hidden under the icons of gold and
precious stone attached to the walls, and under the profusion of gold
and silver lamps hanging from the low roof. Rigid saints in vermilion
robes, whose faces are concealed in the dark shadow of their barbaric
glistening crowns, looked at us as we entered. We stepped in reverently,
on bare feet, and never, in any place, did we have so entire an
impression of a recoil into the long past ages of the world.

Peoples and empires have passed away, while these precious things slowly
tarnished in this dim crypt. Even the monk who accompanies us resembles,
with his long red hair falling over his shoulders, and the pale beauty
of his ascetic face, the mystics of the early ages; and his thoughts are
infinitely removed from ours. And the vague reflection of sunlight which
arrives through a single, little window in the thick wall, and falls in
a circle of ghostly radiance on the icons and mosaics, seems to be some
gleam from an ancient day, some gleam from an age far different from the
sordid, impious century in which we live.

A kind of lodge, paved with chiselled silver, and hung with lighted
lamps, rises in the depth of the crypt; it is there that, according to
the venerated tradition, the _Angel of the Eternal_ appeared to Moses in
the midst of the burning bush.

_III.--Where Nothing Changes_

_March 16._ We have now left the blue lonely waters and the red granite
cliffs of the Gulf of Akaba, and entered the great desert of Tih, the
solitudes of which, our camel-men say, are as immense and as flat as the
sea, and the scene of incessant mirages. It is peopled by a few tribes
of savage Bedouins, descended from the Amalekites. This is the land in
which nothing changes: the true Orient, immutable in its dust and its
dreams. Behind the barren hill on which we have camped, Arabia Deserta
unrolls the infinite tract of its red desolation. On our right is the
wild wilderness of Petra and the sinister mountains of the land of Edom.
In front stretches the gloomier waste of the plateau of Tih.

From the spot on which we stand, light tracks, made by the regular
movement of caravans, run out into the distance, innumerable as the
threads in a weaver's loom. They form two rays: one dies away into the
west, the other into the north. The first is the route of the believers
coming from Egypt and Morocco; the second, which we are about to follow,
is the path of the pilgrims from Syria to Palestine. This wil