Charles H. Spurgeon on Psalms 104:32

No one save a photographer can sketch the desert around Sinai. Roberts' views are noble, and to a certain extent true; but they do not represent these desert cliffs and ravines. No artist can rightly do it. Only the photographer can pourtray the million of minute details that go to make up the bleakness, the wildness, the awfulness, and the dismal loneliness of these unearthly wastes. About noon I went out and walked upon the convent roof. The star light over the mountain peaks was splendid, while the gloom that hung round these enormous precipices and Impenetrable ravines was quite oppressive to the spirit. This is the scene of which David spoke. "He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke." This is the mountain "that was touched, and that burned with fire" (Heb 7:18). Not the mount that "might be touched, "as our translators have rendered it, but the mount "that was touched, " qhla fwmena, —the mount on which the finger of God rested. We could imagine the black girdle of the thick darkness with which the mountain was surrounded, and the lightnings giving forth their quick fire through tiffs covering, making its blackness blacker. We could imagine, too, the supernatural blaze, kindled by no earthly hand, that shot up out of the midst of this, like a living column of fire, ascending, amid the sound of angelic trumpets and superangelic thunders, to the very heart of heaven. Horatius Bonar, in "The Desert of Sinai", 1858.