A PLACE OF ANCHORING

INSCRIBED IN THE BODY - a hike in the Mountains of Eilat

5. INSCRIBED IN THE BODY

    a hike in the mountains of Eilat  

note: the photographs in this chapter are from a different hike in the Eilat Mountains, several years later

 With the faint light of dawn behind the Edom mountains in Jordan, our bus winds its way along the Egyptian border towards our trailhead and we enter into the realm of the stark, gray mountains of Eilat, still blanketed in the night’s darkness. Nowhere else within the borders of Israel do these primeval granite layers expose themselves on the earth’s surface – they remain deep underground, covered by much younger geological strata.

 It is only in the High Mountains at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula that the granite rocks show themselves in their full majesty. Ilana, my dancer friend who had introduced me to this hiking group the previous spring, had often talked to me about trekking in the High Mountains that rise to the height of 2600 meters, much higher than any mountain found in Israel. Filled with reverence and wonder, she spoke of walking for seven days and sleeping under the stars, waking with the first rays of the sun.

 And so it was Ilana who planted in me the great longing to trek in the Sinai mountains, but it is still hard to imagine that I will be able to overcome my fears to undertake such a trek as I am still new to hiking in the desert. I will have to prepare myself, one step at a time. This trip to the mountains of Eilat, in January of 1994 is my first overnight outing with this hiking group. I see it as a preparation for my trek in the High Mountains of the Sinai.

 *

 On the way south, we stop for a half-day hike down the canyon of Nahal Gov, a narrow gorge that descends in a series of vertical drops from the Negev plateau into the broad streambed of Nahal Tzin, just as it reaches the Arava valley. It runs parallel to the old road to Eilat, the stretch with hairpin turns known as the Scorpion’s Ascent.

 Of course, the Gov stream is not running on this sunny day. It would have been foolhardy to enter such a narrow gorge in the rain, for there is no way to escape from the sudden torrents of the flashfloods. The basins at the feet of the waterfalls in Nahal Gov, however, are full of water – a sure sign that the stream has flooded not long ago.

 The only way across the deep pools at the base of these drops is to swim through the cold waters. We are offered the possibility of bypassing this entire section on a path above the gorge and a few hikers choose this option.

 I stand there, hesitating, well aware that my backpack will get soaked, that I will have to continue the hike in wet clothes in the crisp January air, while my new hiking boots might get ruined. On the other hand, the path above the gorge looks scary, arousing my fear of heights, so that is not the simple solution either.

 It is here that I understand that the very point of this hike is precisely to go through the gorge. Suspending all my worries and inhibitions, I jump right into the chilly waters of Nahal Gov. It is an act of letting go. My entire life I had held back, I would come up with every possible excuse why not to do things that were unplanned, things for which I was not prepared, that might upset my sense of propriety, security and comfort. Here, in the narrow gorge of Nahal Gov, I learned that there is something exhilarating in that very act of letting go – the joy of casting away the load of those excuses, a sense of liberation in taking the plunge.

 It is also the elation of overcoming physical challenges – of going down the swaying cable ladders or holding onto a rope between my legs with my feet pressing against the rock wall, moving my legs down one by one, with my weight thrown back. Then swimming across the cold, deep pools, at times six to seven meters long, only to meet another rope at the other end where I must pull myself up the slippery rocks. It gives me a triumphant sense of “I did it”.

 Then there is the sensory experience of the place itself – the gorge – which I would have missed had I opted for the bypass. It is the almost archetypal experience of finding myself in a narrow passage, with its tall cliffs towering above me, where I can see only a thin sliver of sky. It is the sense of being inside, totally committed to the time and place of the gorge – where everything else ceases to be.

 I know, now, that this is the reason I hike.

    *

 The following morning, we are back on the bus, after spending the night in a youth hostel in Eilat. At the trailhead, a group of youngsters are just waking up in the crisp early morning air, still wrapped in their blankets and sleeping bags. They must have been cold that night. It is winter and the difference of temperatures between day and night in the desert can be huge. It will be freezing cold to sleep outdoors in the High Mountains of the Sinai, I think to myself. I am glad that we had spent at least this winter night indoors.

 Our hike begins by going down into a reddish sandstone gorge known as “The Red Canyon”. This gorge is so narrow I can almost touch both sidewalls with my hands, walls that jut out at places and then gracefully bent inwards, confronting me with soft, sculptural shapes of sandstone. An even more archetypal passage.

 Slowly, I find my way through the gorge, brushing off the sand from the grainy walls with dimpled textures, as if formed by fingers imprinting themselves into soft clay. It is still not quite light, I am barely awake, and I am tunneling through the narrow passage without having to make an effort. My movements are practically dictated by the protrusions and curving spaces and I find myself returning to forgotten modes of locomotion I outgrew long ago – the instinct to crawl, or to slither on my belly, like a snake.

 Before long, I am thrust into a dreamlike state, as if hovering underwater, with the warm liquid substance enveloping my skin, buzzing in my ears, cutting me off from the world above. I am cuddling up in the hollows, hugged by the rounded bellies of soft, powdery rock that stir up sensations from a distant past.

 As I tumble out of the dark, narrow passage, I am born into the light, and find myself in a wider wadi, bordered by high walls. On one side of the dry riverbed the rocky walls are painted a brilliant orange red in the early morning sun, which is now warming my body. It seems like these tall, proud rocks have been covered with molten gold, while the other side of the wadi is still in shadow, almost black. This is Nahal Shani, the Scarlet Stream.

 I am cruising down the riverbed, as the dancer in me is awakened. Thoroughly attuned to the rocks that guide the dry river, I become the water that hardly ever flows here in this extreme desert of the Eilat mountains with an annual rainfall of only 30 mm. I sense the river-rounded pebbles under my feet, and flow with the turns of the dry wadi, the fluctuations of its wide, then narrow spaces, with the interplay of shifting shadows and light, as they choreograph the steps of my dance.

 In the radiance of the morning sun, we come to a pause at a bend in the riverbed, surrounded by large blocks of sandstone in saturated ochres and reds, just where a break in the rocks reveals a view of the distant peaks across the border. Yehoshua, who has been guiding the group with love and devotion for decades, has carefully chosen the stop for breakfast – he recognizes the necessity to nourish both body and soul.

 After our break, we walk past huge boulders scattered along the waterless river, as the light becomes brighter and brighter. Then we climb out of the stream, crossing over the watershed into Nahal Raham, where we move upriver through the broad, gravelly streambed that seems almost flat, except for the sudden rises of a couple of waterfalls where we must clamber on hands and feet. 

 The sun is now out in full force and it is getting extremely hot when we reach a deep valley encircled by high ridges. In the center of this rounded bowl is a cluster of date trees – a tiny oasis. It is a place of centering, that seems to be holding the entire valley together.  The place is known as called Diklei Raham, the palms of the Raham stream, but as the name Raham consists of the same letters as the Hebrew rehem, it could be translated as the palm trees of the womb. 

 Resting in the shade of the worn, ancient trees, the centripetal valley gives me renewed strength, enabling me to gather, indeed, to concentrate, my forces, before the long haul up.

 The ascent seems endless, testing my heightened state of consciousness, tempting me to succumb to exhaustion. I decide to maintain my own steady pace and not try to keep up with anyone, and soon I realize I can climb with much less effort, even without the need to sit down and rest. It is my upward momentum that keeps me going, as I suspend my belief that I do not have the stamina for such steep climbs in the desert heat. I learn on this ascent, contrary to what most beginning hikers think, that climbing uphill is not at all the most difficult part of hiking – going down is, as it can be damaging to the knees, while the pull of gravity tends to challenge your sense of balance. No, this is not too bad, I think. Perhaps I will soon be ready to venture into the mountains of the Sinai.

 As I reach the top, the vast, orange sands of the Arava valley burst out in front of my eyes, erasing the memory of my exertion. Up on this ridge, I can see forever – down the Syrian African Rift valley, all the way to the Gulf of Eilat and beyond, to the African savannas; to the north, past the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee towards Lebanon – and, to the east, across the Jordanian border, into the Mountains of Edom. Somewhere in those mountains, a little further north lies the forbidden and still unreachable city of Petra. I can vividly feel its presence. I do not dare to dream, as I sit on this ridge in January 1994, that in less than two years I will find myself across that border, hiking in the sensuous red sandstone mountains of that necropolis carved into the rocks, mesmerized by the intertwining of landscape and architecture, of eros and death.

 We descend from that lookout on a long winding trail that seems to be going off towards the Mountains of Edom. Then it turns into a very narrow path with near perpendicular drops on either side. This is my first “knife-edge”, as the notorious natural formation is known in the lore of hikers, a phenomenon I have dreaded ever since I first heard about it. I walk slowly, very slowly, keeping my center of gravity low, balancing myself on the precarious path by spreading out my arms, as if walking a tightrope.

 With a sigh of great relief, I reach the foot of the ridge, and we walk towards the Pillars of Amram. The pink sandstone pillars feel tall and protective, with dark, enigmatic passages between them that vanish deep into the rock, evoking the White Place in New Mexico, where, for the first time, I came face to face with the eros of the desert. And the eros within me.

 ******

FEAR OF THE FALL

6.  FEAR OF THE FALL

     a hike to the Barak gorge in Israel’s Negev Desert

note: the photographs in this chapter are from different hikes in the deserts of Israel

After quite a few challenging hikes in the desert, I feel I am finally beginning to overcome my fear of heights. And yet, in moments of weakness, it always seems to be lying in wait like a wild animal, ready to pounce on me. That is what happened on our hike to the Barak gorge.

We start out several kilometers after the road from Mitzpe Ramon to Eilat winds its way out of the Ramon Crater. At an overlook, where we can see the three different levels of the landscape, we sit down for breakfast. One step below us is the Barak Plain, with the canyon of Nahal Barak cutting deeply through it. In the far distance, on the lowest level, lies the Arava valley that runs along the border with Jordan.

Our physical appetite satisfied, we walk a few kilometers on fairly flat and uneventful ground, when our path comes to an abrupt end. An unreal landscape stretches out below the steep cliff where we are standing. In the middle of a vast plain of white and brownish sand rise a succession of peaks, like islands in an enormous bay, with at the far right, an isolated mountain emerging above this imaginary body of water – a beacon marking the entrance to the harbor.

We linger for a long while at the edge of these Ashosh Cliffs, not willing to let go of the glorious view. Eventually, we begin our descent from the upper plateau along a streambed with white and smooth stone steps. Just as we are commenting on how enchanting this hike is turning out to be, we are told to stop – our guide Ro’I, who is new to our group, has made a wrong turn. Though this streambed would eventually lead us to Nahal Barak, right ahead of us there is a dry waterfall of some eight to ten meters, which we have no way of circumventing.

Quickly Ro’I starts to climb a high hill on our left to scout the terrain and then yells out from above that we should join him. There does not seem to be a path up and so it is a free-for-all to scale the gentle slopes of whitish earth, topped by what appears to be a steep, darker layer. It is not clear from below whether that upper layer consists of soft crumbly earth or of more solid rocks. As the first hikers seem to have made it over the ridge without any visible difficulties, I follow, cautiously, yet with a reasonable measure of self-confidence.

However, when I reach the almost vertical rocky layer, I realize that my suspicions have been well-founded. Even though these are indeed hard rocks, they seem to be loosely embedded in the soft white earth. Carefully, I try to check each one out before holding on to it, and little by little, I manage to pull myself up. Then, suddenly, a rock I had judged to be firm and secure comes loose, sending electrifying currents up my spine. Instinctively I grasp for a firmer hold, and stand there gasping, balancing myself on a precarious foothold with a sheer drop below. Slowly, I start to regain my breath and somehow or other continue my crawl up towards the top. I have no recollection of how I did it, but from now on I am not the same anymore. I have been shaken to the core.

And then I see, to my alarm, that the worst is yet to come. To reach the streambed with the correct trail, we must cross a long stretch on the other side of the same friable hill, but now the menacing conditions are exacerbated by an even steeper drop. Somehow going up a mountain is always easier because you do not have to look down and your upward momentum works entirely in your favor, as if making you lighter, defying gravity. On the descent, however, your movement augments the downward force. It is here that my fear of heights strikes.

There are no paths on this hill, not even paths made by the desert ibex. There is no tangible proof it is capable of supporting human feet. How can I know it is at all possible to get across when even the largest rocks might turn out to be entirely loose and my foothold will vanish in seconds? It does not help to think that some of the other hikers appear to have made it across – for perhaps they have been inordinately lucky. If one soldier successfully crosses a minefield, that does not mean there are no more mines.

It is the fear of the unknown that intensifies the fear of heights. If I know for sure that I only must get beyond this one trouble spot and the ordeal will be over, then I will just hold my breath and go. Perhaps that is how I worked up the courage to reach the top of the ridge just a few moments earlier.

But now there is no way of deluding myself that if only I make it to the next bend, to the next rock, everything will be all right. I can see the entire slope ahead of me and it looks endless, without any safe points to aim for. And what if we will come across a place that is impassible? We will then have to turn back and go through this very same nightmare all over again.

In this moment of terror, the only way I can get across this terrifying terrain is with the help of a friend. It is Avi who notices the dread on my face and comes to my rescue, and I, blindly and thankfully, deliver my fate into his hands. With his usual confidence-instilling charm, Avi leads me across the most harrowing parts on this hillside, with its soft loose earth and falling rocks, until we finally reach a place where I can rely again on my own resources and link up with the trail in the streambed that we should have taken in the first place. Ah, what an easy descent that would have been.

How ridiculous it is, to think that the hand of another hiker, standing on the very same unsteady ground, could stop me from falling. I know very well that if I were to really lose my balance, I would drag Avi along with me. And yet, it was so easy to fall back to being the helpless little girl who wants to be taken care of, delegating the responsibility for my wellbeing not just to any other person who exudes a sense of self-confidence, but particularly – given my patriarchal upbringing – to a man.

The precipice accentuates the stress and strain of growing up, the tension of taking responsibility for myself, for my own life – the constant battle not to fall ill, not to fall into depression, not to fall apart. I have no fear of flying. In an airplane, where I am not in command, there is nothing I can do to prevent a crash and so worrying cannot possibly affect my fate. Walking along a precipice, it is precisely because I am the one in charge, that I am overcome with fear. Then, I am overwhelmed by the urge to put an end to that excruciating state of fear, that moment of terror – to end the tremendous responsibility for my own life. To fall would stop the anxiety, it would end that ordeal, delivering me from this terrifying nightmare. 

One element in the fear of heights might, paradoxically, be temptation – it is the snake from The Little Prince that tries to lure me to the depths, to the sweet bliss of oblivion. A Jungian analyst friend suggests that fear of heights stems from a yearning for the womb, to be enveloped by the Earth Mother. Climbing leads to a loss of a sure footing, to the sense of being on unstable ground, reaching higher into uncertainty, without the reassurance of the mother. The temptation to fall is based on that desire for security and warmth.

Perhaps it is not death that I fear, but my giving in to the urge to fall. Standing at the edge of the precipice, I realize that only a single step separates me from certain death, a step that is in my power to take. If death has to come sometime or other in my life, I might be tempted to choose my own finale to the story of my life – rather than being caught by death unprepared, without poetry and design. 

On the other hand, I recognize that we do not always have a choice. I know too well that accidents in the desert do happen – and that only intensifies my fear. Looking down a precipice, I am not like the other hikers – I know something they do not, after my dear friends’ teenage son fell to his death from a dry waterfall in the Negev. I have a certain intimacy with the fall – it is very much my story.

                                                            *

The white rock bottom of the gully, where we are now safely going down, has been exposed and polished by the waters of periodic flashfloods. Here I pick up the string of wondrous beads that was cut in the original streambed, as if the traumatic interlude has never taken place.

Eventually, this little dry stream will continue its flow into the immense “bay” we have seen from above the Ashosh Cliffs, but we do not to follow this rivulet all the way to its confluence with Nahal Ashosh that meanders below those cliffs. Instead, we cut across, over its watershed, towards another Ashosh tributary, Nahal Re’im, where we turn around and start to travel upstream.

There is something uncanny about going against the current, even when the river is dry. My body’s instincts want to follow the natural course of the flow, to go with the river and spill into the huge Ashosh bay. It takes me some time to adjust myself to this awkward sensation and feel at ease walking in the “wrong” direction.  

After skirting a secluded waterfall with a dry pool at its base, we climb out of the bed of Nahal Re’im towards a view of the Barak Plain, which we have seen from higher up, at breakfast. Now we reach the part of the hike with marked trails, traversed by dirt roads with jeep tracks. One of these roads takes us down to the plain and from there we continue southwards, past deeply cut gorges like jagged fingers of the drowning trying to grasp onto firmer ground.

A little further on we turn into a streambed, which we follow for a while, when, suddenly, around a bend, the rocky bed stops, as though we had sailed to the farthest end of the earth and are about to plunge over its edge. Filled with trepidation I tiptoe to that edge and lying on my belly I peer down one of the deepest waterfalls I have ever seen. My head is spinning, though there is no way I can possibly fall from this secure position. Yes, there is something physiological about vertigo – perhaps it is not all in my mind. And I lie there, in utter immobility and awe, feeling the blood in my veins gushing down the vertical drop.

Cautiously, I rise, after a long while, and follow the path over a hill on the right to bypass the falls. My friend Ellen says: “Look behind you at these people who are walking in the streambed, they have not yet reached the waterfall, they do not know what awaits them…”. It is the “moment before”, when they can still joke around, when they can still be their naïve, unwary selves.

And now it is my turn to lose that carefree attitude once more. In front of me is the descent into the Barak gorge – a path snaking its way down to the very bottom of the waterfall from which we had just peered down. I must gather myself together, shift into the gear of self-reliance. I must convince myself that I can trust my own body, that I am agile and well-coordinated. That, through the years, I have become an experienced hiker, that I have good boots with gripping soles and there is no reason in the world why I should fall. I tell myself that this path is sufficiently wide and well-trodden, unlike the crumbling hill we had surmounted earlier, that there will be no tricky spots ahead, because it is a marked and thus officially endorsed trail. It has stood the test of many hikers before me. So why should I, of all people, be the one to fall?

Still, it is good to have Ellen nearby. Precisely because she does not take charge of me that I am able to reassemble the shards of my self-confidence. Earlier, in my outburst of panic, I had blindly entrusted my safety to Avi, relinquishing all responsibility for myself. Going down with Ellen - a woman - I start to rely on my own inner resources.

Halfway down it happens. I stop clutching on to the security of my fears and finally let myself go with the downward movement of the path. It is like when you are first taught the separate steps of a dance and you do them hesitantly, trying hard to remember what comes next. And then, as if a switch is suddenly turned on, the isolated steps start to flow into each other to form a continuous whole, and you begin to dance.

It is the image used by Heinrich Von Kleist to describe the unselfconscious grace of the marionettes’ dance – a return to the state of innocence that existed before eating from the Tree of Knowledge (1). It is that moment of surrender (2), when you are wholly present in a sublime garden, without caring if you are naked or not.

Some years ago, perhaps even some months ago, this very same descent would have paralyzed me through and through, and now I am doing it on my own. Ellen says: “just keep your eyes straight ahead and don’t look down!” And what if I do?  Like Lot’s wife, would I turn into a pillar of salt? Is looking at such magnificent sights not the prime reason for being out here in the desert?

And so, I steal one glance at the sheer drop below me. My head is already spinning, but in that split second, I make out the vertical walls of solid rock with the immense dry waterfall and the path winding its way down into the gorge. I can almost hear the imaginary waters roaring down the stony falls. And at the distant bottom of the dark ravine, a speck of the pristine, narrow canyon carved into the white rock, bares its secret, like a glistening pearl.

Of all the views on this hike, it is that that fleeting image of the luscious white canyon, that glimpse of a paradise lost, that impressed itself most firmly on my psyche. Perhaps it is precisely because I was not on known, secure ground, but was hovering above the abyss, risking the possibility of the fall.

* * *

Notes:

1. Heinrich Von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre”, in Essays on Dolls, Syrens edition of Penguin,

translated by Idris Parry -

2.      Kurt H. Wolff – Surrender and Catch, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, 1976

BARREN GROUND - a trek in the Western Sinai E-Tih desert, the “Desert of Getting Lost”

note: the photographs in this chapter are not from the E-Tih desert but from the Negev in Israel

BARREN GROUND - a trek in the E-Tih desert in western Sinai, the “Desert of Getting Lost”

Not without apprehension, I set out on my very first trek in the Sinai - an eight-day trek through the plateau that takes up the northern two thirds of the Sinai Peninsula, a ominously known in Arabic as E-Tih – the Desert of Getting Lost. Soon enough I learn that the E-Tih is, indeed, the proverbial desert – a barren, monotonous wasteland that drains the mind and dulls the senses.

We cross into Egypt at Taba, just south of Eilat without much difficulty. Since the return of the Sinai as part of the peace agreements with Egypt, Israelis have been able to visit the shores of the Red Sea as well as the High Mountains of the Sinai in the south, without a visa. However, as we are heading for the Western Sinai, we had to apply for one several weeks in advance and indeed, as soon as we leave the coastal road, we are stopped at a checkpoint where our papers are carefully examined.

Around noon of our first day, after driving west on a hot, flat road through a tedious wasteland, we reach the sleepy settlement of Nahl, lying literally “in the middle of nowhere”. It seems to owe its existence solely to being a place of rest on the long road through the desert plains, roughly trailing the ancient pilgrimage route from Egypt to Mecca. It is a place straight out of the movies, a set design for French gendarmes in colonial North Africa, where people just wile away the day in aimless recline, while the mesmerizing ceiling fan turns and turns.

Here we must wait for a photographer who is to join our trek but missed her plane from Tel Aviv to Eilat and is being brought by a special jeep to this god-forsaken movie set. We have lunch in a dark room at a roadside restaurant, with tired plastic tablecloths and walls painted in two colors, the lower, darker section in shiny oil paint that can be wiped clean, when someone chooses to do so. Our Israeli guide tries to stretch out the meal, with coffee and more coffee and tea and soft drinks. The ceaseless buzz of the flies brings on a hypnotic state of not caring about anything – there is no point to drain your energies in the futile effort of waving them away.

Waiting and waiting is what people in this town seem to be doing, passing the time by playing backgammon or fingering their stringed worry-beads. Time here is one long expanse of duration, without any ripples or disturbances, like the endless distances of the hamada, the stony, flat desert plains on which we have been driving.

There seems to be some archeological site nearby, the ruins of a Khan from the Ottoman period, serving the pilgrims on their age-old route to Mecca. But after our lazy lunch, we have succumbed to the reigning lethargy of the place and only a few hikers are able to muster the energy to go outside in the sweltering heat to explore the site.

Late that day, when the photographer arrives, we finally leave the languorous town and after a short stop at the ruins of a castle high above the broad vista of the arid El-Arish streambed, we drive towards the western side of the peninsula. Now we are traveling on bumpy dirt roads that run through a more varied landscape of rugged desert hills, arriving at a dry riverbed where we set up our tents in total darkness.

The next morning, we walk a short distance, past a few Bedouin tents, until we get to Wadi Fukiya, where date-trees line the streambed – a veritable desert paradise blessed with generous pools. Never have I seen so much water in the desert. Eagerly, I plunge into the clear waters in a narrow gorge sunk into the broad, rocky dry streambed, swimming through long, interconnected pools contained by high limestone walls. Instead of hiking through the gorge, we are swimming through it.

The entire day is spent in water, sauntering from one swimming hole to another, with their gorgeous, clear waters at times surrounded by beaches of pure white sand. We do not feel the slightest sense of hurry about getting anywhere. Perhaps there is too much leisure, too much of the good in this garden of indulgence, lulling the body – and the spirit. This is the desert of plenitude that will soon become a vague recollection, totally overshadowed by a vastly different face of the desert.

On the second day of hiking, we leave camp in the early morning mist, going up a ridge, negotiating our way on a narrow path, then down into another streambed, past a flock of impertinent camels that seem almost camouflaged in the beige rocks and sand. The acacia tree we reach at Bir Buriya appears a graying green, as if we are viewing the entire landscape through a filter of dust. A Bedouin woman is collecting its curled pods for her goats that do not have enough shrubbery to feed on in this year of severe drought.

Eran, our Israeli guide, has promised we will find water to fill our plastic soda bottles at the nearby t’mille, a little hole dug in the gravelly ground, where water, retained by an impermeable rock layer below, gradually seeps in from the sides of the hole. But the t’mille at Bir Buriya refills too slowly and the Bedouin woman at the spring asked us not to use up their water supply, and so we go on to the next t’mille, half an hour away, but that one turns out to be contaminated by animal droppings. I start to worry that we will be left without enough drinking water for the long haul up Wadi Marzaba. On the second day of our hike, we already learn that the presence of water in this parched land cannot be counted on, despite its abundance in Wadi Fukiya. Fortunately, the next meager spring is not polluted and after filling our bottles, we begin the difficult ascent.

 The thin, pastel mood of the early morning air has turned into an insolent, calculated heat, which greatly magnifies the effort required to push ourselves up the steep incline. There is no room for subtleties here, there is no place left for the spirit. The climb seems endless, the landscape consists of nothing but bare, brown rocks, loose small stones, with other hills blocking the view of the Gulf of Suez, which should have been behind us and could have offered a saving grace, a lifting of the spirits. There is the repeated illusion of approaching the top, only to discover we still have another stretch to go. If I had to choose a setting for the ascent of Sisyphus, it certainly would be this.

 We are experiencing the desert at its harshest. My body is yearning to capitulate to the unforgiving heat, to let myself fall, so that the ordeal will end. Surrender, that total immersion of the spirit, the concept developed by my teacher and mentor in college, Kurt H. Wolff, is not possible in a situation like this, when the body intrudes, when it brutally calls attention to itself, when you are overtaken by pain and exhaustion, or by strong physical urges. All you want then is to take care of that disturbance, to return to the state of equilibrium. [1]

 A slight breeze brings some relief when at last we reach the saddle, but the landscape is still harsh and unwelcoming. Even from up here we cannot see the Gulf of Suez and on the other side there is not much of a view either. The descent towards Wadi Shalala is slightly less hot, yet the landscape continues to be dry, with few, scraggy trees. There is no sign of water.

 When we reach the riverbed of the Shalala, at the bottom of our descent, we seem to be entering a friendlier terrain of ochre and burnt-red sandstone, but I am too tired and hot to really be charmed by those rock formations that in other circumstances would have let my imagination run wild. Suddenly cries of joy burst through the desert air, as the others have reached a small oasis with clusters of date trees providing ample shade. In the riverbed is a spring with shallow pools, encircled by tall grasses. In this newly regained paradise, we drench ourselves in the waters, even if they are somewhat muddy and saturated with algae, then relish our humble lunch and find ourselves wallowing in a drawn-out siesta.

 The path above Wadi Shalala is easier, with no more strenuous uphill ventures, but it is still a long and hot walk. Then, in the afternoon, as the wadi begins to widen, we reach a place where the streambed consists of large, silvery planes of rock, like giant landing strips for extra-terrestrials. In the late light of the day something happens here – my body gathers itself again, my exhaustion begins to fade. My spirit gets ready to take off.

 Even the harshest desert day brings its moments of softness:  in the early morning and again at dusk when the extremes of day and night are tempered by diffused light and comforting temperatures. The desert contains never-ending cycles of soft and harsh states. On cold windy nights and in the unbearable heat of the day, you easily forget the mellowing hours of poetry, the time of reflection, of surrender – when your mundane, bodily needs cease to intrude.

 That night we reach camp in total darkness, after clambering up many strata of rock. The desert is already turning cold and windy, the soft hours are gone. Up on the highlands, the jeeps are waiting with our tents and sleeping bags and the expedition’s Bedouin cook welcomes us with a hearty soup.

 The following day we set out for a walk in the blaring heat of the sun on the flat plains of the highlands. In these plains of the hamada desert, covered with grayish, angular stones, there are no landmarks, no distinguishing features, nothing in the distance to mark the way.

 Here the sense of desolation prevails. When there is no exterior form I can incorporate into my body’s map of the world, when there is nothing to measure myself against, my ability to grasp my surroundings fails to work. When there are no places to rest, to touch, to remember, when there is no richness of color and texture or change of rhythm, I am bound to lose my own distinctive features, my individuality.

 It is here that I begin to relapse into a state of apathy. If all directions are the same, then what difference does it make which way I go? In the Desert of Getting Lost, I begin to feel again the temptation to give up, to quit, to fall – not unlike the immense, illicit pleasure of falling asleep, relinquishing all responsibility for myself, for having to be on guard. Perhaps I fear the desert because part of me wants to get lost.                              

*

To the Bedouin, who know it intimately, the hamada desert is probably not an amorphous space – there are clear directions and goals, there is an intricate web of well-traveled trails crisscrossing the plains, like veins running through the body. There are camel paths, pilgrimage routes, trade routes of caravans carrying spices and turquoise. They follow ways that are laid down by the landscape – from water source to water source, seeking out the milder slopes, bypassing a waterfall, crossing at the lowest place between high peaks - a mountain pass. These desert dwellers seem to be attuned to the large expanses of seeming emptiness, while noticing the wealth of nuances along the way that are invisible to those of us who are not from the desert.

 Khader, our Bedouin guide, or dalil, an old, wrinkled man with a glassy eye and a perennial cough, certainly knows where he is taking us, even if it appears to me that we are walking through an unending expanse of nothingness.

 After about ten exceedingly long kilometers, he resolutely makes a turn to the left in the middle of nowhere, and we find ourselves descending into a wadi that has not been visible before. It is another hot, dry day and again the body is threatening to defeat the spirit.

 We eat our lunch at the foot of a dry waterfall with scant shade at its base, the basins of its large pools empty and uninspiring, then continue on another long, hot walk, when the view suddenly opens up and in the hazy distance lies the broad riverbed of Wadi Abu Gjada, carved deeply into the highland plains. Its dark, rugged banks, silhouetted in the late hours of the day, are finally beginning to lift my spirit, after the oppressive trudging through the brown, fiery landscape. Another hot day is redeemed at the scattered light of dusk.

 It is already dark when we are met by the jeeps that will take us to our camp near the tomb of Nas’rallah, a pilgrimage site of all the Bedouin of the region. We enter the thickness of the night on a long ride in the broad streambed, lying in the back of the open vehicles and gazing at a sea of flickering stars. All along the way, tall bodies of vertical rock rise above us in the darkened riverbed, like grand, shadowy sentinels.

 Then we start to hear running water and the splashing of the wheels going through puddles that seem to cover huge stretches of the dirt road. We are driving through a dense forest of silhouetted date trees that continue for kilometers on end. This is Ein Higiya, one of those legendary oases that appear straight out of dreams. In the dark, it seems ever so dense and lush. The desert is coming alive again.

*

A desert trek in these isolated regions is a journey from oasis to oasis, from plenitude to plenitude – in between it crosses through the void. As an artist, I know from experience that there is a time when a sojourn in the netherworld is necessary – my greatest fear is to remain stuck, imprisoned, in the emptiness and despair.

 It is only in retrospect that all that pain and agony I sometimes go through seem to have a meaning, a meaning that I did not experience in the depths of the depression. If someone had assured me that this change would happen, as it has often happened in the past, I would not have believed it. It would not have made sense. Even though I go through these upheavals again and again – the chaos before creation, the agony and temptation to quit art altogether – knowing, that, at least for me, it is a necessary phase of the creative process, this would be no consolation.

 I often ask myself, if the work I created would have the same depth, if I had not been there, in the depths, myself. Perhaps that despair is part of living on the thin membrane on the “face” of the abyss, the Hebrew al penei tehom – where I could go either way. At times, I fall, deep, deep down, and then, miraculously, I resurface with new insight and strength, and fly.  

 The Jungian psychologist Thomas Moore suggests we should let depression have a worthy place in our lives and not see it as a disease that must be eradicated, an attitude that is fed by our denial of death. Depression, he writes, is a valid state of being that can bring us in touch with such qualities as “the need for isolation, the coagulation of fantasy, the distilling of memory, and accommodation with death” [2]. It is a journey into the dark domain of Thanatos, the way Persephone must cross the river Styx into the netherworld every single year, to return to earth with the new beginnings of spring.

 The cycle of desert-oasis-desert-oasis is never-ending, and depression is a period of drought, a rite of passage that I must go through, enabling me to reach greater insight and understanding. To accept the void as part of life while in the midst of a depression, to grasp it as essential, is an art, a painful lucidity I seldom attain.

 I imagine that to the Bedouin this cycle is the natural order of things. They seem to be able to walk for hours in the burning heat, through the endless expanses of nothingness, without appearing to lose the essence of their being, without getting lost in despair. They know that in the late afternoon the light is soft and glowing, that at the end of the day there is plenitude and calm.

     *

 The following morning, we walk again in the hot, monotonous highlands for a long, long time, and then, finally, begin to descend into Wadi Taibe, that Khader proudly proclaims belongs to his own family. From the path we can see a large blue-green pool at the bottom of a waterfall, with a beach of pure, white sand. I already begin to imagine myself in those clearest of waters, swimming to where the pool’s glassy surface is rippled by the drizzling water, near a moss-covered wall. But the deeply religious Khader begs us not to bathe in his pool – perhaps he does not want it desecrated by our half-naked bodies. And so, we are left with nothing but a cruel mirage.

 Hot and sweaty, our refreshing swim denied, we follow the dry wadi with water from the spring flowing alongside us firmly encased in a black irrigation hose – the omnipresent remains of Israeli technology in the Sinai. Khader is quick to assert that his family refrains from the temptation of the lucrative, prohibited planting of marijuana and opium poppy and practices a more modest, traditional agriculture in the fields further down the wadi. We pass a donkey’s carcass at the foot of a waterfall and the remnants of a charcoal-burning pit. It is too hot to really appreciate my surroundings, and once again, the body interferes.

 At the mouth of the wadi, near Khader’s agricultural plots, we are picked up by the jeeps and taken on long, twisting back roads, returning to the highlands, and finally reach the spring of Ein Yarka. Here the white, hard limestone layers are deeply cut, forming a tall, dry waterfall with a green pool, like a single eye, down at its base. It is a narrow, vulva-shaped formation that widens at the opposite end, gradually tapering down until the rock walls become level with the dry riverbed and the canyon opens to the landscape. At last we have reached the pool we had longed for all day, but it is late in the afternoon and getting chilly, so that only a couple of hikers go in for a dip.

 Even though it is an extraordinary place, Ein Yarka does not evoke in me the primal images it would have on other occasions – perhaps because my senses have been drained by the tiring nothingness of E-Tih, or, more likely, because we arrived at Ein Yarka by jeep. Throughout the trek the jeeps would meet us at our camping site, after we had walked for an entire day, bringing our food and sleeping gear, but now they came to pick us up in the early afternoon and took us all the way across the desert to see this spring. If we had walked this stretch, a strenuous uphill climb, Ein Yarka would have crowned the day.

 It seems that traveling by jeep undermines the experience of nature, by dropping you down at one “attraction” after another, breaking up the experiential thread that binds extraordinary places, disrupting the gradual unfolding of time. It totally nullifies the element of surprise, of trudging for an entire day in the heat and then suddenly be struck by an incredible discovery, tantalizing the senses and the spirit. By making nature more accessible and accommodating, mass tourism, with its travel by bus and jeep, diminishes its aura. [3]

 Illustrating the loss of aura, the naturalist Jack Turner tells the story of his adventurous descent into deep canyons in the remotest parts of a Utah wilderness, where he was suddenly confronted by larger-than-life figures painted on the dark rock walls, “transmuted from mere stone, as if by magic”. [4] When he returned, many years later, the pictographs had been thoroughly photographed and studied, the site had been named and marked and a comfortable trail had been laid. For him, the power of the figures had been gravely eroded. To put it in different words, surrender is no longer likely when everything is predictable and known, when there is no uncertainty and risk and no sense of total immersion.

 After a wondrous night of camping in the streambed of the broad Nahal El Arish, the jeeps drive us to the nearby spring of Ein Abu Natigna, a deep, crooked chasm cut into horizontal layers of pale-colored rock, crenellated at the rims like a clamshell of colossal proportions that has been embedded, upright, in the earth. It would have been thrilling to swim through its narrow, winding canal, but the canyon’s interconnected pools, which, our guide had promised throughout the trip, would provide the ultimate swimming experience, perhaps the climax of the expedition, are utterly dry. Again, the harsh drought of the E-Tih wilderness wins out, proving our first day in the abundant Wadi Fukiya to have been a mere fata morgana.

 We begin to get ready for our trek to the mountain pass, following Nakeb Rakane, the age-old caravan trail that leads to the ancient turquoise mines and on to the Gulf of Suez. Khader, our dalil, who is to stay on his side of the mountain, points out the old nakeb, where several paths coming from different directions converge, before going up to the pass and here we take leave of him.

 It is a long, hot walk up with many deceptive saddles and summits, when you think you are almost there and then realize there is still another slope to climb. Then, suddenly, in one almost painful blow, the view explodes in front of my eyes, revealing a vast landscape of undulating sands, enveloped in a purple haze. Here, at the edge of these cliffs, one thousand meters above sea level, the E-Tih Desert comes to a sudden end. An occasional hill rises like an island above the sandy sea below, containing turquoise and manganese mines of Pharaonic times and the intriguing temple of Sarabit el Khadam to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, where we spend the following day. In the far distance are the glorious High Mountains of the Sinai, that awaken my intense yearning for that trek – which I will do less than six months later.

 On top of these cliffs, at the edge of the Desert of Getting Lost, I can finally see clearly and begin to rise above the void – despite the tiredness of the long uphill haul, despite the “interference” of my body. Here I am able to grasp the cycle of depression-creation-depression as a whole, regaining the faith that the fall, however harsh it may be, is bound to be followed by another ascent to the altitudes of clarity. And creation.

* * *

 Notes

 1.      Surrender cannot occur when one “is not gathered, whole (…). (T)he body, instead of integrating itself with the rest of the person, makes claims that interfere with such integration.”  Kurt H. Wolff, “Surrender and the Body”, in Kurt H. Wolff, Surrender and Catch, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht Holland, 1976, p. 188

2.      Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, Harper Perennial, N.Y. 1994, p 146

3.      Jack Turner elaborates on the concept of aura, introduced by Walter Benjamin in the latter’s famous essay, “The work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Benjamin defines this quality of art or landscape, as “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Jack Turner elaborates on the concept in terms of mass tourism: “Photographic reproduction and mass tourism are now commonplace and diminish a family of qualities broader than, though including our experience of art: aura is affected, but so is wildness, spirit, enchantment, the sacred, holiness, magic, and soul.” P. 15 in Turner, The Abstract Wild, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1997.

 4.      Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1997.

p.8. See the chapter entitled “The Maze and Aura” for this story

[“I had become a tourist to my own experience.” (p.11)]