Here the 19—20 November our tents were stiffened by the night's frost. Mount Seir or J. Sherra before us (sherra is interpreted high), is high and cold, and the Arabs' summer clothing is as nakedness in the winter season. The land is open, not a rock or tree or any good bush to bear off the icy wind; it is reported, as a thing of a late memory, that wayfaring companies and their cattle have starved, coming this way over in the winter months. In the night they perished together, and the men were found lying by the cold ash-pits of their burned-out watch-fires. Not far from this wady, in front, begins that flint beach, which lies strewn over great part of the mountain of Esau; a stony nakedness blackened by the weather: it is a head of gravel, whose earth was wasted by the winds and secular rains. This land-face of pebbles shines vapouring in the clear sun, and they are polished as the stones and even the mountains in Sinai by the ajdj or dust-bearing blasts. The wide-spread and often three-fathom deep bed of gravel, is the highest platform of land in all that province; the worn flint-stones are of the washed chalk rock lying beneath, in which are massy (tabular) silicious veins: we see such gravel to be laid out in shallow streaming water, but since this is the highest ground, from whence that wash of water?