by Jim Malusa
Looking back at the Galala Plateau, I see that the monks have a comparatively sweet piece of real estate. With its spring feeding over a thousand gallons of water an hour into the monastery, they’ll probably open a spa. Call it The Hoopoe, after the big bird that whistled Yoo-hoo! to me at the monastery wall yesterday, the bird dressed in black-and-white below and cinnamon above.
This happy bird doesn’t come out today. The rocks, buried in dust, barely come out today. The highway is pushed through the dullest terrain by economic and engineering logic. Worse, there’s a gas line to one side of the road, and an unfinished water line on the other. The desert does not hide its wounds, and the view from my bike is of endless heaps of dirt. They do serve, however, as a minor windbreak, and every five or ten miles there is a person hunkered down at the edge of the road.
Perhaps they are beggars. I’m nagged by the knowledge that charity is one of the five pillars of Islam, right up there with Only One God, prayer five times a day, the Ramadan fast, and, if God grants you the means, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Feeling uncharitable, I don’t stop. The road has me in a mood. The sun is hot but a surprisingly chill headwind has come up. It feels like cold water on a burn.
I’m ten miles from the Red Sea’s Gulf of Suez when I first see the mirages—the pooled reflections of sky on the desert floor—turning to black as I draw closer, then rising like a balloon and vanishing. This shouldn’t happen with such a wind—it upsets the lenses of warm and cool air that create the refractive illusion—but now there are ships on the desert, too, phantom freighters making visible headway. Only when I reach the true blue of the sea will I see that the ships are oil tankers.
It looks like this is the road to Zafarana after all. The crossroads town is a bright new café/hotel/pizzeria plunked down in a forest of communications antennae on the shore. “Zafarana is most wind in Egypt,” says my waiter. “Egypt have plan for wind generator, to make electricity here.”
What are they waiting for? In the time it takes me to finish a cappuccino and a mushroom pizza, the wrong-way wind has decided my fate. My late start from Cairo wrecked my schedule for completing the trip. It’s time to catch a ride north along the coast to Suez.
Every driver knows that psycho killers don’t pedal. I wait no more than thirty seconds before a pickup stops and I’m heading towards Suez with Mohammed and Gamal. Their little truck is a regular Allah-mobile, with a “God is Great” sticker on the glove box, a “Mohammed is the Prophet” brass stencil hanging from the mirror, and a ridiculously long verse from the Koran covering the rest of the dash. It’s a good thing Arabic is a lovely script; it all looks like poetry to me.
After the usual exchange of names and marital status, Mohammed asks in pretty-good English, “Tell me please, what do you think of the Egyptians, both good and bad?”
Well, they are very friendly people. More friendly, I admit, than typical Americans.
“American do not have time to be friendly like Egyptian,” Mohammed explains. “He too busy.”
That’s exactly right, I say, but how did you know?
“I work with Americans, for Gulf of Suez Petroleum Company. Tell me, what about Egypt make you sad?”
Too many people in the Nile Valley. Not enough space, not enough hope for the children.
“President Mubarak tell us this. Should have less children. Every Egypt boy want to go to America.”
I hope they don’t get in until they learn to drive like Gamal, who actually stays in his lane on a road wedged between sudden mountains and the wind-frothed Bay of Suez. Wherever there’s a bit more room, pick-and-shovel crews are working on the half-built shells of “holiday villages.” Judging from the tea shops with names like Pussy Sleep, the developers hope to lure the freewheeling Europeans from their damp and drippy continent. The only problem with the plan is the beaches. They’re cordoned off with barbed wire.
“There go BOOM!” says Mohammed.
Land mines?
“Yes. War with Israel.”
Every antenna and depot and oil tank we pass in Mohammed’s truck is surrounded by a wall and numerous guard towers, apparently empty. The soldiers are piled into jeeps with bent wheels, or digging inexplicable trenches, or learning to chain-smoke while sitting outside a flapping tent.
The gentlemen drop me off fifteen miles short of Suez. It’s a grim ride into a glum city. Every ten minutes a junkyard dog tears after me. A squirt from my water bottle and they skid to a stunned stop. Some resume the chase, leaping over the flattened bodies of their comrades that fared poorly in earlier conflicts with cars. It’s a fitting entrance to a city obliterated during the Suez wars.
The world’s most contentious ditch is a shortcut that slices 5,000 miles off the voyage from Europe to the Persian Gulf and India. Egyptian muscle built the hundred-mile sea-level cut in 1869, but they never truly ran the thing until their first president, Gamal Nasser, showed the British and French the exit in 1956. The flabbergasted Europeans, who’d provided the engineering and money to build Suez, immediately found sympathy in Israel. Heaven forbid that the transport of Arabian oil through Suez be entrusted to actual Arabs, who seemed awfully likely to erect a big sign reading No Jews Allowed.
The British, French, and Israelis invaded and held the canal until a gale-force international scolding shamed them into leaving. Suez was an Egyptian canal again, but only a decade later the Israelis squashed the Arabs during the 1967 Six Day War. The Egyptians, sore losers, scuttled enough ships to block passage through the two-hundred-foot-wide canal. Suez remained a battleground until the stirrings of a truce with Israel in 1974. The canal was cleared and the city rebuilt. The new buildings of concrete and rebar are instant slums, accented by the occasional toasted shell of a blasted Israeli tank (actually, a U.S. tank, since we supply both sides).
Forty miles on the bike today, and I, too, am blasted. The brighter side of Suez presents itself in a hotel, nicely equipped. There’s the standard Egyptian toilet, outfitted with a copper tube water jet that works like a bidet, but due to the tube’s sadly exposed position in the center of the bowl, it suffers a frightful aesthetic flaw that I leave to your imagination. I take a shower with my clothes heaped in the bottom of the stall, mashing them like grapes as I wash my hair. From my window there’s a view of the flaming stack of a refinery across the bay. Ships appear to be running aground, but that’s just the entrance to the canal.
It’s also the end of Africa. On the other side is Asia and the Sinai Peninsula, home to the highest mountains in Egypt. Naturally, the monks got there first.
THE ONLY WAY to reach the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, midway across the peninsula, is through Feran, possibly the world’s skinniest town and certainly one of the meanest. Four miles long and one hundred feet wide, Feran is an oasis squeezed between canyon walls. Hundreds of palms curve up from a rocky streambed, and little houses are backed up against the granite. Much of the road is in the streambed, only a stone’s throw, literally, from the den of maniac children who burst out to heave rocks at me.
Ideally, this is when their mother appears and scolds, It’s not nice to stone visitors. But she’s busy prodding with a long stick the branches of an acacia, to knock down what the goats can’t reach. They’ve already chewed the tree into the shape of a parasol, and now the black mob waits for more, bleating in anticipation.
The kids obviously practice tossing stones at the goats, and one little girl has a big-league arm. I see my chance for escape at what appears to be church grounds. Mercy! I duck in, and immediately it’s quiet enough to hear the town roosters crowing. A man appears, angelic in white tunic and turban, and takes me for a little tour of the church and the nunnery. His name sounds like Awesome, and he says, “Moses stay Feran forty days.” He isn’t the first to say so. Christian hermits have hidden out in Feran since the second century, when nearby Mount Serbal was believed to be the mount of Moses.
“Cafeteria?” asks Awesome. Thank you, and soon I’m drinking tea near a
garden of almond and citrus trees in spring bloom. A nun brings me a plate of scrambled eggs with a crumble of goat cheese. Caged parakeets bob and sing near a sign that says, “Do Not Forget That You Are In A Holy Place.” And it works: I no longer want to kill the stone-throwing children.
Refreshed by the tea and a tailwind, I pedal out from under the feathery shade of the date palms into the April sun. The canyon walls are slashed with veins of red and black, of rock once melted and squeezed like toothpaste. Nothing on earth stays still forever, but few places are so clearly a landscape in progress. Slabs have sheared off the walls and crashed onto the road, leaving a glimmer of quartz and feldspar crystals in the noon light.
The resulting slalom is no problem: I’m going up, slowly, for the next forty miles. Each bend in the canyon brings a new view of the 8,000-foot-high mountains. That’s lofty enough to snatch a little rain, water that eventually percolates out at scattered oases. Not much, but enough for Moses and his flock en route to the Promised Land. Although there’s no archaeological evidence, the story itself is so old that it has gained credence simply by persisting, just as Australia’s Aborigines have faith in the songlines of their ancestors. Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, dropped by the Sinai in AD 327 and was impressed by a big bramble zealously protected by a group of hermits. They claimed it was the burning bush of Moses. Helena had a chapel built for the Virgin Mary, and it was later named after Saint Catherine, the Egyptian martyr whose bones were transported by angels to nearby Mount Catherine.
That’s the easy way to the top. I’ll need eight hours and three quarts of water to climb the 4,000 feet to the Monastery of Saint Catherine. A fleet of HolyLand tour buses are parked outside the Morgenland Village Hotel, whose marquee reads “We Organize Bedouin Nights for Groups.”
I imagine this means a friendly campout with the nomads and not the sort of “Bedouin Night” that for centuries had the monks saying their prayers extra fast. Well before the birth of Islam, the Bedouin took pleasure in an occasional raid on the monastery, wasting a monk or two and munching on holy wafers. By AD 530, when Christianity had become the official state religion of Byzantium, Emperor Justinian decided that this outpost deserved something better: a fortress of granite. The thirty-foot-high walls were finished, coincidentally, in time for the first wave of Muslims that followed in the next century. The monks survived with a mix of savvy, guts, and humbug. In an early effort at cultural diversity, they built a mosque and insisted that the Prophet Mohammed himself had visited the mount of Moses.
It seems to have worked. Surrounding the monastery today is a living wall of Bedouin, hawking camel rides. Inside the fortress, through a portal with a slit overhead for pouring boiling oil onto the unwelcome, are so many of us tourists that I can scarcely peek into the church. It’s not Coptic but Greek Orthodox, and the ceiling is hung with dozens of brass incense burners.
These are serious monks, in black robes, caps, and cardigans, and I know that there are some holy remains around, a mummified saint or at least a desiccated part of a monk. My prayer is fulfilled at the ossuary, guarded by Father Joseph. In the cellar behind him and a screen of chicken wire are sixteen hundred years of monks reduced to thousands of bones stacked like firewood. To keep everything tidy, the skulls are piled like cantaloupes in a cavern of their own—enough hollow-eyed brain cases to fill thirty shopping carts.
“We call this the University of the Monastery,” says Father Joseph. “They are the teachers, and we are the students.”
Yes—but the teachers are dead, aren’t they?
“Saints never die. We learn through their memory. Their flesh is dry, but gives off a nice scent. They are not subject to ordinary limitations of space and time. God gave them special qualities.”
Who, I wonder aloud, is the cadaver in the box in the back?
“Father Stephanos. He kept the steps to the Mountain of Moses in the sixth century,” says Father Joseph. “Some saints’ bodies are still fresh. Before they die they stink of tumors and disease, but after they die they smell good.”
Thank you for your time, I say (but thinking: I wouldn’t want to bunk with Father Joseph). Now I’m going to hike up the mountain.
It’s another 2,500 feet to the top of Mount Sinai. A stiff climb, but Father Stephanos did nice stonework on the three thousand steps. For the weary there are Bedouin offering, “Good camel, good price.” Along the way I pass English children and Israeli pilgrims and German birders armed with camera lenses like bazookas. At the breezy, bald summit is a chapel and graffiti (“The Bull Climbed Mount Sinai”) and more Bedouin selling tea and holy rocks and stab-and-sip orange drink.
I sneak off and find a ledge to myself. Alone, with a dusty but inspiring view, it’s easy to see how Moses could find God atop Mount Sinai. Or that Mount Sinai is God. Or, embracing gravity as well as theology, to see that I have one hell of downhill ride tomorrow, to the Gulf of Aqaba.
ANOTHER MURKY EGYPTIAN SUNRISE, scarcely bright enough to roust me out of the sleeping bag to pump up my miniature stove. Flame on, and in a few minutes I can dip a bandanna in the roiling water for a face wash, then prepare my coffee. When I kill the stove, the world falls silent. There’s only a hopping black bird with a white cap—a wheatear, says my bird book—and he or she has no interest in my breakfast orange and fig jam on a pita.
Camp is easy enough to pack up—a ground cloth and sleeping bag, journal and book, stove and cup. The big drop to the coast is fifty miles east. Meanwhile, the road, narrow and new and very black, leaves the crumbling Precambrian granites and crosses a maroon plain of little sharp stones, each as if shattered with a hammer.
An easy climb over a low pass drops into a valley bounded by cream-colored sandstone eroded into lonesome buttes. When I stop for a closer look on an exposed shelf of rock, I find the ripple marks from the waves of a long-ago shore. And see, not far from the road, a single black tent. There are people, too, squatting in the sand beside a little cook fire. They wave me over, and five minutes later I’m sipping tea.
Salem is fifteen and the man of the tent, a swaybacked shelter of flour sacks and goat hair. Dad is out, I don’t know where. Mother Hamda wears a black veil and a deep blue robe fastened with buttons of silver and malachite. Her feet appear carved from driftwood. While tending the fire, she smokes a cigarette through her veil—a chic solution to modesty. A three-year-old girl, with a wristwatch inked onto her wrist, flicks pebbles at the goats. When she plinks one on the nose, the family smiles, revealing rotten teeth all around. A donkey chews on a paper wrapper, and the goats sneak back to nibble on the plastic water barrel, the dinged teapot, the tiny cassette deck. There’s not much else to chew on.
They’re Bedouin, nomadic Arabs loyal to family, tribe, and land—and, like nomads everywhere, dismissive of political boundaries and institutions. This attitude is necessary not only for the pursuit of feed for their animals, but also for helping or hindering the flow of people and goods across the Sinai. Some Bedouin smuggle hashish in boats along the Mediterranean coast. If pursued by the police, they dump the hash into the sea, but only after putting it in a waterproof skin within a larger burlap sack filled with salt. The sack will sink, but after the salt dissolves in the course of a day it comes bobbing back up to the surface for retrieval.
A clever and slippery folk—and hospitable, too. I entertain the kids with “Oh, Susannah” on my harmonica. In return, Hamda pulls out an aluminum flute for a breezy tune. When the goats bug her, she whacks them with the flute.
There’s no telling what’s inside the shabby tent, but outside there is an excellent view and a single acacia tree. I wonder if they are simply poor or deliberately free. To my surprise but not Hamda’s, a four-wheel-drive truck with a Egyptian guide and a pair of French tourists pulls into camp. They, too, have tea, while Salem pulls out a bag of beaded key chains and necklaces for sale. So this is why they are camped only a hundred yards from the road.
The guide gives me a sidelong glance and says, “
You are not first bicycle.”
Yes, I didn’t think so—I saw one just yesterday at the monastery, but could not find the rider among all the tourists.
The guide turns away without a word. Oddly cool, I think, for an Egyptian—but then I understand. He’d promised his clients a visit to the Authentic Nomads of the Desert, not an American with a harmonica. And although it means I won’t get a chance to play the Stones’ “Hey, Mona!” with Bedouin backup on flute, I leave my hosts with a bag of coffee and head for the sea.
Every half hour or so a vehicle passes—a Mercedes tour bus, or a Toyota pickup with a goat in the bed, or a Peugeot station wagon taxi with suitcases lashed to its roof rack. Otherwise the road is mine, through drifts of yellow sand strewn with gray boulders like giant pewter eggs.
Which is not to say I’m alone. Overhead are dozens of hawks and vultures tilting on invisible thermals, making the spring migration from Africa to Asia. Crossing a watercourse traced with mustard and verbena, I catch the stink of trampled vegetation, clamp on my brakes, and stop. Across the sand are footprints the size of pie pans. A camel, I suppose, but I hear only a chirp like the squeak of a hinge, from a teacup bird in a thorn tree. Then the call of a child, a girl tending a ravenous herd of black goats. A little snooping reveals the family tent propped up against a sandstone monolith pocked with hundreds of shallow caverns. It looks like a ten-story sponge.
The goats pour down a dune and turn toward a shady cleft in the sandstone. If there’s water up there, they’ll find it. Bedouin goats can drink like no other goat. A forty-five-pound billy can suck down two gallons of water. To equal this feat, a 155-pound Jim would have to chug seven gallons at a sitting. If I could hold it down, I would not merely be uncomfortably bloated—I would drop dead from diluted blood. The Bedouin goat carries on because its gut is a canteen, slowly metering out the water over the next two, three, or four days.