Travels of Rolando, Or, a Tour Round the World (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. BAGDAD. M. Bernier relates his visit to Idumea and the city of Petra.? Rolando is joined by hia parents.?Proposals for the iurther travels of the party. On our arrival, we learnt that the messenger had returned from. Shiraz, bearing letters from my parents, to announce their immediate return; no consideration tempting them longer to delay our meeting. A caravan was expected from Shiraz in a few days, and M. de Clermont trusted they would certainly form a part of it. We found the party at my cousin's augmented by the arrival of an intelligent French traveller, M. Bernier, the account of whose rambles in the deserts of Arabia afforded us all much pleasure. Doloni was particularly inquisitive on the subject of his visit to the land of Idumea, and the ruined city of Petra. " To me," said Doloni, "there has always been something deeply interesting in the history of the doomed posterity of the rash and impetuous Esau. " By his marriage with the women of a strange land, the thoughtless elder brother, who had already cast away the blessing of his birth-right, offended his parents, and broke the law of God, bringing down on his posterity woe and desolation; yet the frankness, energy, aud generosity of his character are more amiable than the craftiness and selfish prudence of hia brother. It was in the cavern-dwellings ofMount Seir that the Edomite descendants of Esau took refuge, after extirpating the original inhabitants; there they dwelt, and became a great people; lor we read that the wandering Israelites had to petition their king to allow them to pass through his land." " There is only one valley through which they could have passed," observed M. Bernier, "and many circumstances corroborate the opinion that the tribes went through the Wady-el Ghuweir, t...