Into Thick Air (13 page)

Please, I say while I struggle to read the name scribbled down by Father Stephanos back in Beni Suef. Please let me talk with . . . Father Deoscoros.

I hate to be turned away from the only habitation between the Nile and the Gulf of Suez. Fortunately a group of wealthy Lebanese tourists drives up and wheedles its way in. Father Deoscoros calls down to the gate boy to let us all in, but “only for five-minute tour of church, no more. This is special time for us.”

I'm grateful. If they wished, the monks could keep everyone out by simply closing the gate on the mile-long, thirty-foot-high wall that surrounds the monastery. A fortress it is, at the foot of the tremendous limestone scarp of the Galala Plateau, 5,000 feet high. For centuries there wasn't even a gate, so exclusive were the monks—everyone had to be winched up in a basket over the wall.

Inside are palm and olive groves, grape arbors, and dozens of stuccoed buildings scrawled with gothic graffiti. Black-robed, piously hirsute men shuffle in and out of the dormitory. It's a hot day, but cool inside the thirteenth-century church filled with glittering icons of saints on horseback, murals of seraphs, and a painting of Saint Anthony by Velázquez. The Lebanese drop to their knees and make the sign of the cross before a lighted display case with mother-of-pearl inlays. “Is remains of Bishop Joseph,” says Father Deoscoros, gesturing to a linen sack with bulges suggesting knees and shoulders. “
Complete
remains. He died in 1826.”

Collecting the remains of the holy is serious business for monks and really brings out their competitive spirit. Back in the seventh century a troop of Saint Anthony's monks disguised as Bedouin sneaked into another Egyptian monastery (there are thirteen) and stole the bones of John the Short. They claimed that the remains were rightfully theirs. The other monks later stole them back.

There's no shortage of bones at Saint Anthony's now: all monks stay until they die. The first three years they wear white and study the Copt language of ancient Egyptians. King Tut is dead, but the words he spoke survive in the liturgy of the church. After the white-robed years the monks switch to black and expand their universe to include the more prosaic. Says Father Deoscoros, “Some are accountants, some study engineering.”

Someone has to run the place, but in truth I'd expected more monkish vocations. Say, advanced crypt chiseling. I want to learn more, but Father Deoscoros is already herding us to the tour's end at the rather excellent gift shop, the only religious outlet I've seen that stocks geologic maps. I tell the father that I'm an internet journalist, and I'd like to put Saint Anthony's in my story.

“I did not think you could send these things from bicycle. Father Bishoy will be very interested in your project. He is our computer expert. I will call him—if you can stay a little longer?”

Certainly.

A couple of hours later, after both fathers have posed for pictures, and I've finished off my guest lunch of sautéed vegetables and rice and a demitasse of espresso, Father Bishoy is still curious. “Do you send your files on e-mail?”

I remember my computer lesson in the Australian outback, and tell Father Bishoy, No, it is something called File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, sent directly to another computer.

“Hmmm. Very interesting. But why do you do this on a bicycle?”

I see more, I tell him. And I like to sleep outside.

“You could sleep aside your car.”

He's got me there. I say, maybe it is like your fasting—a little sacrifice, but good for thinking.

Father Deoscoros understands. “We fast during the day for two hundred days each year. It is good for the soul, not your body.”

For the technological finale, I open my wonder phone and aim it at the satellite over the equator. Nothing. The enormous cliffs to the south block the signal. The monks aren't surprised. Perhaps they know something that I won't discover until I review my notes from the gift shop geologic map. The wall of Upper Cretaceous limestone shielding the monastery from the satellite is the Saint Anthony Formation.

 

SOMETIMES THE DESERT is a bust. I came for the silence, the space, the solitude—all that
sublime
jazz—but come morning it's obvious why this stretch of desert is mine, all mine. I'd hoped for crisp light over clean rocks, or at least wind-scalloped sand. I get dust and a milky dawn, a sunrise without the sun. It's midmorning before the thermonuclear ball rises above the scum.

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.