"I had at first intended to visit, on my return, the upper mountains, to which there is a road leading through the Wady Mokabelat; but Ayd dissuaded me. He said that if the party from which we had just escaped meant to pursue us, they would probably lay in wait for us in some of the passes in that direction; as he did not doubt that it would be their belief, that we were bound for Tor or Suez, the nearest road to which places lies through the Wady Mokabelat. I yielded to his opinion, and we returned along the coast by the same road we had come. Hamd's wound was not dangerous; I dressed it as well as I could, and four days afterwards it was nearly healed." P. 513.

The travellers hastened onward through a narrow plain, covered with sand and loose stones. Ayd said that here in summer, when the wind is strong, a hollow sound is sometimes heard as if coming from the upper country. The Arabs believe that the spirit of Moses then descends from Mount Sinai, and in flying across the sea bids a farewell to his beloved mountain.

Mr. Burckhardt, in order to avoid suspicion, had never yet allowed his companions to see him write, lest he should be thought a necromancer or a searcher for treasures. When mounted on his camel, at an easy walk, by throwing his mantle over his head, as if to ward the sun, he could sometimes write unobserved. His journal-books were small, they could be carried in his waistcoat pocket, and when taken out they might be concealed in the palm of his hand. Sometimes pretending to sleep, and covered with his mantle, and at others going apart for a few minutes, and crouching under his cloak, he continued his notes.

"This evening I had recourse to the last method; but having many observations to note, I remained so long absent from my companions, that Ayd's curiosity was roused. He came to look after me, and perceiving me immoveable on the spot, approached on tip-toe, and came close behind me without my perceiving him. I do not know how long he had remained there, but suddenly lifting up my cloak, he detected me with the book in my hand. What is this?' he exclaimed. 'What are you doing? I shall not make you answerable for it at present, because I am your companion.' but I shall talk further to you about it when we are at the convent;' I made no answer, till we returned to the halting-place, when I requested him to tell me what further he had to say. • You write down our country,' he replied, in a passionate tone, our mountains, our pasturing places, and the rain which falls from heaven; other people have done this before you; but I, at least, will never become instrumental to the ruin of my country.' I assured him that I had no bad intentions towards the Bedouins, and told him he must be convinced that I liked them too well for that; 6 on the

6

contrary,' I added, had I not occasionally written down some prayers ever since we left Taba, we should most certainly have 'been all killed; and it is very wrong in you to accuse me of that, which if I had omitted, would have cost us our lives." He was startled at this reply, and seemed nearly satisfied. Perhaps you say the truth,' he observed; but we all know that some years since several men, God knows who they were, came to this country, visited the mountains, wrote down every thing, stones, plants, animals, even serpents and spiders, and since then little rain has fallen, and the game has greatly decreased.' The same opinions prevail in these mountains, which I have already mentioned to be current Among the Bedouins of Nubia; they believe that a sorcerer, by writing down certain charms, can stop the rains and transfer them to his own country. The travellers to whom Ayd alluded were M. Seetzen, who visited Mount Sinai eight years since, and M. Agnelli, who ten years ago travelled for the Emperor of Austria, collecting specimens of natural history, and who made some stay at Tor, from whence he sent Arabs to hunt for all kinds of animals. P. 518.

Mr. Burckhardt never recovered Ayd's confidence; but he kept him in tolerable good humour; this was no difficult matter, for he was an easy tempered man, fond of plentiful fare; and he used to boast that once, in his younger days, he and three other Bedouins had eaten, at a single meal, the whole of a mountain goat, although his companions, as he added, had but moderate appetites.

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In the convent at Sinai are preserved pompous memorials of several European travellers who had visited it; and Mr. Seetzen does not rank last in the enumeration of his titles, or of the countries which he has traversed. An inscription in modern Arabic might have shamed this vanity. It runs as follows. "To this holy place came one who does not deserve that his name should be mentioned, so manifold are his sins. He came here with his family. May-whoever reads this beseech the Almighty to forgive him. June xxviii. 1796."

The Arabs believe that the tables of the commandments are buried beneath the pavement of the Church on Djebel Mousa, or Mount Sinai, and they have excavated it on all sides in the hope of finding them. They are persuaded also that the Monks are in possession of the Taourat, a book 'sent down to Moses from heaven, upon the opening or shutting of which depend the rains of the Peninsula. This reputation occasionally is troublesome. Some years since, after a violent flood, a Bedouin, whose camel and sheep had perished in it, fired his gun at the walls of the convent, saying, you have opened the book so much that we are all drowned. After he

had been pacified by presents, he earnestly requested that for the future they would never more than half open the

Taourat.

The following testimony upon a point, which in our opinion never admitted controversy, is, as we think, most conclusive. We shall present it to our readers without a single comment. Mr. Burckhardt is speaking of the gross ignorance of the priests of Sinai on scriptural subjects.

"I believe there is not a single individual amongst them, who has read the whole of the Old Testament; nor do I think that among Eastern Christians in general there is one in a thousand, of those who can read, that has ever taken that trouble. They content themselves, in general, with their prayer-books, liturgies, and histories of saints; few of them read the gospels, though more do so in Syria than in Egypt; the reading of the whole of the Scripture is discountenanced by the clergy; the wealthy seldom have the inclination to prosecute the study of the Holy writings, and no others are able to procure a manuscript copy of the Bible, or one printed in the two establishments in Mount Libanus. The wellmeant endeavours of the Bible Society in England to supply them with printed copies of the Scriptures in Arabic, if not better directed than they have hitherto been, will produce very little effect in these countries. The cost of such a copy, trifling as it may seem in England, is a matter of importance to the poor Christians of the east; the Society has, besides, chosen a version which is not current in the east, where the Roman translation alone is acknowledged by the Clergy, who easily make their flocks believe that the Scriptures have been interpolated by the Protestants. It would, perhaps, have been better if the Society, in the beginning at least, had furnished the eastern Christians with cheap copies of the Gospels and Psalms only, which being the books chiefly in use among them in manuscript, would have been not only useful to them, but more approved of by the directors of their consciences, than the entire Scripture. Upon Mohammedans, it is vain to expect that the reading of the present Arabic version of the Bible should make the slightest impression. If any of them were brought to conquer their inherent aversion to the book, they could not read a page in it without being tired and disgusted with its style. In the Koran they possess the purest and most elegant composition in their language, the rhythmical prose of which, exclusive of the sacred light in which they hold it, is alone sufficient to make a strong impression upon them. The Arabic of the greater part of the Bible, on the contrary, and especially that of the Gospels, is in the very worst style; the books of Moses and the Psalms are somewhat better. Grammatical rules, it is true, are observed, and chosen terms are sometimes employed; but the phraseology and whole construction is generally contrary to the spirit of the language, and so uncouth, harsh, affected, and full of foreign idioms, that no

Musselman scholar would be tempted to prosecute the study of it, and a few only would thoroughly understand it. In style and phraseology it differs from the Koran more than the monkish Latin from the orations of Cicero.

"I will not take upon me to declare how far the Roman and the Society's Arabic translation of the Old Testament are defective, being unable to read the original Hebrew text; but I can affirm that they both disagree, in many instances, from the English translation." P. 584.

In the bay of Birket Faraoun, according both to Egyptian and Arabian tradition, Pharaoh and his hosts were overwhelmed. The continual motion of the waters in this bay, which is occasioned by " its exposure on three sides to the sea," as Mr. Burckhardt remarks, (though we have some difficulty in picturing to ourselves a bay so formed) is ascribed by the natives to a more poetical cause ;-the turmoil of the spirits of the drowned who are restless beneath the water.

With one more striking extract from an account of the Ryhanlu Turkmans in the Appendix, we must conclude.

"The Turkman women do not hide themselves, even before strangers, but the girls seldom enter the men's room, although they are permitted freely to talk with their father's guests. I was much struck with the elegance of their shapes and the regularity of their features. Their complexion is as fair as that of European women; as they advance in age the sun browns them a little. As to their morals, chastity becomes a necessary virtue where even a kiss is punished with death by the father or brother of the unhappy offender. I could mention several instances of the extreme severity of the Turkmans upon this subject; but one may suffice. Three brothers taking a ride, and passing through an insulated valley, met their sister receiving the innocent caresses of her lover. By a common impulse they all three discharged their fire-arms upon her, and left their fallen victim upon the ground, while the lover escaped unhurt; my host, Mohammed Ali, upon being informed of the murder, sent his servant to bring the body to his tent, in order to prevent the jackalls from devouring it: the women were undressing and washing the body to commit it to the grave, when a slight breathing convinced them that the vital spark was not yet extinguished; in short the girl recovered. She was not sooner out of immediate danger, than one of Ali's sons repaired to the tent of his friends, the three brothers, who sat sullen and silent round the fire, grieving over the loss of their sister. The young man entered, and saluted thein, and said, I come to ask you, in the name of my father, for the body of your sister; my family wishes to bury her.' He had no sooner finished, than the brothers rose, crying if she was dead, you would not have asked for her, you would have taken the body without our permission. Then seizing their arms, they were hurrying out of

the tent, in search of the still living victim; but Mohammed, Ali's son, opposed the authority of his father, and his own reputation of courage to their brutal intentions; he swore that he would kill the first who should leave the tent, told them that they had already sufficiently revenged the received injury, and that if their sister was not dead it was the visible protection of the Prophet that had saved her: and thus, he at last persuaded them to grant his request. The girl was nursed for three months in Mohammed Ali's family, and married after her complete recovery to the young man who had been the cause of her misfortune." P. 368.

Our article has already exceeded the limits which we proposed to ourselves in its commencement: and we hold this unintentional extension of it to be a sufficiently fair proof of the value affixed by us to the book which forms its subject.

ART. III. Julia Severa; ou l'An quatre cent quatre vingt douze. Par M. Simonde de Sismondi.

WHEN we see a work of fiction advertised from the pen of a philosophical historian, and political economist, our first feeling is regret, that the author should have forsaken the scientific and eminently useful course in which he has deservedly required a distinguished reputation, to stray amidst the flowery, but devious and hazardous paths of fancy. M. Simonde de Sismondi appears to have anticipated this regret, if he does not even participate in it; and he urges, in a sort of apologetical preface, that when the scene of a romance is laid in very remote ages, a degree of laborious research is requisite, to give a due colouring and costume to the pictures delineated, which can only be expected from those to whose severe studies such information is indispensable. Be this, however, as it may, JULIA SEVERA, OU L'AN QUATRE CENT, QUATRE-VINGT DOUZE, has nevertheless considerable merit, as every work of M. Sismondi must have; it affords, we have no doubt, a faithful picture of the state of France at the end of the fifth century, and makes us better acquainted with the evils, disorders, and sufferings then prevalent, than the concise, condensed sketches we read in history. The chief fault is a degree of heaviness pervading the whole, and reminding us at every instant that the author is not labouring in his vocation. We will give a short analysis of the story, and extract some of the most striking passages.