[p.587] like repeated discharges of heavy artillery, is heard at times
in these mountains; and they all affirmed that it came from Om Shomar.
The monks corroborated the story, and even positively asserted that they
had heard the sound about mid-day, five years ago, describing it in the
same manner as the Bedouins. The same noise had been heard in more
remote times, and the Ikonómos, who has lived here forty years, told me
that he remembered to have heard the noise at four or five separate
periods. I enquired whether any shock of an earthquake had ever been
felt on such occasions, but was answered in the negative. Wishing to
ascertain the truth, I prepared to visit the mountain of Om Shomar.
As I had lost much of the confidence of the Bedouins by writing upon the
mountains, and could not intimidate them by shewing a passport from the
Pasha, I kept my intended journey secret, and concerting matters with
Hamd and two Djebalye, I was let down from the window of the convent a
little before midnight on the 23rd of May, and found my guides well
armed and in readiness below. We proceeded by Wady Sebaye, the same road
I had come from Sherm. In this Wady, tradition says, the Israelites
gained the victory over the Amalekites, which was obtained by the
holding up of the hands of Moses (Ex. xvii. 12.), but this battle was
fought in Raphidim, where the water gushed out from the rock, a
situation which appears to have been to the westward of the convent, on
the approach from the gulf of Suez.
I was much disappointed at being able to trace so very few of the
ancient Hebrew names of the Old Testament in the modern names of the
peninsula; but it is evident that, with the exception of Sinai and a few
others, they are all of Arabic derivation.
On a descent from the summit of Wady Sebaye, at an hour and a half from
the convent, we turned to the right from the road to Sherm, and entered
Wady Owasz [Arabic], in a direction