Moonlight and Mt. Sinai

After arriving back in Cairo from our less-than-ideal trip to Upper Egypt, we headed to the Sinai Peninsula with a spirited group of friends for three beach- and pool-side days. The group was made up of Henrik and five other Danes, most of whom we had met previously. Henrik had organized the trip, which was to a newly-opened resort where they were still working out some kinks in service and finishing the building, but where we also got an excellent price on rooms and board. It was not the kind of place we really like to support: everything on super-size scale, and no environmental consciousness save light switches that can only be turned on when the key is in them. But we will certainly admit to enjoying the comfortable bed, high-pressure shower, and plentiful lounge chairs; more significantly, we had a great time hanging out with everyone, and even fancied that we understood Danish sometimes when they would switch into that language. We didn't do much besides watch the kite-surfers showing off with leaps into the air and sprints across the water, read, swim, and have vicious games of pool in which my incredible skill at scratching was showcased. We also taught everybody my favorite childhood card game of Bullshit (or "I Doubt It", in Silverstein family parlance), and had as much fun playing that as we did reading aloud from our set of Bush cards. (An answer to the administration's assignation of a card to each high-ranking al-Qaeda person, listing the fine accomplishments or stunning words of a Bushie instead).

When our friends headed back to Cairo, we went instead toward Mt. Sinai, the famous site of Moses and the burning bush. We had been advised to hike in the middle of the night, in order to watch sunrise from the top, but didn't know whether there would be few or many people doing the same thing. Arriving at the base just in front of three full-sized tour buses, we got our answer. But happily, once we started up the mountain, we were virtually alone most of the climb.

Security at the base is heavy, and no one is allowed to hike without a guide, all of whom are local Bedouin. Our guide, Solomon, had spent his childhood in a village within the national park surrounding the mountain, and had not left the area ever before three years ago. He is now an army conscript based in Cairo, which he strongly dislikes, but is allowed 10 days each month to come home and work. He told us some about the historical monastary of St. Katherine's, which is at the base of the mountain, and pointed out some stars to us, but often we just walked enjoying the quiet. The moon was just two days past full, casting incredible light on our path. In searching for a way to describe it, we decided the look was more similar to walking by a fluorescent streetlight than to any other kind of light, but that still doesn't capture it: there was no harshness as with an artificial light, and it was somehow as if the path and we were lighted but everything was still dark. In any case, it was strange and beautiful.

The path was wide and basically gentle, with only a few steep bits. Looking out, we could see many other mountains and one tiny Bedouin village in a valley, and occasionally we came across people trying to sell camel rides or snack-stand tea houses filled with Snickers bars and Coke. The desert-ness of the mountain was striking; with no trees or grass around the path, and only sand and stone everywhere, it was almost hard to distniguish Sinai from the surrounding area. Between that and the fact of it being the middle of the night, a time neither of us had ever hiked before, it was quite a cool sensory experience.

The most wonderful part of the night came when we arrived at the peak. It was 4 a.m. and we were among the first people there, with the tour-bus groups still somewhere on the way up. The sun wouldn't come up for another hour and a half and the air and wind were very cold, so we wrapped ourselves in a rented blanket and sat in the shelter of a rock on the side of the peak. As we drifted between wakefulness and sleep, the silence was so complete that it reverberated in my ears-- something I'd thought was only a flighty literary expression before I actually experienced it! In the silence, I kept imagining three bell-like voices ringing out, singing "Dona Nobis Pacem" in a round. It would, to me, have been the only thing fitting to break the quiet.

When we woke up to the beginnings of sunrise at about 5:15, the peace had been pretty solidly broken. The hundreds of tour-bus people had arrived, and were crowded onto the east-facing part of the peak. Some of the Bedouin guides and blanket-sellers were talking and laughing at volumes that felt, perhaps unfairly, designed to be abrasive. The same feeling returned later, as they would run past all of us making our way down at high speeds, shouting to each other across the mountain; we found it understandable that they could be bored and frustrated by the tourist scene, which they saw every day, but given that for us it was a one-time experience, we found it a little annoying. Anyway, as the sun continued its brilliant rise, changing the colors of the clouds and sky and mountains minute by minute, no amount of noise could have cancelled out the magnificence of it.

The hike down had none of the solitude of the hike up; on the contrary, we were caught in a huge stream of people the entire time. This was largely because the downward path consisted of 2940 uneven stone stairs, laid out by a dedicated 12th century monk along what is said to be the original path of Moses. The other tourists were almost all Russian, and many of the women were wearing clothes that (if I were to wear them) I would put on for a night out in the city, not for climbing a mountain; the woman directly in front of me most of the way down, for example, had on fishnet stockings and 2 1/2 inch platform mules. But somehow she made it, and so, sleepily, did we.