Page 350 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

King Rameses’s viceroy in the delta hacl dispatched a regi­

ment of chariots to round up the Israelis, and at the same time
had sent word to the garrisons of Gaza and Ascalon to march
south and head off the tribe. But young Moses apparently had
an eye for country, for all his communing with spirits. He

had shaken off his pursuers in the tidal flats around the head of
the Gulf of Suez, where tire chariots could not follow—many had
been lost when the tide, coming in with deceptive swiftness,
had turned the salt crust to quagmire. Then, instead of following

the well-watered roads to the north, where he would have met the
troops from Canaan, he had led his people into the mountainous
desert of southern Sinai. And on the edge of the desert the troops

had given up the pursuit and marched back into Canaan.
It was a routine incident, such a pursuit of a raiding tribe,
made unusual by the fact that the tribe had so long been resident
in Egypt. It only went to show, said one of the Egyptian ser­

geants, that you couldn’t trust these Semites, however long they
had been living in a civilized country. The barmaids sniffed and
turned their backs demonstratively.
But the runaway tribe was soon forgotten by garrison and

children alike. Traders and travelers from the south occasionally
brought news of it, and it appeared that the Israelis had been
accepted by the nomad shepherds of Sinai, with whom their
leader, Moses, had established good relations during his earlier

exile, and they seemed to be in process of assimilation. And that
was that. There were other things to think about.
The most obtrusive of these was the coming war in the

north. It was an open secret that Rameses II, the young pharaoh
of Egypt, was preparing a large-scale campaign which was to
break the Hittite grip on the rich lands of northern Syria and to
re-establish the former frontier of Egypt on the Euphrates.

During these years, while the class of 1300 b.c. was entering its
teens, roads were being improved, stores collected at strategic
points, garrisons increased and exercised, and troops recruited

even from among the Canaanites. Many of the older brothers
of the boys were attracted by the good terms of service and the
prospect of plunder to join one or another of the mercenary com­
panies that were being raised along the coast.