that should also be a refuge. Justinian was the more ready to accede to the request since it fell in with his own desire to erect a stronghold against the incursions of wild tribesmen from Arabia into the south-eastern parts of his empire. Such was the genesis in the sixth century of the great convent-fort. In ail essentials, as it was raised so, with certain repairs, it stands to-day, with its immensely thick and buttressed walls of hewn granite, its noble church, its interior ramparts, its chapel built over the site of the

Burning Bush, its mosque, its worldfamous library. The connection with Saint Katherine came much later. The legends regarding her have been superimposed upon the much,, more venerable pre-Christian traditions associated with the sites of the Burning Bush and the Law Giving, and with the flight of Elijah to Horeb. In the Middle Ages the convent was frequently beset by the Bedouin, for, though the walls are impregnable, it is very vulnerable from the slopes of the mountain at whose foot it lies. When bows and arrows were superseded by muskets, life inside the convent at a time when relations were strained must have been lively indeed. On the whole, however, a modus vivendi has usually been found with the Arabs; certain tribes have become traditionally the defenders of the consent in return for subvention. The monks say this was initiated by

Mahomet himself. Bread is regularly distributed in return for supplies of firewood. All arrangements for the transport of pilgrims across the desert were, and are, in the hands of the convent, or their agents in Cairo, so that the Bedouin had more to gain than to lose by maintaining peaceable relations with the monks. SITE OF THE BURNING BUSH A very ancient tradition is enshrined in the chapel built on the site of the Burning Bush. No one can enter here without first removing his shoes, in obedience to the precept first given to Moses. The reputed site is intimately connected with the origin of the convent, for Justinian’s fortress-church had no arbitrary foundation. Already a settlement of hermits existed round the site of the

Bush and the tower that had been erected there—-some say by the 'Empress Helena; and it is a fait that a tower reputed to be older than the convent is incorporated in it. » There is a curious little circumstance which does not seem th have been scientifically investigated though many travellers have referred}- to it. Across the ravine from the cSnvent, on the north-east side, stands the mountain Jebel ed Deir, and it is said that on one day in the year, presumably the longest, .the sunlight.-pene-trates through a chink in the, rocks on the summit and falls upon a spot near the foot of Jebel Musa. ’ This must have been occurring for iiullenniums of years. But when the convent was built- the ray was imprisoned, so to speak, and once a year ii falls through a window over the altar in • the chapel of the Burhffig* Bush and ’ rests upon the floor.