In the Wadi Hammamat the Arabs refused to follow him upon this route, which was destitute of water, little known, and not free from danger. But he succeeded in inducing them to consent, and came within a hair’s-breadth of losing his life when, in his search for the porphyry quarries, he went astray on Gebel Dukhan, the _Mons porphyrites_ of the ancients. But he was not the man to resign easily a scientific prize when he beheld it before him, and therefore we see him, though scarcely escaped from destruction, begin his search anew, and once more attain his aim. He had ordered a ship to be ready at Gebel-es-Set, and thence he went across the Red Sea to Tur. His companion, Weidenbach, is now living in Australia, in easy circumstances, and we can readily understand the sigh with which he declared that this was the most fatiguing part of all the journey, when we consider that Lepsius was obliged to limit his whole sojourn upon the Peninsula of Sinai to the time between the twenty-first of March and the sixth of April, and observe, from his other writings,[58] as well as the great work on monuments, all that he accomplished in that period. With this must be included, too, all the inscriptions and designs which he copied. The days began at sunrise, and before the travellers lay down to their brief sleep in the evening all that had been discovered through the day had to be reduced to order and set down in writing. Lepsius visited only a small portion of the Peninsula of Sinai, but with the exception of the neighborhood of Petra, it was the most interesting part, and he explored it in every direction with diligence and sagacity. He copied or took home with him in the shape of casts whatever Egyptian inscriptions or paintings of interest he found there, and he afterwards published, from his excellent paper casts, many of those incisions upon the rocks of the Peninsula of Sinai which are known by the name of the Nabathean Inscriptions. The most important elevations in that locality were all ascended by him, and he took from their summits the points of the compass, for the cartographic works to be undertaken in the future. His sagacity and erudition established that which the king of Oriental travellers, Burckhardt, had suspected before him, namely, that the mountain from which the Law was given was not the Gebel-Musa group, which is at present held to be the Sinai of the Scriptures, but the magnificent Serbal. The author of this biography, during his own journey to Sinai, was also obliged to adopt the view of Lepsius; he furnished fresh arguments to confirm it,[59] and is of the opinion that sooner or later it must be generally accepted as correct, in spite of the opposition which it still encounters on many sides.