Not Hearing Any Thing, He Then Returned To His
Mountain, Four Months After Which A Party Of Omran, To Whose Tribe The
Men Had Belonged, Came To The Tent Of The Sheikh Of The Towara To Demand
The Fine Of Blood.
The man had died a few days after receiving the
wound, and although he was a robber and the
First aggressor, the Bedouin
laws entitled his relations to the fine, if they waved the right of
retaliation; Hamd was therefore glad to come to a compromise, and paid
them two camels, (which the two principal Sheikhs of the Towara gave him
for the purpose), and twenty dollars, which I thought myself bound to
reimburse to him, when he afterwards called on me at Cairo. This was the
third man Hamd had killed in skirmish; but he had paid no fine for the
others, as it was never known who they were, nor to what tribe they
belonged.
Had Hamd, whom every one knew to be the person who had stabbed the
robber, refused to pay the fine, the Omran would sooner or later have
retaliated upon himself or his relations, or perhaps upon some other
individual of his tribe, according to the custom of these Bedouins, who
have established among themselves the law of “striking sideways.”[See my
remarks on the customs of blood-revenge, in the description of Bedouin
manners.]
[p.541] The convent of Mount Sinai is situated in a valley so narrow,
that one part of the building stands on the side of the western
mountain, while a space of twenty paces only is left between its walls
and the eastern mountain. The valley is open to the north, from whence
approaches the road from Cairo; to the south, close behind the convent,
it is shut up by a third mountain, less steep than the others, over
which passes the road to Sherm. The convent is an irregular quadrangle
of about one hundred and thirty paces, enclosed by high and solid walls
built with blocks of granite, and fortified by several small towers.
While the French were in Egypt, a part of the east wall which had fallen
down was completely rebuilt by order of General Kleber, who sent workmen
here for that purpose. The upper part of the walls in the interior is
built of a mixture of granite-sand and gravel, cemented together by mud,
which has acquired great hardness.
The convent contains eight or ten small court-yards, some of which are
neatly laid out in beds of flowers and vegetables; a few date-trees and
cypresses also grow there, and great numbers of vines. The distribution
of the interior is very irregular, and could not be otherwise,
considering the slope upon which the building stands; but the whole is
very clean and neat. There are a great number of small rooms, in the
lower and upper stories, most of which are at present unoccupied. The
principal building in the interior is the great church, which, as well
as the convent, was built by the Emperor Justinian, but it has
subsequently undergone frequent repairs. The form of the church is an
oblong square, the roof is supported by a double row of fine granite
pillars, which have been covered with a coat of white plaster, perhaps
because the natural colour of the stone was not agreeeble to the monks,
who saw granite on every side of them. The capitals of the columns are
of different designs; several of them bear a resemblance to palm
branches, while others
[p.542] are a close but coarse imitation of the latest period of
Egyptian sculpture, such as is seen at Philae, and in several temples in
Nubia. The dome over the altar still remains as it was constructed by
Justinian, whose portrait, together with that of his wife Theodora, may
yet be distinguished on the dome, together with a large picture of the
transfiguration, in honour of which event the convent was erected. An
abundance of silver lamps, paintings, and portraits of saints adorn the
walls round the altar; among the latter is a saint Christopher, with a
dog’s head. The floor of the church is finely paved with slabs of
marble.
The church contains the coffin in which the bones of saint Catherine
were collected from the neighbouring mountain of St. Catherine, where
her corpse was transported after her death by the angels in the service
of the monks. The silver lid of a sarcophagus likewise attracts
attention; upon it is represented at full length the figure of the
empress Anne of Russia, who entertained the idea of being interred in
the sarcophagus, which she sent here; but the monks were disappointed of
this honour. In a small chapel adjoining the church is shewn the place
where the Lord is supposed to have appeared to Moses in the burning
bush; it is called Alyka [Arabic], and is considered as the most holy
spot in Mount Sinai. Besides the great church, there are twenty-seven
smaller churches or chapels dispersed over the convent, in many of which
daily masses are read, and in all of them at least one every Sunday.
The convent formerly resembled in its establishment that of the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem, which contains churches of various sects of
Christians. Every principal sect, except the Calvinists and Protestants,
had its churches in the convent of Sinai. I was shewn the chapels
belonging to the Syrians, Armenians, Copts, and Latins, but they have
long been abandoned by their owners; the church of the Latins fell into
ruins at the close of
[p.543] the seventeenth century, and has not been rebuilt. But what is
more remarkable than the existence of so many churches, is that close by
the great church stands a Mahometan mosque, spacious enough to contain
two hundred people at prayers. The monks told me that it was built in
the sixteenth century, to prevent the destruction of the convent. Their
tradition is as follows:
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