I dialed the university doctor and told him what I had found out. But he already knew that Curt was in an ambulance coming to Cairo.
“It’s important that he gets to Cairo within six hours. He needs to be treated as soon as possible.” He then asked me for basic intake information on Curt because he was going to be his doctor at the kidney hospital on the Corniche in Cairo. The hospital, he told me, specialized in kidney disorders and would be able to help as long as Curt got to Cairo within six hours.
Christopher came in the door as I put down the phone and looked at me inquiringly. With some reluctance, I told him the latest news: we were waiting for his father to arrive in Cairo, in an ambulance from Hurghada, whose hospital had been unable to deal with Curt’s dehydration.
When Chris came out from the shower a few minutes later, we sat in the living room again, discussing what this meant. We now realized with a painful certainty that Curt’s medical condition was far more serious than we had initially grasped.
We went over the facts as we knew them. Curt had left Cairo last Friday and it was now Saturday, over a week later. The Bedouin, Gamel Mowad, had seen him that first Friday when he guided Curt to the beginning of the trail, and the following Wednesday when he found him lying on the plateau with little water, and then again on Friday with no water. There was an anomaly in the recurring appearance of Mowad, but we couldn’t think of what it was at the time.
A month later, in Cairo, the monks from St. Anthony’s came to visit us and speculated that Mowad had followed Curt the entire time because Curt must have seen some sort of drug trading or refugee trafficking.
CHAPTER 46
Desert Petroglyphs
April 2001
FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARD, I tried to imagine what really happened with Curt in the desert above St. Anthony’s Monastery in 2001.
In my mind’s eye, I see him getting out of the university car, saying goodbye to the driver, and grabbing his old patched and faded Peace Corps pack, to begin the long walk down the dirt road that leads to the monastery of St. Anthony’s. Before hiking into the wadi, a dry riverbed, he decides to top off his water bottles and talk with anyone who can tell him about the trail between St. Anthony’s and St. Paul’s. He’s happy to be returning to the rough desert landscape of eastern Egypt, the only place where he has found the peace and quiet that he craves while living with us in overcrowded and polluted Cairo. His plan is to hike in the desert for approximately five days before heading to the Red Sea resort town of Zafarana, where he’ll catch a minibus back to Cairo.
From what he’s been able to find in our Egypt guidebooks—and there isn’t much information—it will take about three to four days to do the whole distance through the mountains and wadis. Though it’s not well marked, the trail can be worked out, he figures, by using his hand-held compass and Xeroxed maps he’s tucked away in the upper flap of his backpack. With his climbing experience in South America and the Arctic, he figures it’ll be like any other expedition he’s been on in the past, including the ocean voyaging he did with me. He’s confident about finding his way south to St. Paul’s through the wadis and over the plateaus. He’s decided to go ultra-light by packing only two liter-and-a-half bottles of spring water, five flat loaves of the local bread, and a package of French Laughing Cow cheese, along with a bivy sack tent, a sleeping pad and bed sheet, a camera, and a small telescope for taking photos of the night stars and planets.
When he leaves St. Anthony’s later that afternoon, his mind is full of directions that were confusing at times. A Bedouin offers to lead him to the entrance of the wadi that formally begins behind the huge stone walls of the monastery and leaves him. Curt picks his way through the desert scree until he arrives at a campsite that is still within sight of the monastery. He’s exhausted by the day’s travels, so in the late afternoon shade of the desert wadi, he settles on the sleeping pad and drops off, deeply asleep for the night.
The morning air is quiet and pleasantly cool as the blue walls of the tent lighten in the following day’s dawn. When he crawls out and stands for a moment, turning slowly around, he tries to pick out a trail in a landscape made up of wildly juxtaposing lines of craggy rock and scree walls with a vertical dried riverbed down the middle.
Was it here? I wonder if this is where his seeds of uncertainty were first sown.
He grabs the pad from the tent and finds a comfortable spot amid the rocks and sand to eat his bread and cheese for breakfast. He finds himself staying longer, perhaps longer than he should, given the heat and lack of any shade later on. In a small spiral-bound notebook with a yellow plastic cover, he makes notes about where he thinks he is and his plans for the day. He looks over the Xeroxed topo map for details that he might have missed earlier. With the thick reading glasses from his dad’s collection in their Vermont summer house, he sees that the trail is straight ahead or due east from where he sits this morning, as the Bedouin said. He rechecks his bearings with the compass and rises stiffly from the rocks. As each item goes back into the pack, the silence is soft; the small stones crunch quietly under the leather soles of his boots as he picks up the pack and continues his hike under the rose-colored morning sky.
The walls of the wadi flare backward in steep lines, but the trail that the Bedouin so blithely gestured to isn’t there. “Heneck, heneck [There, there].” The Bedouin waved his hand toward the far distance where the trail went up to the plateau between two large boulders. He pointed down at the dirt path where they had stood by St. Anthony’s and up again in the direction of St. Paul’s. It seemed obvious enough.
Curt becomes hot and increasingly thirsty during the day, though he tries not to think of how much water he left at the monastery because the extra weight could have slowed him down. Despite his creeping misgivings about the direction of the trail, he decides to stop for the night further up the wadi and make camp after the moon sets. When he looks up, the sky is filled with an infinitesimal number of visible stars and planets that he wants to photograph, so he pitches the tent and takes out his portable Meade telescope and Nikon SLR. In his stuff sack, he finds the index card with the stars and planets and their altitudes that he copied out of the almanac he left in Cairo. He’s happy because this is the best time of the day.
Almost all his life, Curt has loved looking at the night sky and reading the constellations. When he and I rowed the Atlantic and Pacific, Curt reveled in the art of navigating by sextant, calling the altitude readings out to me as he shot navigation stars like Regulus and Eridani and the planets like Venus and Mars so I could record them in the navigation notebook. It was always satisfying to figure out those calculations and come up with a position that could be plotted with the dividers on the ocean charts. Each day, he’d put a little X after the previous day’s position and show me our steady progress across the oceans.
This evening he photographs seven stars—two that he’s looked for a long time—and scribbles their declinations into the yellow notebook. The silence of the desert is almost eerie in its heaviness.
When he crawls into the tent well after midnight, he contemplates what to do the next day. The wadi is coming to an end and its walls are coming closer together with no obvious path upward. Could he have missed the trail up and out of the wadi? The Bedouin said the trail went left and sharply upward shortly before coming to the end. He’s seen nothing like this so far.
The air is hot and oppressive the next morning when he wakes. It’s the day that he will, hopefully, leave this godforsaken wadi by climbing upward. At breakfast, he briefly considers retracing his route from the monastery and takes another nibble of stale bread and cheese with small mouthfuls of water. Can he find his tracks again, though? Can he find his way back in this 100-degree Fahrenheit heat? It’s only late April, but every day is scorching hot. In the end, he decides that it’s better to go up and figure out where he is than to wander on the wadi bed any longer.
After an hour, he sees a trail between two large boulders. He looks down
and sees tracks made by a pair of sandals, though they don’t only go in between those rocks; they are everywhere. It’s only a vague suggestion of what he considers a trail, and it’s not much to go on.
Before he left St. Anthony’s Monastery, one of the English-speaking monks warned him to be very careful to stick to the trails. There are bad things out there, drug smuggling, he seemed to say in his imperfect English. But before he could process that information, the Bedouin stepped up and offered to be his guide to the beginning of the trail. He took only one of the extra water bottles that the monk held out, with a quick thank you; he followed the Bedouin toward the wadi. When he looked back, the monk was still staring after him.
He walks up to the two large boulders and pats both with outstretched hands. They are close enough to each other to form an entrance of sorts. He’s sure that this is the start of the trail that will lead him out of the wadi and up to the plateau where he can figure out where the hell he is.
With one last glance backward at the two boulders, he starts up the trail with a feeling of trepidation and some foreboding, though he really doesn’t have a choice but to go up. He can’t go backward anymore and risk getting lost in the wadi.
Though his frame pack is relatively light, his fifty-five-year old body hurts with each step. He’s definitely out of shape. A blast of heat strikes as he moves from the shade of the wadi into the full sun of the upper wall. His water bottle is light as he takes a short sip of warm water.
He pushes on through his increasing fears. He wants more water to quench what is becoming an all-encompassing thirst.
Suddenly, there is the faintest wisp of a breeze on his face. He’s sure the end of the trail out of this hellhole is up there. He’s near the top of the plateau. Thank God, he’s there.
The night air of the plateau is surprisingly cold, and the thin bed sheet he uses in the bivy tent is barely keeping him warm. His body aches everywhere as he floats in the blank space of a restless sleep. The desert floor is cold and he’s shivering, but, finally overcome by exhaustion, he falls into a heavy sleep.
I imagine that he has the same dream that he had on Aconcagua Mountain in the Andes in 1970 and on the rowboat in 1985 when we were anchored on the Great Barrier Reef. Curt told me several times, and I’ve read in his logbooks, that during times of great distress on expeditions, he would dream about a man in white, perhaps from a monastery. In the dream, he is walking through a meadow on a hillside. Trees are sparse as he gains altitude. He doesn’t wake up before he reaches the top of the mountain. The summit is the most perfect and idyllic setting. The meadow is beautiful; the trees around the large clear area are perfectly formed. There is a wall around the grounds of what seems to be a monastery. From the gate, a man dressed in white walks toward him and shakes his hand and only looks at the trail.
The white light of an early dawn breaks below the rim of the plateau and slowly brings a glow to the eastern horizon. It’s like the dawn at sea when he would look out the cabin door and see the deep yellow radiance.
Today is the third or fourth day since he left Cairo. Though the trail into the wadi wasn’t easy to follow, he’s now sure that he’s on the right path. After breakfast, he plans to find the trail again and continue walking to St. Paul’s. The only problem might be the heat and low food supplies. He decides to wait until noon, and then if he’s not comfortable with the way things are going, he’ll turn back and walk in the direction of St. Anthony’s. He’s sure that from the advantage point of the plateau, he’ll be able to see the monastery below, and then be able to pick out a route back down.
An hour later, he is turning back toward St. Anthony’s. It’s crazy, this trail. It’s not there and he doesn’t know why, because he’s been hiking all his life and he should know how to pick up a lost trail. It doesn’t make sense.
The temperature is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and there’s hardly any shade. His brain is frying, despite his sitting in the shade of this boulder for the past hour or so. His water supply doesn’t look good, though he tries not to sip more than one mouthful an hour. He’s incredibly desperate for water. He can’t eat this baladi bread without some moisture; it’s like eating pages of a book. It’s stale, and he doesn’t have enough saliva to chew it.
The sun is at its highest point in the sky. He’s hot and thirsty, but still he sits here because there is nowhere to go in these temperatures. He tries to remember why he came here in the first place. Why was it so important to him to hike this trail between two monasteries? It doesn’t make sense, but he thinks it had to do with challenging himself and getting out of Cairo. It’s hard to focus on anything but this incessant craving for water. The need for moisture is worse than anything he’s ever known on past expeditions.
This morning he had another strange dream as he lay on the ground. It was so hot and he was too tired to get up and go anywhere. All he could do was lie there, little pointed rocks poking him in the back, and the fear of dehydration consuming him. His mouth was completely dry.
A shadow crossed his face, and he opened his eyes. Instead of glaring sunlight, there was a face leaning over him and then speaking to him. The English was broken, but Curt struggled to beg him to help.
The man’s face creased in a frown and Curt thought he looked familiar. Was it the Bedouin who showed him this trail at the monastery?
He reached up and tried to grab the Bedouin’s sleeve, to get him to pay attention. “Help me,” he managed to say. The Bedouin passed him a water bottle and Curt grabbed it fiercely. The precious liquid went down his throat in a second.
“Take a note to my wife in Cairo,” Curt rasped, and scrambled with sunburnt hands for his notebook and pen. The Bedouin watched impassively as Curt wrote out the telephone number for our apartment, but he took it and promised to take it to the monastery.
Later Curt lay there wondering if the dream was real and, if it was, how did the Bedouin know where he was? If he was the one who told him where to go that first day, how did he know he was here on the plateau? It must have been because he had never left. The Bedouin shadowed Curt the first two nights and then guided him with his footprints to the plateau. When Curt couldn’t go any further, the Bedouin got worried and came to see him. He was going to call me and tell me that Curt need to be rescued.
Curt’s mind wanders freely as he thinks of the impending rescue from this plateau. He thinks of Christopher and me and the strange dream he had the other night. Why didn’t the man in white from the monastery point out the trail to him? He had always done that in the past.
I imagine that, at this point, Curt fumbles for his notebook and pencil stub and begins to write the note to us that we later received, explaining what happened here. It seems important to let us know he loves us. But after two simple lines saying, “Something happened. I love you both very much,” he drops the notebook and falls into a dreamlike state.
In his fantasy, he sees himself standing at the edge of the plateau looking down at the wadi floor, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer distance. Why am I up here? he wonders. He looks at the wall below him for the way through the maze of paths that blend together in shades of brown and ochre. He starts walking down from the plateau on a zigzagging path. Lower and lower he goes, the hot air of the wadi smelling faintly of dry acacia. He passes rocks and small caves that he had not noticed on his way up to the plateau.
He stops at the mouth of one cave to rest and marvels at his ability to keep going when he is so tired and thirsty. He was sure that it was over, but he’s having no problem getting down now. He stops in front of a large rock that appears to have lines etched into it. He looks closer; it seems familiar. He’s seen this sort of carving before. And then he remembers: French Polynesia and Tahiti Iti. These stone carvings were everywhere. Along trails that led from one village to another and in places that were out in the middle of nowhere. We had wondered about those, the ones that were barely accessible to anyone but the rock carver.
Once, in the winter of 19
85, we hiked to the southern end of Tahiti Iti to find a petroglyph of a turtle on a boulder that faced the setting sun in the west. To get to it, we had to time our arrival to coincide with the low tide because at high tide, it was impossible to cross the reef to the small headland, where the turtle petroglyph resided at the water’s edge.
Turtles in ancient Polynesian mythologies were sacred, we were told, and could transcend boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead. Their images were often used in memorial ceremonies to assist a spirit in a successful passage to the afterworld.
He looks at this rock in the Egyptian desert and wonders about it as he runs the sandy, cracked palm of his hand over the surface, feeling the outline of the turtle incised so finely into rock. It is company for him while he waits.
There’s a dot in the distance that turns into a figure. It’s moving toward him. Without thinking, he begins to get up and step away but he stops. The figure looks familiar, and as it draws closer, he sees it is the man in white from the monastery. As he comes closer, Curt sees his outstretched hand is not pointing, but it is beckoning to him. He has come to meet him.
CHAPTER 47
Understanding Desert Islands: An Eastern Desert Trek
November 2011
TEN YEARS AFTER CURT’S DEATH on April 28, 2001, I traveled on a Thanksgiving holiday weekend to Egypt’s Red Sea coast with a group from my university in Cairo. Though everyone else on the trip planned to swim at the seaside resort and enjoy learning about the history of the mountain monasteries of St. Paul and St. Anthony, which we would also take in, my specific goal was to visit St. Anthony’s, where Curt began his trek to St. Paul’s Monastery on April 21, 2001. I had come to see the Red Sea partly on holiday break and partly to revisit the place where he had fatally lost his way ten years earlier.
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