That was the end of him. It was the end of Djebel el-Mokateb. The next day they travelled on. “As I have never had the good fortune to hold in my hands the memoirs of the English bishop Clogher of Clocester” [sic] “about the journey of the English merchant who is said to have seen the above-mentioned Djebel el-Mokateb in 1722, I remain in considerable doubt as to whether we have seen the right mountain or not,” von Haven concluded.
Thus the Danish professor managed to reduce to nothing the greatest of the objectives of the Danish expedition. The whole of his circumstantial story can be paraphrased in one or two negative statements. In the first place, he found no Hebrew inscriptions. He found a number of grottoes and grave-stones with hieroglyphic carvings, half eroded by the wind; and these inscriptions, together with certain idols, led him to the conclusion that these could not be memorial stones left behind by the Israelites. They were probably not on the right Djebel el-Mokateb. He asked their guides whether there were no other rock faces in the neighbourhood; and the Arabs, who had already once before parried his inquiries, answered sourly that there were not. Von Haven was content with this information. That is one side of the matter. The other is that, after having given up any idea of finding the right mountain, he then went on to ignore the inscriptions which had been found. When Niebuhr prepared to copy the hieroglyphics, the Arabs made difficulties for the obvious reason that they glimpsed an opportunity to make a little money. Instead of bargaining properly with them, von Haven turned and abused them, told them they were out of their minds, and finally declared that he did not want to speak to them. When Peter Forsskål heard some time after about this abortive undertaking, it inspired him to make certain remarks in his diary. He said he could not conceive how von Haven failed to exploit such naïve superstitions: “I am astonished that the members concerned did not turn these ideas to their own advantage, which in my view could easily have been possible. We all know that even the most dangerous and baneful things in the world of man can daily be turned to advantage, if only they are turned by clever hands.” Von Haven did not succeed in exploiting the Arabs’ superstition, partly because he did not want to have anything to do with them, partly because by his unfriendly attitude he had lost their confidence. The result was that he had to admit defeat at the hands of the very people who in their naivety were ready to believe him possessed of powers that could call forth treasure from the earth and bring rain from the clouds. The one thing he did achieve was to bring about a further deterioration in his relations with the guides on whom he was dependent; and the only thing he could think of doing was to abandon the idea of copying the inscriptions. The expedition had been in vain; the next day he moved on, without any inscriptions, without a map of the place, without knowing for certain whether he had ever been on Djebel el-Mokateb.
After this defeat von Haven started on the second part of his mission: the exploration of Mount Sinai itself and his visit to the nearby monastery of Saint Catherine. The journey there took a day longer than had been calculated, because the Arabs compelled them to make a halt at the intervening Faran oasis, where their families were living. Von Haven now had so little authority left over his guides that he did not complain when one of them exchanged his own dromedary, the saddle of which had broken, for von Haven’s, with the result that when the beast got up, von Haven fell off and had to cover the rest of the journey on foot. Nor did he succeed in getting any of the Arabs to fulfil their obligations and ride back to fetch Forsskål, Baurenfeind and Kramer from Suez. Forsskål was by now very worried, but his misgivings were groundless: the humiliation in Suez had finally paralysed what remained of von Haven’s initiative, whether for good or for evil. Shared meals no longer meant for him an opportunity of gaining revenge but of finding consolation. In place of the drama that Forsskål pictured to himself in his uneasy moments, we have instead von Haven’s idyllic description of their stay at the Faran oasis:
“The Faran valley is fertile and more heavily populated than other places in the desert. It has a number of hills which are said to be particularly full of palm trees. The Arabs brought us several small baskets full of dates for us to try. They also have here a number of goats. We saw a herd of about a hundred and thirty seeking food on the side of one of the hills. The Arabs also keep a number of dogs to give warning at night of wild animals, which come to devour their goats and camels. These were, they said, the wolf, the striped wolf, the bear, and the tiger. They complained mostly about these four kinds of animal. They possessed guns with which to shoot them, the kind of gun fired by igniting with a match.
“The wife of Sheik Hassan came over to visit us in our tent in the afternoon, bringing with her some eggs and offering to sell us chickens. The Arab housewives still wear the same kind of dress in the desert as they did a hundred years ago in the time of Thévenot. The woman who visited us had a silver ring in her right ear, so massive that it almost reached her nose, without exaggeration. She had a large silver chain around her neck, which hung low upon her breast. The other Arab women did not possess these two ornaments in silver, but in brass or other metal.
“In that corner of the Faran valley there were eight tents full of wives and children. Only the very poorest Arabs had only one wife. The wealthier sheiks had two or three. Two of our guides had two wives each, and the third only one. But they all wanted more money, or at least enough to buy several wives. When we told the wife of our guide, Madame Hassan, and the other Arab women that in our countries each man had only one wife, they sighed and looked at one another; but they did not dare say that this seemed to them to be better, although we asked them about this. On our return journey they grew bolder, and spoke their opinion straight out about this.”
Then comes the end of sitting about in the shade and eating dates and talking with Arab women. On 14th September they again struck camp; and now they rode into the valley that led to the monastery of Sinai and to Moses’s mountain, Djebel Musa. Characteristically, von Haven did not attempt to conceal the difficulties that had to be overcome: “The way up to Djebel Musa accorded well with the forbidding appearance that these rocks presented to the world. There were many twisting paths through a number of slopes or elongated hills leading into a narrow stony valley, where everybody descended from their dromedaries and camels in order to go forward on foot. I, of necessity, remained sitting, since I had a fever. The road went up and down, full of holes and sharp stones, and sometimes also of slippery rocks, on which the dromedaries walk more confidently than do the camels. On all sides lay enormously large boulders, which seem to have fallen down from the mountain.”
They spent the night in this valley, and at half past eight the following morning they reached the monastery, “which is dedicated to Saint Catherine, and whose archbishop calls himself Archbishop of Sinai.” Here the second big drama of the expedition was to be played out. Here is von Haven’s description of the historic events that took place there, on 15th September, in the Sinai desert:
“In addition to the monastery door, which is only opened when the archbishop is present, the monks have another entrance over one of the walls of the monastery, where by means of a rope they haul in provisions or people that they wish to allow into the monastery. There is no other way into the monastery so long as the door remains shut. Immediately we arrived, our Arabs began to shout for the monks. But before they came, we had time to look at the monastery. We sat down on the western side, where we had most shade and where the door was. It is situated in the lowest part of the valley, and not on the side of the mountain. It is an irregular quadrilateral building built in sandstone blocks of about a half-ell’s length, more or less, and a quarter of an ell high or perhaps a little more. When one of the monks appeared, we told him that we had a letter to one of the fathers, Christopher of Macedonia, saying that the letter was from Constantinople and that we were Franks. When he heard that we were not Greeks he was not a little surprised, but promised that he would report this to the Father Superior. Meanwhile I went over to our
camp to fetch the letter and our Greek domestique; the latter was to enable us to talk with the fathers without being understood by the Arabs. When I got back again, we had to wait a long time before we saw any of the fathers. Finally, the man we had first spoken to shouted to our Arabs, and asked one of them to come to the wall. Near the door there was a hole through the wall, but situated so low that the monk within had to lie down in order to speak through it. It was only big enough to allow a man to put a hand and arm into it. Here he first harangued the Arabs, saying that Sheik Hassan could come over to the monastery with the strangers he had escorted, but that the other Arabs who had collected outside had no business there. This he said in a loud enough voice for them all to be able to hear. After this, he demanded to see our letter of introduction. I passed it to him through the hole, and he went away with it to the others. If I were to try to estimate the thickness of the monastery walls at this point, I should say they were at least one and a half ells thick; I could only just manage to put the letter into the monk’s fingers, despite the fact that we both stretched our arms into the wall, or rather the hole.
“The monks did not discuss our letter for long. They handed it back to us, with the seal still unbroken as they had received it, with the excuse that as the letter was not from their own archbishop, they could not receive it. They had, said their spokesman, orders to receive no other letters than those which came from their archbishop in Cairo. They could therefore not allow us into the monastery. To the Arabs, he shouted: ‘These people are Franks and they bring us letters from their own country, from Stamboul; we can neither receive them nor the letters.’ ”
With these words the matter was decided. Von Haven did not get permission to visit the monastery. From his letters from Cairo we know that he had visited the Archbishop of Mount Sinai several times; but so taken up had he been at that time by what the high prelate had had to say about the dangers of travelling in the Sinai desert that he had completely forgotten to ask him for the letter of introduction to the monastery, which he knew was so necessary and which would have been a small matter for him to have done.
Now it was too late. Had he got in he would have found in this desert monastery a priceless collection of valuables: Russian communion chalices, silver Greek candelabra, gold-embroidered altar cloths and vestments, diamond-encrusted crosses and episcopal staves, all of them gifts from medieval kings, patriarchs and monastic orders. Not that these splendours are the most important things, nor even those that would have attracted von Haven’s greatest interest. These we find on the next floor in the monastery’s library. The library of the Sinai Monastery was not merely a sight worth seeing, but its collection of old manuscripts is even to-day regarded as being second in importance only to the collection in the Vatican in Rome. Here von Haven would have found more than 3,500 manuscripts, of which 2,250 were Greek and 600 were Arabic. Above all, here was kept one of the world’s most famous bible manuscripts, the so-called Codex Sinaïticus dating from the fourth century, later acquired by Tischendorf, who had remembered to provide himself with a letter of introduction from the archbishop in Cairo.
Von Haven’s diary tells us he did not insist on entry. He did not demand any bible manuscripts. He simply asked for a little food: “As it was not possible to get into the monastery, I asked the monk if they would at least sell us some food, as practically all our provisions had been consumed by the Arabs. He answered that this was the desert and that they themselves had nothing. Nevertheless he would see if he could give us a few figs and grapes out of their garden. Thereupon he went away, and we were not able to speak to him again.”
Von Haven now compares this latest rebuff with the earlier one, and comes to the heroic conclusion that, despite everything, food is less important than bible manuscripts: “Much as it pained me that we had to leave without any provisions or the least soulagement, it distressed me even more that I had to leave behind all these codices unseen.” Nevertheless his diary suggests that he had not entirely dismissed food from his mind:
“After half an hour, a basket of grapes and figs was handed down to us over the garden wall, which was immediately facing the monastery to the west. The Arabs ate the greater part of this gift. We arrived back at our camp after twelve o’clock with an almost empty basket. The best thing we had was pure water from the hills. I forgot to mention above that by the 12th the Arabs had already smoked all our tobacco, and also taken all our flour and oil; and on the 14th our rice was also finished; so that we had nothing left except the dry biscuits from Cairo. They told us there was nothing to be got here, nor did they know where to get hold of anything, and said it was only common sense that we should now turn back again. This we were reluctant to do. I have observed earlier that we could not possibly be at Mount Sinai. The monastery was situated in a narrow valley, which was not even large enough for a medium-sized army to be able to camp in, let alone the 600,000 men that Moses had with him, who, together with their wives and children, must have come to over 3,000,000. In the neighbourhood of this oft-mentioned Greek monastery is also said to be the famous rock with the twelve holes, from which Moses is supposed to have struck water with his staff. We have not had the good fortune to see it. The reasons for our ill luck can easily be understood from the foregoing.”
Von Haven made no further effort to establish whether this really was Mount Sinai, just as, a few days earlier, he had quitted Djebel el-Mokateb. He had to abandon the idea of finding the place where Moses struck water from the rock; nor did he make any renewed efforts to gain access to the monastery’s manuscripts. His excuse in all these instances was the same—that they had nothing more to eat—and he seems to be aware that it was a poor one. At the Sinai monastery they were barely a day’s journey from the Faran oasis, where they could get themselves all sorts of food with the greatest of ease. They had money enough. It would not have been difficult to pay a few Arabs to go and fetch more provisions; and even if they had all had to withdraw, and then later returned to Mount Sinai, the expense would have been trifling in comparison with the loss the Danish State suffered by having thus vainly dispatched an expedition from Copenhagen to the Sinai peninsula.
Niebuhr’s drawing of the St. Catherine monastery
This also seems to have been Niebuhr’s opinion. He does not discuss food problems in his diary; but when von Haven proposed they should return, he protested, “Even if we were not able to get into the monastery, I would not have travelled so far across the desert without at least climbing Mount Sinai.” When Niebuhr suggested this, von Haven put forward another excuse in his diary: “Great though my desire was to see this mountain, nevertheless it was impossible for me to climb it on account of my fever and because of an injury to my foot. I had to let Herr Niebuhr go alone with two Arabs.”
While von Haven set out the following day alone with two Arabs on the journey back, Niebuhr climbed Mount Sinai. The previous day he had made two drawings of the Saint Catherine monastery, giving its situation relative to both the mountains and the valley; he also worked out a sketch map of the region, calculating its exact situation on the Sinai peninsula partly from readings of solar altitude, partly from estimates of the distance travelled from Suez. Now he climbed Mount Sinai, satisfied himself that this really was the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments, described the chapels that had been set up along the path, and copied all the inscriptions he found on the rock faces. Not until the afternoon did he catch up with von Haven, who without regard for his fever or his bad foot was steering a rapid course for the luxuries of the Faran oasis, which they reached that same evening. Once again their Arab guides vanished to their homes and families, and this time they had to wait for them for three days. At Mount Sinai, von Haven had had plenty to do but nothing to eat; here there was plenty to eat but nothing to do. Not until 20th September did they set off again; and at dawn the following day Niebuhr rode ahead alone to Djebel el-Mokateb in the hope of being able to copy the inscriptions without being disturbed by the A
rabs. He did not succeed in avoiding them entirely, but by dint of a few kind words and a little payment he was allowed to work all day at the rock face. When in the evening he joined up with von Haven, who in the meantime had settled down in the little village of Nazzab, he had worked out an accurate sketch map of the place with the inscriptions, discovered that it had been an Egyptian burial ground, and copied the hieroglyphics from the more important of the rocks, filling three plates in his travel diary. The following day he again rose at dawn and rode on ahead, this time to copy the rock drawings and inscriptions which on the outward journey they had passed during the night, because the Arabs wanted to revenge themselves on von Haven. Again he succeeded in getting the sheik’s permission to do the work, and at sunset he had copied all the texts on the hillside; they fill two plates in his diary and consist of certain Cufic inscriptions, together with rock drawings of camels and oxen.
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