Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2021
In Bertrand Russell’s The Wisdom of the West, the above photograph is paired with the caption “Mt. Sinai, home of Yahweh, the Invisible God of the Jews.” Indeed, this photograph depicts what is believed to be the 7,500-foot-high, volcanic, granite mountain located on the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, which the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) and the Qur’an identify as the site where Yahweh makes a covenant with Moses. The choice of this grey, out-of-focus, distant view is akin to Herman Melville’s description in The Encantadas of the Galapagos Islands: “It is to be doubted whether any spot on earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this group … . In these isles rain never falls … Another feature in these isles is their emphatic unimaginableness.”
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