At-Tur or more commonly El Tor (Arabic الطور, also known as Al-Tur, Tur Sinai or the former name Raithu) is the capital of the governorate of Janub Sina in Egypt.
The name of the city is derived from an Arabic name for Mount Sinai, where Moses is said to have received the tablets of the law.
Arab tent camp near El Tor, Egypt in the Sinai
Arab tent camp near El Tor, Egypt in the Sinai
by Ernst Haeckel
I executed this panel from a color sketch that I took during a walk in the vicinity of El Tor on the afternoon of March 26.
Star corals
On the left in the foreground you can see a pile of huge, mostly round coral blocks that are to be used to build a house; they have only recently been brought up from the sea, have not yet been hewn, and the delicate star-shaped pattern on their surface shows us that they belong to different species of the extensive family of reef-forming star corals (astraeids).
Various subfamilies
Various subfamilies of this large family are represented, namely sun corals (heliastraeids), honeycomb corals (faviades) and labyrinth corals (maeandrines). But there are also pore corals (poritids) and organ corals (tubipores) in between.
The dilapidated tower on the left in the foreground and the house further back are, like all the other houses in the village of El Tor, built solely from coral blocks that can be easily carved into any shape.
Various palms
The large, forked palm tree that rises to the right of the turret is the beautiful Doum palm of Upper Egypt (Hyphaene thebaica), which we saw for the first time at El Tor in several magnificent specimens.
The other palms in the middle of the picture, on the right and left, are all the common date palms (Phoenix dactylifera); here in El Tor as everywhere in Arabia, they are the most important cultivated plant.
Vegetation
We found very little other vegetation in the area around El Tor. The most remarkable thing was a beautiful aloe with long red flower clusters (far left in the foreground).
The desert, which stretches directly from the village of El Tor to the foot of the mighty Sinai Mountains (rising in the background), is almost completely devoid of vegetation.
Source: Arabian corals: an excursion to the coral reefs of the Red Sea and a look at the life of coral animals: popular lecture with scientific explanations by Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August, 1834-1919. Publisher Berlin: G. Reimer, 1876.
