inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground,"l as the sure word of his testimony informs us ; but, if we may judge from any thing we know of the mighty power of an earthquake of the required magnitude, it must, if it took place, have convulsed to their overthrow the whole lands of Canaan, Moab, Ammon, Edom, and the Desert, to the destruction of all their inhabitants. No such convulsion took place. Lot, casting his eyes on Zoar, quite proximate to Sodom, said, “ This city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one: oh, let me escape thither, (is it not a little one ?) and my soul shall live.”2 Into this city he was permitted to flee, and was safe. Abraham, living in the plains of Mamre, near Hebron, had practical cognizance of the execution of the threatened vengeance of God on the cities of the plain, only by his getting up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord, and looking toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and beholding the smoke of the country going up like the smoke of a furnace. Striking as must have been the phenomena which occurred during the storms of fire and brimstone, and the eruptions and submergence which may have been their cause or accompaniments, they certainly fall short of the awful demands of the theory to which I refer. The fact undoubtedly is, that the Wádí Arabah and its continuation, the valley of the Jordan, whatever partial changes they may have undergone in our own Adamic era, together form perhaps the most wonderful crevasse in the whole world—a fissure made by volcanic and basaltic eruptions, long before the race of man appeared on the globe.

When we got across the Wádí Arabah, the breadth of which in the straight line we estimated at about ten or eleven miles, we came upon a low ridge jutting into it, as

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ENCAMPMENT ON THE BORDERS OF EDOM.

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an outpost from the Idumean range. We partly rounded and partly surmounted this ridge, and pitched our tent in the Wádí which leads up, by a low pass, to the flanks of Mount Hor, and alongside of them to Petra, the wonderful and mysterious Selan,1 or city of the rock, which we had come so far through the great and terrible wilderness to inspect. As soon as we were able, we took out our bibles, and read the twentieth chapter of Numbers. This portion of the Divine word carried us back, with melancholy interest, to the times when Israel vainly demanded of his brother Esau a way through his territory, without trespass, or injury, or unrequited favour; and when the consecrated brother of Moses died upon the top of that very mount, the summits of which the sun, sinking in the western wastes, in the ocean of desolation over which we had passed, was still gilding with subdued radiance.

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Wednesday, 8th March 1843.—We set our artist to work early this morning to make a drawing of Mount Hor from the top of a high mass of rock east of our encampment. The result of his attempt appears in the preceding page in a reduced form. When he was busy with his pencil, we set out upon a geological excursion over the lower ridges of Mount Seir. We were glad that we did so, as our personal inspection of these ranges gave us a far more correct idea of their seemingly complicated formation, than we could get from any of the books in our possession. The fundamental stratified rock we found to be the new red or variegated sandstone, a circumstance worthy of notice, because, when asso

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ciated with the existence of the same rock, with horizontal strata, on the heights of Mount Hor, which we afterwards visited in the course of the day, we had unequivocal evidence of the formation extending to the extraordinary depth of about 1500 feet. Through this rock, there burst longitudinal dykes of red granite and porphyry, running nearly parallel with the range of Mount Seir, and so completely silicifying the sandstone in some parts as to give it the appearance of a primitive rock. Above the red sandstone, we have the Jurassic limestone, so abundant in the IIoly Land, and highest of all the cretaceous system, of which we afterwards found the summits of Mount Seir behind Petra to be composed. Over much of the sandstone below, there lie great quantities of alluvial compact conglomerate, principally of chalk, with pebbles and rounded stones, and also large quantities of loose chalk which have been washed down by the heavy rains. The red granite and the dark porphyry cutting through the stratified rocks, so diverse in their colour, and the white debris by which they are covered, presented together a scene so peculiar as to give large scope to our wonderment.

When we returned to breakfast, we found that the whole stock of our water was exhausted ; and that one of our sheikhs, who had set out in the morning in search of a supply, had not returned. We determined not to wait his arrival, and we went on to the foot of the pass called the Nakb el-Abu-Sheibah,1 which leads up to Petra. Here we had the satisfaction of meeting our Arab, with a goatskin filled with the precious element, the want of which had begun to create in us some uneasiness. He had found a supply, after a long search, in the clefts of one of the adjoining rocks. Our breakfast was soon made ready; and we