A third, and the chief, excursion was to Sinai and the Red Sea. It is no exaggeration to say that for most it was a terrible experience; there were many who visited Mohammedan lands often and some who saw Jerusalem more than once, but not one went a second time to Sinai. No big caravans travelled that way, few were the merchants who traded to Suez; it meant, then, being subject to the pleasure of the Arabs. There privation was the best that could be looked for, they were dependent for their lives and the endurance of life on their own enforced liberality and the chance of forbearance from others; and very thankful must they have been when they caught sight of the two great towers, since pulled down, which stood in the suburbs of Cairo for landmarks to those coming from Suez, although they might expect to receive a welcome, as they had probably had a send-off, from the boys of Cairo in the shape of dirt, bricks, and bad lemons. Two Germans were reduced to such a state as to become subject to hallucinations. Especially strange did the journey seem to a Russian who passed by the Cairo route to Jerusalem. So totally different a desert from those he knew,—neither forests nor vegetation, no people, no water; nothing but sand and stones, except for the Red Sea. And it happens that here, in particular, does he show how far more second-hand was his knowledge of the Bible stories than was that of other Europeans. The function of the cloud which is said to have accompanied the Israelites by day on their flight was, to him, to hide them from pursuers, and at the Red Sea there were still visible to him the twelve ways that Moses had opened up for his people, one for each tribe, marked on the surface of the water by a deeper tint, and the prints of Pharaoh's chariot-wheels were as indelible as ever for him, whereas Christians from farther west ceased to see them soon after the beginning of the sixteenth century. Some facts were even more exclusively his own, as that Pharaoh's soldiers were changed into fish after their drowning; and were to be known when caught by having human heads, men's teeth and noses, though their ears had grown to fins; nobody eats them. Pharaoh's horses were likewise fishified; hairy fish with skins as thick as your finger.