On the 15th, about nine o’clock, I saw a large high rock, like a pillar, rising out of the sea. At first, I took it for a part of the Continent; but, as we advanced nearer it, the sun being very clear, and the sea calm, I took an observation, and as our situation was lat. 25° 6´, and the island about a league distant, to the S. S. W. of us, I concluded its latitude to be pretty exactly 25° 37´ North. This island is about three miles from the shore, of an oval form, rising in the middle. It seems to me to be of granite; and is called, in the language of the country, Jibbel Siberget, which has been translated _the Mountain of Emeralds_. Siberget, however, is a word in the language of the _Shepherds_, who, I doubt, never in their lives saw an emerald; and though the Arabic translation is _Jibbel Zumrud_, and that word has been transferred to the emerald, a very fine stone, oftener seen since the discovery of the new world, yet I very much doubt, that either _Siberget_ or _Zumrud_ ever meant Emerald in old times. My reason is this, that we found, both here and in the Continent, splinters, and pieces of green pellucid chrystaline substance; yet, though green, they were veiny, clouded, and not at all so hard as rock-crystal; a mineral production certainly, but a little harder than glass, and this, I apprehend, was what the _Shepherds_, or people of Beja, called _Siberget_, the Latins _Smaragdus_, and the Moors _Zumrud_. The 16th, at day-break in the morning, I took the Arab of Cosseir with me, who knew the place. We landed on a point perfectly desert; at first, sandy like Cosseir, afterwards, where the soil was fixed, producing some few plants of rue or absinthium. We advanced above three miles farther in a perfectly desert country, with only a few acacia-trees scattered here and there, and came to the foot of the mountains. I asked my guide the name of that place; he said it was Saiel. They are never at a loss for a name, and those who do not understand the language, always believe them. This would have been the case in the present conjuncture. He knew not the name of the place, and perhaps it had no name, but he called it _Saiel_, which signifies a male acacia-tree; merely because he saw an acacia growing there; and, with equal reason, he might have called every mile Saiel, from the Gulf of Suez to the line. We see this abuse in the old Itineraries, especially in the [156]Antonine, from such a town to such a town, so many miles; and what is the next station? (_el seggera_) ten miles. This el seggera[157], the Latin readers take to be the name of a town, as Harduin, and all commentators on the classics, have done. But so far from Seggera signifying a town, it imports just the contrary, that there is no town there, but the traveller must be obliged to take up his quarters under a tree that night, for such is the meaning of Seggera as a station, and so likewise of Saiel.