exaggerated, it is said, by the bright scarlet colour in which Sinai
is always painted in mediaeval illuminations.

But the gorgeousness of colouring, though it may interest us, was
not, of course, what produced the deepest effect upon the minds of
those old hermits. They enjoyed Nature, not so much for her beauty,
as for her perfect peace. Day by day the rocks remained the same.
Silently out of the Eastern desert, day by day, the rising sun threw
aloft those arrows of light, which the old Greeks had named "the
rosy fingers of the dawn." Silently he passed in full blaze almost
above their heads throughout the day; and silently he dipped behind
the western desert in a glory of crimson and orange, green and
purple; and without an interval of twilight, in a moment, all the
land was dark, and the stars leapt out, not twinkling as in our
damper climate here, but hanging like balls of white fire in that
purple southern night, through which one seems to look beyond the
stars into the infinite abyss, and towards the throne of God
himself. Day after day, night after night, that gorgeous pageant
passed over the poor hermit's head without a sound; and though sun
and moon and planet might change their places as the year rolled
round, the earth beneath his feet seemed not to change. Every
morning he saw the same peaks in the distance, the same rocks, the
same sand-heaps around his feet. He never heard the tinkle of a
running stream. For weeks together he did not even hear the rushing
of the wind. Now and then a storm might sweep up the pass, whirling
the sand in eddies, and making the desert for a while literally a
"howling wilderness;" and when that was passed all was as it had
been before. The very change of seasons must have been little
marked to him, save by the motions, if he cared to watch them, of
the stars above; for vegetation there was none to mark the