Rain falls in the peninsula in sudden downpours, often in connection with a thunderstorm. When we camped in the Wadi Umm Agraf in January of 1906, it rained without ceasing for two days and a night, creating rivulets and a waterfall down the mountain slope. A week later the valley floor was carpeted with verdure and flowers, and the thorny bushes were masses of bloom. Rainstorms may result in a spate, the dreaded _seil_ of the Bedawyn, which often appears several miles below where the rain has actually fallen. In the winter of 1914-15 the Wadi el Arish was twice in spate, and left extensive pools of water behind. The effect of a spate, seen on Dec. 3, 1867, in the Wadi Feiran by the Rev. F. W. Holland, was described by him. In little more than an hour, the Wadi Feiran, at this point about 300 yards wide, was filled with a raging torrent from eight to ten feet deep. Men, animals, and trees were swept past upon the flood, and huge boulders ground along the wady bed with a noise of a hundred mills at work. In this spate perished thirty persons, scores of sheep and goats, camels, and donkeys, and it swept away an entire encampment that had been pitched at the mouth of a small valley on the north side of Mount Serbal.[5] Disasters of this kind are in part attributable to the reckless deforestation of the country which has gone on unchecked for thousands of years, and continues at the present day. To this is attributable also the calamitous invasion of sand along the shores of the Mediterranean recorded by Arabic writers. In ancient times wood was extensively used for smelting purposes in different parts of the peninsula, as is shown by enormous slag-heaps in the Wadi Baba and in the Wadi Nasb. A great bed of wood ashes beneath the temple-floor at Serabit showed that wood was freely used in offering the holocaust in a district that is now entirely denuded of trees. According to the Mosaic Law, charcoal was used in early times at the Temple service as we gather from “a censer full of burning coals” (Lev. xv. 12).[6] For domestic use it was exported during the Middle Ages, and was regularly delivered by the Bedawyn as tribute to the Pasha in the nineteenth century. Its export continues to this day.