Twice we came upon the foundations of such places, old walls of clay or stone, stark skeletons of ancient homes that the shifting sands had disinterred, which once had been the theatre of human hopes and fears, where once men had been born, loved, and died, where once maidens had been fair, and good and evil wrestled, and little children played.

Some Job may have dwelt here and written his immortal plaint, or some king of Sodom, and suffered the uttermost calamity.

The world is very old; all we Westerns learned from the contemplation of these wrecks of men and of their works was just that the world is very old.
One evening against the clear sky there appeared the dim outline of towering cliffs, shaped like a horseshoe.

They were the Mountains of Mur many miles away, but still the Mountains of Mur, sighted at last.

Next morning we began to descend through wooded land toward a wide river that is, I believe, a tributary of the Nile, though upon this point I have no certain information.