Moslem though, he was, he looked like a caste-marked Hindu. Camels seemed insignificant in this desert waste. The single telegraph wire looked nostalgic rather than helpful. The metal kilometer "stones" seemed lost. And at night, among the only real dunes we encountered in II days, we sat under the growing moon and watched our cameleers dance and sing in our honor. Dark, wind-blown gowns against milkwhite tents bellying in the breeze; the monotonous chant; the endless handclapping and swaying to music; the satisfied grunt of a camel-they seemed to fit the wind-swept dunes better than they did the walled-in wadies or the stony desert. That night we slept at the west end of the soft-sand belt, called Debbet er-Ramleh, which separates the granite spearpoint of Sinai, the Tor, from the limestone plateau, the Tih, which is the tail of Lebanon and the Judean highlands. From now on it is pebble desert, serir, all the way to the Springs of Moses. Along this part of the route, motor cars can move at high speed. The pebblecovered desert lacks the beauty of smooth dunes, but every riffle and softly curving hogback spells uncertain footing, obscured trails, slow going and sand-cut faces. It is the riffled dune, so pleasing to the eye, which endangers the eyes and where such dunes are found, even men wear veils. Yet the serir, glittering with flints, is not unbeautiful. Desert animals trace their delicate autographs on the embryo dunes that form behind each tuft of vegetation. One lizard had left a trail so charming that it could have served as an embroidery design. To our right stretched Jebel er-Raha, the even edge of the limestone plateau, the Wall of the Israelites. To our left, between the straw-colored sands of Asia and the lion-mane mountains of Africa (the Sinai Peninsula forms a political Africa Minor), lay the vivid gash of cobalt which is the Gulf of Suez. We lunched at Marah, whose bitter springs caused the Israelites to rail against the Eternal, and spent the night in a level plain near the 40-kilometer mark. The dragoman rode up just in time to discover our improvident Arabsthey had provided themselves with a whole box of our oranges earlier in the trip-filling their water skins from our tanks. Before we arrived they had been compelled to return most of it. If the tea tasted of goat hair at the end of that ovenly ride, we did not notice it. THE DESERT TEACHES THE TRAVELER NOT TO DISCOVER, BUT TO FEEL Those last desert days taught us the value of traveling, not to discover but to feel. Until then our chief impression of Palestine was summed up in an irreverent story of how Moses, surveying the Promised Land from Pisgah peak, gave one look at the barren Judean plateau and then lay right down and died. But after those Sinai days Judea never seemed as barren again. We came upon the Springs of Moses before noon. Only a short distance away was the lazaret of Suez and the aluminum-colored oil tanks of Arbain seemed close at hand. But there would be no train for Jerusalem that night. We pictured the Saturday jazz band, the welter of black suits and pastel-shade silk dresses. in the hotel, and the street noises of the bazaar, where men blow grain from their mouths into the crops of coral-eyed pigeons, and we gladly prolonged our stay in the oasis where Moses sang his song of deliverance and Miriam, leading her chorus of women, tambourine in hand, gloated over the destruction of the Pha raoh. Our last morning looked toward the future rather than the past. The morrow would see us in Jerusalem and night in the tent of the Samaritan High Priest at the Israelitish blood sacrifice on Mount Gerizim.* Then amid the shouting hordes in the teeming courtyard of Nebi Musa and a silent moonlight walk on the wall of the Holy City. Greek Easter was upon us with its Washing of the Feet, closely followed by the spirited entrance of the Nebi Musa procession through the Gate of the Virgin Mary (see text, page 667). Friday would *See, also, "The Last Israelitish Blood Sacrifice: How the Vanishing Samaritans Celebrate the Passover on Sacred Mount Gerizim," by John D. Whiting, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for January, 1920. A HORNED WOMAN OF THE SINAI PENINSULA With life reduced to bare essentials, the Turi Arab woman (see text, page 735) loads herself down with cumbersome jewelry and hides her face behind what Thackeray called a "nose bag." But her distinctive feature is the horn of wifehood, a prong of hair projecting from the forehead. find us in the monkish cliff nest at Mar Saba, and Saturday awaiting the Holy Fire at the Holy Sepulcher (see text, page 673). All the hurry and confusion of modern living were soon to engulf us, as the sea beside us had engulfed Pharaoh's chariots. As each camel arrived at the bulky ferryboat, its load was quickly put aboard. and silently each Arab stole back to his desert without a word of farewell. was with a sense of loneliness that we felt the sail and current sweep us away from the desert of the Exodus as we slanted across toward Suez. And there with Waghorn's statue looking out from the oh, so artificial and blessed trees of Port Thewfik, we repeated the last verse of our song of our desert march, now finished: It "And when at last we reach our homes Left to right: Two silver coins of Tarentum, about 400 B. C.; a gold coin of Croesus of Lydia, 568-554 B. C.; early Athenian coins showing the head of Athena on the obverse and an owl on the reverse side, 590-524 B. C. Left to right: Two silver coins showing profiles of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, 43-31 B. C. (with one exception, the only known portraits of Cleopatra are those on coins); a silver coin of Syracuse, obverse and reverse, 405-345 B. C., the period of finest art in coin-making (see text, page 751). Left to right: Early "pieces of eight" of Peru, and the obverse of the coin from which we derive our word "dollar." This is the "thaler," or "Joachimsthaler," issued by the Count of Schlick at Joachimsthal, Bohemia, 1518-1525 A. D. (see text, pages 752, 756). SOME EARLY SPECIMENS OF "THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL" Money is often the creature of geography. No man could walk up Broadway with a goat under his arm and use the goat to buy a ticket for a reigning musical comedy, nor could he pay for a haircut with muskrat skin; yet many so-called "backward peoples" still prefer barter to cash deals. In Timbuktu a goat is legal tender, and on Tiburón Island, Gulf of California, old clothes and jam or whiskey are preferred to dollars and cents-because there are no towns or stores where the Seri Indians can spend any money. Barter survives, usually, in lands badly ruled, where, to their regret, the people have learned that a goat is a goat, but that often the fiat money of a rebel chief may drop to zero. Twenty-three hundred years ago the Greeks made the most beautiful gold coins ever minted, and about the same time certain African tribes were using rock salt and live animals as currency. Largely because of their isolation, their lack of world contacts, the latter still use animals and rock salt to buy their wives and pay their debts. The use of coined money, as a rule, has kept pace with man's mental and economic progress, and a measure of a government's strength and integrity is the stability of its money. BY WILLIAM ATHERTON DU PUY O-DAY in Wall Street or the disks in all their varieties. It has served Baghdad Bazaar - now as when Judas betrayed Jesus for silver and Marco Polo found Chinese making banknotes of mulberry bark-men dream and talk of money. They talk more about it than of any other one thing. Could we, by some magic, at this instant catch all words being uttered in every tongue everywhere, the most frequent would probably refer to money and price. "Money," it has been said, "is what the other man takes for the things you want." Man has used money, in some form, since the dawn of civilization. Fishhooks and slave girls, beads, hawks and hounds, all have served as a medium of exchange. Early Virginians bought wives with tobacco. Once, it is said, Mexican Indians used cacao beans, until aboriginal crooks began making clay counterfeits, baked and varnished to look like the real. The study of money, as an instrument of trade through the ages, involves art. heraldry, and mythology; it leads to economics and politics-and far into history. When kingdoms rose, often new moneys rose with them; and, when they fell, their moneys passed away. Nothing shakes a government like the depreciation of its money. The very progress of civilization itself may be largely measured by the pace at which the various moneys of the world have been standardized and accepted by international commerce. It was, to a large degree, the quest for gold and silver, and their use in coined money, which led to the exploration and settlement of America, Australia, and South Africa. Metal-disk money was born in Lydia, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, about 2,600 years ago. It appears to-day in its most ambitious form as the American dollar. Cowrie, the lowly shell money of the antipodes, has through the ages been the most widely circulated rival of the metal disk; but its day of dominance has departed. Only isolated communities still cling to it as money (see page 768). Yet cowrie can boast that more people have used it than have clinked the metal a greater number of human beings as a medium of exchange than any other money devised by man. COWRIE SHELLS WERE THE WORLD'S FIRST MONEY Shell money, beginning as ornament, has been popular with aboriginal peoples almost everywhere; but no other has gained the prestige of cowrie or persisted so long. It was born of a pretty little mollusk taken from the shallow spots of the Indian Ocean, and used by all the inhabitants of that geographical area washed by its waters. These shells were white or straw-colored, about an inch long, glistening and clean. They constituted what was probably the first money in all the world, the medium of exchange for dense populations, and served many men for many generations. Cowrie's last ambitious stand was made on the West Coast of Africa, where it was in general use as money a generation ago. It is still current in isolated communities in Africa, India, and the South Seas, but has practically given way to the advance of the moneys of commercial nations. The cash of China, coins with holes in them, still dominate the marts of many men in a considerable corner of the Asiatic world. There exist inscribed cash pieces attributed to 1115-1079 B. C. and similar pieces, uninscribed, believed to be earlier. The tao, also of China, was one of the first metal coins in the world. The word means "knife" or "sharp-edged instrument," hence the name was applied to the razor-shaped coins of old China. The earliest Chinese metal coins are believed to have been miniature spades, uninscribed and without perforation and with open shank for inserting a handle. Some authorities place them earlier than 2000 B. C. Convenience for carrying is accepted as accounting for the introduction and long use of perforated coins by China and its neighbors. From earliest times a string has been the poor man's pocketbook (p. 759). A DOLLAR BILL WEARS OUT SOONER THAN A PAIR OF SHOES In eight months the average dollar bill in circulation is worn out. So the Federal Government must constantly replace its paper money. Obviously, however, a $500 bill will wear much longer than one of small denomination. Paper money, ready to be distributed from the Treasury Department, Washington, D. C. There have been many unique moneys in different countries. Nails were once so precious that they were used as money in Scotland and in New England in preRevolution days. And while the mark was skidding to zero after the World War, postmasters in remote parts of Germany used shoe nails for small-change purposes-they had a fixed utility value. Bars of crystal salt are money in many parts of Ethiopia. This medium of exchange, however, suffers deterioration in a strange way. It has become a nice courtesy, when meeting a friend, to proffer a coin to be licked. So does the money lose weight through friendly hospitality, and it is to be hoped that the salt acts as a germicide! THE CARTWHEEL COINS OF YAP The island of Yap, of the Caroline group, neighbors in the remote way of the South Seas with the Philippines and New Guinea, undoubtedly boasts the strangest of money. It is of stone and the coins are sometimes 12 feet in diameter and weigh many hundreds of pounds! The stone from which this money is made is not quarried on Yap, but must be brought from another island hundreds of miles away. The mild-natured Polynesian who is able to hire the labor necessary to cut out one of these huge coins and transport it to Yap is, admittedly, a man of wealth and consequence. It is convincing evidence of one's financial status to deposit one of the large stones in front of one's home and let it "take root" (see illustration, page 759). To-day the legal tender of a modern world is the metal disk of gold or silver. To be sure, many lands have contributed to its development. Political geography, the resources of peoples, their |