File:The desert of the Exodus - journeys on foot in the wilderness of the forty years' wanderings - undertaken in connexion with the ordnance survey of Sinai, and the Palestine exploration fund (1871) (14594891057).jpg

Identifier: desertofexodusjo02palmuoft (find matches)
Title: The desert of the Exodus : journeys on foot in the wilderness of the forty years' wanderings : undertaken in connexion with the ordnance survey of Sinai, and the Palestine exploration fund
Year: 1871 (1870s)
Authors: Palmer, Edward Henry, 1840-1882
Subjects: Bible Palestine -- Description and travel Sinai (Egypt) -- Description and travel
Publisher: Cambridge : Deighton
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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the church, stand upon the summit of a low hillor promontory round which Wady Hanem sweeps.Now all is desert, though the immense numbers ofwalls and terraces show how extensively cultivatedthe valley must once have been. Arab tradition,which calls Wddy Hanein a valley of gardens, isundoubtedly true, for many of those large, flat,strongly-embanked terraces must have been onceplanted with fruit-trees, and others have been laidout in kitchen gardens; this would still leave manymiles for the cultivation of grain. At the south sideof tlie hill on which the ruins stand is the ash-heapof the fort, on which are strewn great quantities ofbroken pottery and glass. Here, too, are a fewruins, apparently of outbuildings connected with thefort. The ruins of the town lie in the valley itself, tothe east of the hill; they are now little more than aconfused heap of broken walls and half-buried foun-dations, but are still of considerable extent. Amongstthem we found a church, part of the apse of which
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I* THE CITIES OF THE SOUTH. 367 was still standing, and a few broken columns werelying about among the debris. There are also threeweUs, now dry, but one of them in a very perfectstate, the roof and wall which protected it stillremaining entire. The Arabs call it Bir es Sakiyeh,the well of the water-wheel, and the cucularpavement whereon the animals turned the wheel isstill visible. The black, flint-covered hill-slopeswhich surround the fort are covered with longregular rows of stones, which have been carefullyswept together, and piled into numberless littleblack heaps. These at first considerably puzzled us,as they were evidently artificially made and intend-ed for some agricultural purpose, but we could notconceive what plants had been grown on such diyand barren ground. Here again, Arab tradition cameto our aid, and the name teleilat-el-anab, grapemounds, solved the difliculty. These sunny slopes,if well tended, with such supplies of water and agri-cultural appliances as the inhabi

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