A Night on Sinai by Isabella Bird Bishop

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 18, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 44.

A Night on Sinai.

By Isabella Bird Bishop

I LAY with my head on a stone till sunrise, bitterly cold, I confess, but thinking much of Jacob at Bethel and Elijah's fast near this same spot. The brief, majestic narrative of Sinai takes complete possession of one here. "The mount" which "burned with fire" might have trembled at the divine presence but yesterday; it is also unchanged, so silent, so indescribably sublime.

In the still, starry nights there are strange noises, rumblings, and rushings as of distant avalanches or earthquakes, which the Bedaween say are sounds made by the imprisoned and tormented spirits of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, but which are possibly avalanches of sand or the descent of masses of rock, gradually detached by the action of frost. These nocturnal sounds do not detract from the solemnity of the surroundings.

Oh, how infinitely it exceeds all my dreams and anticipations! It stands alone; I cannot compare it with anything; it does not remind me of anything. "This is Mount Sinai in Arabia," is all one can say; and as I think of the awfulness of the giving of the law, in the still night the sound of the cymbals of the convent, changed by the echoes of the desert valley into the sweetest of unearthly music, as it floats up to my tent in this Easter week, speaks at the foot of Sinai of Him who came not to destroy but to fulfill the law, himself "the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth."

Somehow the exquisite sweetness of those chimes had made me revert to my old belief that the monks who dwell under the shadow of Sinai must be holy men who were cultivating an exalted piety in these sublime solitudes, but I was soon disenchanted.—Isabella Bird Bishop.