THE PEDALTO INSTITUTION FOR INCORPORATED ART

 
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BUREAU OF OTHER DESERT CITIES

DIRECTOR   Spirodon Abazza

ABOUT

We were now coming into another country, and leaving the desert behind us; a scanty verdure was beginning to cover the mountains. At nine o'clock [the next day,] we came to another field of ruins, where the relics of an Arab village were mingled with those of a Roman city. Soon after we came to an inhabited village, the first since we left Cairo. Like the ruined and deserted village we had left, it was a mingled exhibition of ancient greatness and modern poverty; and probably it was a continuation of the same ruined Roman city, the last of the cities which once stood on the great Roman road from Jerusalem to Akaba. Unless the two Englishmen and Italian before referred to passed on this same route, I am the only person, except the wandering Arabs, who ever did pass through the doomed and forbidden Edom, beholding with his own eyes the fearful fulfilment of the terrible denunciations of an offended God. And, though I did pass through and yet was not cut off, God forbid that I should count the prophecy a lie : no; even though I had been a confirmed skeptic, I have seen enough in wandering with the Bible in my hand in that unpeopled desert, to tear up the very foundations of unbelief, and scatter its fragments to the winds. In my judgment, tho words of the prophet are abundantly fulfilled in the destruction and desolation of the ancient Edom, and the complete and eternal breaking up of a great public highway ; and it is neither necessary nor useful to extend the denunciation against a passing traveller.