Upon arriving at the fountain of Elim, two leagues to the west of Suez, they found it brackish, and though there were several large troughs for the convenience of watering cattle, it was not considered wholesome, and the people of the neighbourhood preferred the waters of the Ain el Mousa, or “Fountain of Moses,” two leagues east of the city, which are lukewarm and sulphureous, and spout up like an artificial fountain from the earth,—a circumstance which Dr. Shaw thinks is no other way to be accounted for than by deducing their origin from the “great abyss!” The distance between Cairo and Suez is about ninety Roman miles, which the Israelites, according to Josephus, though the Scriptures are silent on the subject, traversed in three days, which, considering that they were encumbered with aged persons and children, Dr. Shaw thinks exceedingly improbable. The time employed in his own traject he does not mention; but observes that upon every little eminence on the road, as well as in the mountains of Libya near Egypt, great quantities of echini, as well as of bivalve and turbinated shells, were to be found, most of which corresponded exactly with their respective families still preserved in the Red Sea. The old walls of Suez, as well as the ruins of the village of Ain el Mousa, are full of fossil shells, which, as Xenophon remarks in the Anabasis, was the case with the walls of certain castles on the confines of Curdistan. Having turned the point of the Red Sea at Suez, they proceeded towards the south, having the sea on their right, and the broken plain of the desert on the left. In the tongue of land improperly called the “Peninsula of Mount Sinai,” lying between the Sea of Suez and the Gulf of Akaba, over which they were now moving, the danger, while the whole caravan kept together, was not great, as opportunities of plunder being unfrequent, robbers had not sufficient motives for establishing themselves there. The chances of danger being thus diminished, our traveller became imboldened to overstep the limits of prudence, and yielding to his passion for collecting plants and other curiosities, lagged behind, or wandered from the caravan. Scarcely, however, had he tasted the sweets of feeling himself alone in the boundless wilderness, a pleasure more poignant and tumultuous than can be conceived by those who have never experienced it, than he beheld three robbers start up, as it were, from the sand, and rush upon him. Resistance was out of the question. The ruffians immediately seized him, and tearing off his clothes, mean and ragged as they were, two of them began to fight for the possession of them. Meanwhile he stood by, naked, a spectator of the fray, apprehensive that their natural ferocity being aggravated by strife and contention, they might terminate their quarrel by plunging their daggers in his heart. Providence, however, had otherwise determined. The third robber, taking compassion upon his forlorn and