After a silly fortnight at old Madiáma, I resolved to march upon its seaport, Makná, the [Greek] of Ptolemy, which the people call also “Madyan.”100 We set out at seven a.m. (January 25th); and, after a walk of forty-five minutes, we were shown by Furayj a Ghadír, or shallow basin of clay, shining and bald as an old scalp from the chronic sinking of water. In the middle stood two low heaps of fine white cement, mixed with brick and gravel; while to the west we could trace the framework of a mortared Fiskíyyah (“cistern”), measuring five metres each way. The ruin lies a little south of west (241 deg. mag.) from the greater “Shigd;” and it is directly under the catacombed hill which bears the “Praying-place of Jethro.” A tank in these regions always presupposes a water-pit, and there are lingering traditions that this is the “Well of Moses,” so generally noticed by mediæval Arab geographers. It is the only one in the Wady Makná, not to mention a modern pit about an hour and a half further down the valley, sunk by the Bedawin some twenty feet deep: the walls of the latter are apparently falling in, and it is now bone-dry. But the veritable “Moses’ Well” seems to have been upon the coast; and, if such be the case, it is clean forgotten. True, Masá’íd, the mad old Ma’ázi, attempted to trace a well inside our camp by the seashore; but the Beni ‘Ukbah, to whom the land belongs, had never heard of it.
After marching about six miles, we entered a gorge called Umm el-Bíbán, “the Mother of Gates,” formed by the stony spurs of the Wady bank: the number of birds and trees, especially in the syenitic valleys, showed that water could not be far off. At 10.10 a.m. a halt was called at the half-way place, a bay or hollow in the left cliff, El–Humayrah—“the Little Red”—an overhanging wall of ruddy grit some eighty feet high, with strata varying in depth from a few lines to as many fathoms, all differing in colour, and all honeycombed, fretted, and sculptured by wind and rain. Above the red grit, weathered into a thousand queer shapes, stood strata of chloritic sand, a pale yellow-green, and capping it rose the usual dull-brown carbonate of lime. Large fossil oysters lay in numbers about the base, suggesting a prehistoric feast of the Titans. Amongst them is the monstrous Tridacna (gigantea), which sometimes attains a growth of a yard and a half; one of these is used as a bénitier at the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. Amongst the layers were wavy bands of water-rolled crystals, jaspers, bloodstones, iron-revetted pebbles, and “almonds,” which, in the Brazil, accompany and betray the diamond.101 We had no time to make a serious search; but, when the metals shall be worked, it will, perhaps, be advisable to import a skilled prospecter from the Brazil or the Cape of Good Hope.
At noon we met the “heaven-sent, life-sustaining sea-breeze;” and now the broad and well-marked Wady Makná, with its rosy-pink sands, narrowed to a gut, flanked and choked on both sides, north and south, by rocks of the strangest tricolour, green-black, yellow-white, and rusty-red. The gloomy peak, which had long appeared capping the heights ahead, proved to be the culmination of a huge upthrust of porphyritic trap. Bottle-green when seen under certain angles, and dull dead sable at others, it was variegated by cliffs and slopes polished like dark mirrors, and by sooty sand-shunts disposed at the natural slope. Crumbling outside, the lower strata pass from the cellular to the compact, and are often metalliferous when in contact with the quartz: at these Salbandes the richest mineral deposits are always found. Set in and on the black flanks, and looking from afar like the gouts of a bloodstone, are horizontal beds, perpendicular spines, and detached blocks of felsitic porphyry and of rusty-red syenite, altered, broken, and burnt by plutonic heat. In places, where the trap has cut through the more modern formations, it has been degraded by time from a dyke to a ditch, the latter walled by the ruddy rocks, and sharply cut as a castle-moat. And already we could see, on the right of the Wady, those cones and crests of ghastly, glaring white gypsum, which we had called “the Hats.”