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However, we pushed them on with flouts and jeers, and we ourselves followed at eleven a.m. The Pass proved to be one of the easiest. It began with a gradual rise up a short broad Wady, separating the southernmost counterforts of the Sharr from the north end of the Jebel el-Ghurab.
The only tolerable Pass rounding the southern Sharr was, they declared, the Wady Aujar, an influent of the Wady Zahakan, near Ziba. The Col el-Kuwayd, now within a few yards of us, is so terrible that the unfortunate camels would require, before they could attempt it, at least twenty-four hours of preparatory rest and rich feeding; and so forth.
To the right rose the Jibal el-Tihamah, over whose nearer brown heights appeared the pale blue peaks of Jebel Sharr and its southern neighbour, Jebel Sa'luwwah. At nine a.m. we turned abruptly eastward up the Wady el-Sulaysalah, whose head falls sharply from the Shafah range.
We shall see the same freak of nature far more grandly developed into the "Pins" of the Sharr. It has evidently upraised the trap, of which large and small blocks are here and there imbedded in it.
The country behind it shows a perspective of high and low hills, lines of dark rock divided from one another by Wadys of the usual exaggerated size. Of these minor heights only one, the Jebel el-Sahharah looks down upon the sea, rising between the Dibbagh-Kh'shabriyyah block to the north, and the Sharr to the south.
The great valley now defines, sharply as a knife-cut, the northernmost outlines of the Sharr, whose apex, El-Kusayb, towered above our heads. Thorn-trees are abundant; fan-palm bush grows in patches; and we came upon what looked like a flowing stream ruffled by the morning breeze: the guides declared that it is a rain-pool, dry as a bone in summer.
The more distant plane showed only the heads of the Shenazir or "Pins," the two quaint columns which are visible as far as the Sharr itself. This lower block is bounded, north and south, by gorges; fissures that date from the birth of the mountain, deepened by age and raging torrents: apparently they offered no passage.
This Jebel Libn, along which we are now steaming, is a counterpart on a small scale, a little brother, of the Sharr, measuring 3733 instead of 6000 to 6500 feet. We first see from the north a solid block capped with a mural crown of three peaks.
The mass, formerly mammilated, has been broken and denticulated by the destruction of softer strata. Already the lower crest, bounding the Sha'b Umm Khargah, shows perpendicular fissures which, when these huge columns shall be gnawed away by the tooth of Time, will form a new range of pillars for the benefit of those ascending the Sharr, let us say in about A.D. 10,000.
Northernmost, and prolonging the Libn, that miniature Sharr, is the regular wall of the Jebel el-Ward; then come the peaks and pinnacles of the Jibal el-Safhah; and lastly, the twin blocks El-Ral, between which passes the Egyptian Hajj when returning from El-Medinah. Faint resemblances of these features sprawl, like huge caterpillars, over the Hydrographic Chart, but all sprawl unnamed.
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