Into Thick Air (14 page)

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.

Near the coast the stand-alone buttes are replaced with bare black mountains skirted with tremendous fans of gravel. My favorite road sign appears: “Let the engine work.” This means a big descent is ahead. If I were driving I would downshift and spare my brakes. On a bike I upshift and shoot down a long canyon at a glorious 30 to 40 mph. With fingers lightly poised on the brake levers, I bank as deep as I dare through the last sweeping curve to the Gulf of Aqaba.

First things first: push the bike onto the beach, take off my shoes, and wiggle toes in the sand. Across the slender bay are simple stone mountains with the violet blush of day's end. The peaks are only fifteen miles east, but it's a long fifteen miles to Saudi Arabia, home of the most intolerant zealots on the globe.

Or so I'm told. I've never set foot in Saudi Arabia. I'm wondering what it's really like over there, when over here a young couple saunters up. The bikini beach babe and her headbanger boyfriend size me up with a single look. They must consider me outside the law. Like Eve offering the apple, the woman holds up an unlit joint.

“Do you want to get high?”

 

FREEDOM BEACH is a huddle of reed huts, each with a lightbulb, a flimsy door, and a hasp. Bring your own padlock, or pick one up in the village of Tarabeen. Beach entertainment includes a big steel cage with four monkeys so skinny they appear assembled from strands of roadkill.

“There are only two reasons to come here,” says a young man from Cairo. “Sex, and to get high.” He's sitting under a palapa of palm fronds with a bare-chested Israeli.

You mean there are Egyptian women for . . . rent?

“Oh, no! Not Egyptian girls, but Israeli girls from the kibbutz. No Egyptian girl like this for long time, the sixties in Cairo. There, along Ali Baba ... you should know these girls!” He whistles and waggles his hand. “With black eyes, like Cleopatra!”

Oren, the Israeli, finds no offense in the reference to Israeli women. He ignites a Marlboro and asks, “You come on that bike?”

Yep.

He's appalled. I tell him it's not just a workout—the big hill down to the coast was an eye-watering blast. He counters, “You wouldn't think so if you were in a taxi and the driver puts it in fifth gear and goes into a power death dive.”

Oren, who wears the kind of broad headband once favored by kamikaze pilots, is currently digging Guns n' Roses' “Appetite for Destruction” on his boom box. Oren also has an appetite for females in halter tops; he guesses at their flavor as they pass. “Israeli. She, French. There, German.” It's educational, and he plans on staying “till the money runs out.”

The money goes to the Bedouin. Although legal title is tenuous, they own Freedom Beach as well as Goldenfish and Moonland—the “touristic camps.” The Bedouin were quick to realize that tending to a certain species of tourist isn't so different from tending goats. You simply herd them to a place with water and food and they take care of themselves, kicking up their heels and foraging for sex.

Farther north along the coast is a camp called Basata. A placid sanctuary compared to the hormonal riptide of Freedom Beach, it's run by an ex-engineer from Cairo with a pharaoh's goatee and an elegant robe. His name is Sherif and he's installed an ethic as radical as Freedom Beach's, except here there are organic veggies and recycling bins and a folk guitarist strumming “Get Back.”

Like most of the patrons, I've brought my own Heineken. A barefoot man with a pigtail smiles an invitation to sit and relax beside an absurdly low table. An artist from Tel Aviv, Gershom respectfully inquires of my journey. I confess that I'm a pedaling internet journalist. A German woman sitting cross-legged wants to know more, for pragmatic reasons: she wants to be a travel writer. “But what do you write about?”

Everything. Rocks, people, birds, history.

“For example? How about you show me one story on your computer?”

I dig the laptop out of my bike bag and let her read the story of stumbling upon Midaq Alley. She giggles a couple of times, then looks up to say, “That's it? It is amusing, but I like to read for information.”

This
is
information—it's about Cairo.

“People want to read this? Why do you get paid to do this?”

And I can't help but think: An Egyptian wouldn't have said that. An Egyptian would have kindly lied—because they're sweethearts.

This simple sentiment rings true the next day when I pass a road sign near the international frontier. It's just a piece of sheet metal with hand-painted letters in Arabic and English. Yet that someone bothered to write “Good-bye” in flowery script . . . well, that makes this farewell sing. I forget Egypt's suicide taxis and hair-pulling bureaucracy. I won't miss the pyramids of the dead, but I am fond of the living tea-happy Egyptians.

Excluding the diabolical customs people. Which reminds me: Israel is dead ahead, and it's time to repack my bicycle bags.

 

THE ISRAELI CUSTOMS WOMAN wears a sharply creased blue uniform. Dark military eyes move between my passport photo and my face, once, twice.