1. The location of the city was a military secret, and its deep precipices and steep mountains provided natural defenses.

2. According to Josephus, a historian of the first century C.E., the Egyptian army drove the Israelites “into a narrow place” and trapped them “between inaccessible precipices and the sea.”

3. Opposite to these Chasms Snake River makes two desperate leaps over precipices, at a short distance from each other; one twenty, the other forty feet in height.

4. Crevasses in the glacier-ice were far too frequent to permit of reckless speed even in a clear atmosphere, and then there were hideous precipices along the edges of which our way often led us