The present monkish tradition has no worth in an impartial research. This every one must know, who has occupied himself seriously with such things. If, even in Jerusalem they are, for the most part, not of the slightest value, unless they be supported from the original source, how much less are they worth on the Sinai peninsula, where they relate to questions much more distant, both as to time and place! During the long space of time between the giving the Commandments and the first Christian centuries, Sinai is only once mentioned in a later historical occurrence, as the “Mountain of God, Horeb,” upon which Elias appeared. It would indeed be extremely wonderful, if during this lapse of time the tradition had not been interrupted, and if also during that time the population had so changed on the peninsula, that we cannot point out a single place mentioned in the Old Testament with any certainty, and even the Greeks and the Romans were not acquainted with these old designations.[115] We must therefore return to the Mosaic accounts, in order to prove the truth of the present acceptation. To this we must also add, that the general relative geographical position of the localities of the peninsula have not essentially altered since the time of Moses. They who take refuge in a contrary opinion, may undoubtedly prove everything, and for that very reason they prove nothing. It is therefore very important to keep the historical relations of the different periods before our eyes, because these were certainly likely to cause changes in different places. Hence it cannot be denied, that the fertile and well-watered Wadi Firân, at all times, and therefore also at the time of Moses, was the most important, and most frequented centre of the whole peninsula, by reason of its unparalleled fertility, and of its inexhaustible bubbling fountains. That this wonderful oasis was then, as now, in the middle of the eternally naked desert, the whole character of the land proves. On the other side it is not less true, that the environs of the present convent on Gebel Mûsa were formerly, (notwithstanding the spare streamlets, which there spring from the earth, but only moisten the neighbouring soil), just as barren as all the other parts of that mountain waste; that the draw-wells[116] dugout of the rocks at first supplied water sufficient for the use of the inhabitants of the convent; and that an artificial irrigation of more than a thousand years’ duration, with the most careful employment of every means of culture, rendered possible the small plantations now found there.[117] In olden times there was not the slightest reason for rendering this desert habitable by art, so much the rather as it lay apart from all the connecting roads of the peninsula, and formed a true mountain hollow, to which there was only one entrance, through the Wadi e’ Shech. ^