16. TO KNOW THE MOUNTAINS - a six-day trek in the Hight Mountains of the Sinai
Ever since I started to hike and was told about trekking in the High Mountains of the Sinai, I felt that something was missing, until I would trek through that mountain range, that I would not be whole until I would walk day after day, sleep under the stars, and totally immerse myself in those mountains.
I would have to prepare myself slowly and thoroughly before setting out on this pilgrimage, for a pilgrimage it would be. I did not want to get lost in the details, to be paralyzed by fears. And I did not want to risk the interfering demands of my body - as had happened to me in the E-Tih desert, the Desert of Getting Lost. I wanted my trek in the High Mountains of the Sinai to be an experience of surrender, the culmination of all my hikes in the desert.
In the Fall of 1996, over three years after I joined my more challenging hiking group, and half a year after trekking in the E-Tih desert, I finally sign up for a six-day trek into the High Mountains. It is during the week of Succoth, the holiday marking the Israelites’ wandering in this very desert for forty years, as they prepare themselves to enter the Promised Land.
It is also the time when the then Prime Minister Netanyahu defiantly opened the Hasmonean tunnel, violating the delicate status quo between Palestinians and Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem. The tensions are already high when we cross the Egyptian border into the Sinai desert.
Throughout our trek, bits of news about riots breaking out are passed on to us by the handful of Israeli hikers who dared to enter into an Arab country after the start of this new round of hostilities. It is good we do not have a radio - I do not want to know. I have come to the Sinai to seek solitude, concerned with my own inner being. I want total distance from the life I have built over the past twenty-six years in Jerusalem. Even though I have already been involved in the women’s anti-occupation movement, be it somewhat passively, as a foot-soldier, not a leader - I find myself running away from the news - and from all sense of responsibility and political action.
*
Not far from the monastery of Santa Katarina, we meet our Bedouin guide and camel drivers, who load the animals with our bags and food supplies. It is already late in the afternoon when we finally start our trek.
As night begins to fall, we set up camp in the dry streambed of Wadi Kweiz, below a trickling spring and the stone wall of an orchard. After supper, when the full moon of the Succoth holiday has risen over the silhouetted mountains, we gather in a large circle and introduce ourselves – we are about twenty trekkers - from Israel and Europe. Noa, our Israeli guide, is visibly delighted to be teamed up with her old friend Sami, our Bedouin dalil, whom she has not seen for several years, because she had been traveling abroad, while Sami was serving in the Egyptian army. The route they chose, we later understand, leads to the mountains that they had always loved the best, that brought them the greatest challenge and joy, but which, for us, would not always be the easiest to climb.
It is hot, the following day in these bare, lower valleys making the mild uphill climbs more of an effort. Around noon we reach a walled orchard, a lush garden with pomegranate, apple, quince, plum and apricot trees, and a special kind of pear that grows only in the High Mountains. The fruit trees in the high desert are not spread out all over the dry wadis, but are clustered inside stone garden walls, watered by wells and springs. They are pulled together and protected, conserving their energies - like the sun-dried apricots with their concentrated sour taste, which the sedentary Jebaliya – the Mountain Bedouin - preserve, releasing their juicy flavors by boiling them, in another season.
We are welcomed by the owner with the traditional sweet, almost syrupy mint tea and have lunch, while we make ourselves comfortable on carpets in the cool shade of the trees, leaning against the garden walls. Here, in this orchard, there is that same sense of tranquility you get from being inside a Bedouin tent, where, reclining on rugs and mattresses, always with a breeze blowing through, you can find yourself slowly drifting off into the unbounded expanses of time.
Towards the late afternoon, after passing several springs and a canyon so narrow it is called “the closed gorge”, we reach a large walled orchard at Abu Tweita, where we are camping that night among the fruit trees. The camels, having taken an easier, but roundabout, route through the broader wadis, are already there.
After a short rest, we set out for a nearby peak, Jebel Abu Tufaan, to see the sunset. I am eager to finally climb a mountain, after a day of walking at a lingering pace in the lower-lying wadis and lazing around in shady orchards. As this is the first mountain we are climbing in this range, I am totally unprepared for what is to come.
At first it is easy, as we skip playfully over large, rounded boulders of pinkish granite - it seems like the entire mountain is one enormous block of granite. I take pleasure in the grip of my hiking boots on the rough surfaces of the rock and in the fact that I can walk up steep inclines without any fear of sliding back. We work our way around the mountain and then we start our climb in earnest. We are faced with a tall vertical crack between two blocks of granite and have to move our bodies inside that narrow crevice. There are plenty of protrusions to grasp or to stand on and the walls of the crevice, against which I can press my body, giving me a measure of security in face of the sheer drop below.
All of a sudden I realize that we will have to go down the very same crack in total darkness, after the sun had set. I start to panic, as do some of the other hikers near me, until Noa assures us that there will still be at least half an hour of light after sunset, to make it down safely.
The final part of the mountain is a perfect dome of pure granite, with no cracks or notches to hold onto. I cannot believe it is at all possible to scale this massive rock with nothing but empty space behind me, even though I ran up similar rocks at ground level. I am terrified, but Sami, together with his cousins, who have joined us at the family orchard, form a long row on each side of us and pull us up to the top of the dome, one by one. I do not know how I would have done it without their help.
The dome tapers off on the other side, providing a large, safe platform on which to sit and wait for the sun to set. I am still trembling for quite a while. After the trip, a hiking companion hands me a photograph she had taken of me, sitting on top of Abu Tufaan, the fear still visible in my eyes.
Even though we are now at the altitude of 2000 meters, we can see only the closest mountains, the more distant views of the highest peaks are blocked by the ridges around us. The sun goes down without much of a fanfare in the skies, yet the golden light it casts on the landscape makes it seem as if the mountains are burning from within. Then a gray, shadowy blanket begins to spread over the surrounding ridges, and we hurry to start our descent from the treacherous bald mountain, again with all the help we can get.
This is our first climb, on a day spent mostly idling around. It has been close to mountaineering, rock-climbing without the security of a rope. It demanded none of the healthy stamina needed to walk up a steep path, but rather acrobatic skills, virtuoso balancing acts on precariously slanting surfaces, the ability to squeeze your body through narrow cracks, dangling above a sheer drop.
It was mainly the surprise that unnerved me, that shook me so deeply. If this had been our last mountain, the culminating experience of a gradual process of learning leading up to it, I would have been better prepared for the challenge. Instead of moving step by step, we were ruthlessly thrust into the difficult topography of the granite boulders. It was a test of fire, a ritual of passage that marks an abrupt, qualitative change from one state of being to another.
*
In the morning we start out by crossing over the ridge where the sun had set and continue on a plateau behind that ridge - I am glad that on this day we will have no more scary mountains to climb. Soon we find ourselves in a landscape of intimate little valleys, enclosed by craggy ridges and large, rounded granite formations that look like sculptures - camels, lizards, ogres, gargoyles and other petrified monsters, human torsos and faces in the strangest contortions.
I wander through the valley with my camera, as if in a trance. The place is alive, teeming with the most fantastic creatures – enormous prehistoric reptiles lying in wait, watchfully eyeing our movements. Strange how this solid rock, from the deepest foundations of the earth, can express itself in such soft, pliable forms, with shallow indentations as if a potter had pressed her thumbs into a clump of clay, hollowed it out and rounded it, caressing it into a gentle glaze. In this enchanted world, the hard, rigid granite appears to be dripping, oozing down, like the languid flow of spilt molasses. All around there are heavy, pulsating bodies of rock, an elephant, a walrus, a heavyset woman feeling good with her dimensions, weighing down on an armchair, like Picasso’s rendition of Gertrude Stein.
The mountain Bedouin build rujms on top of rocks – piles of small stones that elsewhere serve as trail markers, but here gain much more playful tones. And in a moving dialogue with the evocative forms of the granite boulders and local Bedouin lore, visiting hikers have created their own, often imaginative, stone sculptures. This is Farash Um Sila, the valley known as “The Sculpture Garden”.
Slowly we make our way towards the far end of the valley and there, at the very edge, the view opens up, with the Sirbal towering above the landscape, and the E-Tih cliffs closing the scene. These are familiar mountains in the distant north, mountains I got to know on my journey to the Western Sinai. But the much higher peaks of the High Mountains, to the south, are still invisible to us.
Cautiously, we descend on a steep path of burning rock and are awarded with a swim in the largest pool of this mountain region - Galat El Azrak, “The Blue Pool”, which in fact is a brilliant green, gently reflecting the willow that weeps over it and the encircling cubist rocks. The pool’s clear waters are surprisingly cold on such a hot day, but they offer a sense of purification towards the more elevated stages of our journey. We huddle together to dry on the warm rocks, like a band of lethargic seals.
In the broad Wadi Tala, on the way to that evening’s campsite at Farash Romano, we pass large patches of cane and other lush vegetation, herds of grazing wild donkeys and a progression of enclosed orchards and animal shelters. The walls of these orchards are constructed in whimsical configurations of rounded stones, with larger granite boulders left as found, embedded in the ground. The wall is then built around and above them, bringing about a lively conversation of large and small forms. Nowhere is there a straight line, a forced, even row – the walls always follow the topography and stones of all sizes and shapes hug each other lovingly, as if they are having a grand family reunion. The Jebaliya seem to have captured the animate forms of the granite, so distinctive of their landscape and carried them over into the architecture of their walls and shelters, guided by a flight of fancy straight out of fairytales.
At Farash Romano, on the third night of our trek, I realize I have finally begun to move with the mountains. Time is no longer measured by the linear progression of minutes and hours, it has become an ocean into which I am submerged way over my head. And so, when my watchband breaks that night, I am even relieved to be rid of that irrelevant timepiece. Events that are happening elsewhere do not touch me anymore - the riots that had erupted in the occupied territories and their harsh repression seem so far away, as if in another era. My world is filled to the rim by the mountains.
The following morning, we start out with a steep ascent, leaping from one boulder to another. At that point I begin to feel somewhat dizzy and even have to ask another hiker to pull me up those rocks. After a flatter, more relaxing stretch, surrounded by suggestive forms of granite bathed in the silvery light of the early morning sun, we reach the gentle spring of Ein Nagila. Here shallow basins with standing water reflecting the sky are carved in the polished white rocks, which drop down into a valley holding the ruins of a Byzantine church.
I decide to stay and rest at the spring, to try and regain my strength, while the others climb Jebel Bab, one of the high peaks in what looks like a sheer granite wall ahead of us. Yet, at the same time, I know I am missing out on a grand experience. There is a V-shaped breach in this wall known as Bab El Dunya – “Gateway to the World” – the name alone is electrifying. A gate arouses anticipation, a longing for another place, preparing the spirit to enter. But the Gateway to the World is not a pass, I am told, there is no descent on the other side. Behind this wall the mountain region ends - in a sheer drop. The view towards the Gulf of Suez and the sandy plains along the coast must be spectacular – the Bab is, indeed, a gate for the eyes, as well as for the spirit. I fantasize that on a clear day you would be able to see far, far into Egypt – the World – and perhaps even distinguish the triangular silhouettes of the pyramids. I vow to return to the High Mountains and climb Jebel Bab.
But if I do not get to see the world that morning, I am blessed with the chance to come to know Sami, our dalil, who has also stayed behind at Ein Nagila, letting Noa guide the group. While he makes tea for the two of us from herbs he has collected along the way, I ask him about the mountains, wondering how this environment is perceived by one who knows it so intimately. Sami, a handsome young man in his mid-twenties with a fluent command of Hebrew, affirms that he too is aware of the connection between the natural forms and the vernacular architecture of the fences and enclosures. Explaining the origins of the formations in his mountain landscape that seem to be so alive, he radiates a sense of awe and wonder, adding, somewhat provocatively, in his familiarity with secular Israelis: “to you they were formed by “nature”, but I call it a Higher Being…”
After breakfast, we set out again, crossing another small, sheltered valley, known in these regions as a farash. Then the landscape around us starts to get mountainous and we can see more pronounced, sharper peaks at the places where the view opens up a little. We cross valleys much like Farash Um Sila, yet with even more vivid rock formations, though they have not been officially labeled “sculpture gardens”.
Here, inside these reclusive, concentrated valleys, deep in the heart of the mountains, I begin to regain my vitality. The massive granite creatures slowly move closer and closer, encircling me, inviting me to dance. My spirit is already with them, leaping over their rugged, leathery backs, with no fear, no fatigue, bouncing from a blubbery elephant to a phlegmatic dinosaur waking from a stone-age slumber with a resounding roar.
Then, looking towards the south, a majestic mountain reveals itself. It is unlike any other peak we have seen earlier – large, forceful, dominating the surrounding ridges. It is cloaked in a mantle of white and crowned by three or four tooth-sharp peaks. This is Jebel Um Shumar, we am told, the second highest summit in the Sinai – indeed, as its Arabic name implies, a mother, a Great Mother. I tremble with elation, for now finally, we are in the High Mountains, as I bask in their full mythic glory.
The next morning our trail from Wadi Buliya leads us over the gravelly backsides of Jebel Sumra to a saddle between this black, volcanic mass and the equally dark Abas Basha. Suddenly, after all that black rock, a pink, dreamlike landscape appears before our eyes, as if summoned by a magician who laid out an immense, quilted bedspread at our feet.
I can clearly see the distinctive Jebel Na’adja, a grand mosque with an immaculate pink dome and four imposing pillars of granite forming a perfect square around it. And then, with a shudder going down my spine, it dawns on me that right in front of us is none other than the bare, granite scalp of Jebel Abu Tufaan, the site of our initiation into these mountains. You can even distinguish the huge boulders we passed on our way up, before we turned around the bend and came face to face with the terrifying mountain. And for a moment my body relives the nightmare of scaling that dome, with the depths looming below. Not only do I recognize that mountain with my eyes, I know it, in the flesh.
From here on the wide, serpentine path up Jebel Abas Basha seems like a highway after the strenuous ascents we have come to expect in these mountains. It was built for the chariots of an Egyptian ruler in the previous century, who sought a cure for his ill health in the dry desert air. The palace he was constructing on top of the mountain named after him was abandoned when he suddenly died, allegedly poisoned by his wife’s lover.
As I reach the last ridge before the summit of Jebel Abas Basha, I am suddenly struck by a moonscape of tall, rugged mountains with sheer vertical fissures, gradually dissolving into the misty distance - as if the view from the saddle had not been enough. This mountain keeps eliciting a delirious sequence of exclamations, one stronger than the other, as more and more of the landscape is revealed. Now, I am prodded to climb higher and higher by my desire to reach the final, all-round view.
At 2,304 meters, Jebel Abas Basha is one of the higher peaks in the Sinai. It is at these staggering heights that I am finally able to grasp the totality of the entire mountain range. To the south, are the sharp, white crests of Um Shumar; and then the 2,642-meter peak of Jebel Katarina, the highest mountain in the Sinai. And in the east, right across the rift beneath us, stands the dark, pyramid-shaped summit of the legendary Mount Sinai, or as it is known in Arabic, Jebel Musa - “The Mountain of Moses”.
It has been argued that Jebel Musa might not be the real Mount Sinai. This designation originates from Byzantine times, yet there is no archeological evidence to support it and some scholars have proposed alternative locations elsewhere between Egypt and the Promised Land. But it is no wonder that religious traditions have chosen the High Mountains as the region where such fateful upheavals took place. Like other places on earth of great spiritual magnitude – the Himalayas, the Grand Canyon, the mesas of New Mexico, the hewn red rocks of Petra – this landscape emanates a sense of the numinous: the presence of the divine is indisputable.
I am not to climb Jebel Musa, not this time, and not on my second trek into these mountains, the following year – when I do “see the world” at Jebel Bab. I am destined to look at Mount Sinai from a distance, the way the dying Moses viewed the Promised Land. We are told that the magic of watching the sunrise from the peak of Mount Sinai would be severely marred by the throngs of tourists and the foul smells they leave behind. The idea of Mount Sinai is more exalted than its crude reality – as with the mechanical reproduction of great works of art, examined by Walter Benjamin, easy accessibility in the service of mass tourism, has utterly tarnished the mountain’s aura. [1]
In the Hight Mountains of the Sinai Peninsula, the mountains come in couples, like the volcanic Jebel Musa lying in an intimate embrace with the granite Jebel Safsafa - each mountain composed of a different kind of rock, one pink, one black. The pink granite mountain was formed by the slowly cooling magma from the bowels of the earth that became exposed as the layers above it eroded over the ages; while the other peak, geologically much younger, consists of dark, hardened lava, deposited by volcanic eruptions. The black rock is angular, sharp, sometimes broken up in rectangular blocks, sometimes gravelly, creating a stark foreboding landscape. The pink granite, even though it is a harder rock, reveals soft, pliable forms, like undulations of the flesh.
As you dwell in the spiritual heights, the heavenly realm where God revealed himself in his raw being, sensuality is ever present. You cannot separate the body from the spirit, the sensuous from the sublime, they are inescapably entwined - as manifested in stone.
And so it is not surprising that one interpretation of the momentous occurrence at Mount Sinai portrays it as the marriage between God, the groom, and Israel, the bride. In the midst of the thunder and the lightning, as God appears on the mountain, Israel receives her husband’s seed – the Torah – and bursts out with pleasure – to the point of “seeing the sounds” – a confusion of the senses, or synesthesia, which often accompanies such moments of delirious ecstasy.
In this act of communion, Israel knows God and is known by God. The generation that stood at Mount Sinai is traditionally referred to as dor de’a, the Generation of Knowledge, which, of course, could also mean carnal knowledge. [2] Perhaps, I would add, this carnal knowledge is the cognitive love of that is the essence of Kurt Wolff’s concept of surrender. (3)
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Sitting on the remaining walls of the palace that never reached completion, I try to comprehend what these ancient mountains know. They behold the distant views that are invisible from the ground, they see that which lies beyond. They can testify to the changes in the atmosphere, to the coming of thunder and lightening, of dark threatening clouds, to the rising of the sun. They possess an all-encompassing knowledge of everything they have witnessed in those millennia, of the forces of water and wind, of the watershed events that took place here, shaping the history of a people and three religious faiths. And they remember all those who journeyed through the ages to this remote region, to seek the holy. Their knowledge derives from their broad, powerful view in all directions - a consummation of the spirit’s yearning for the absolute. They offer a lucidity that is impossible when you are in the midst of the commotion, involved, attached, bound to all the others.
But herein lies the painful paradox - attaining the powerful, over-all knowledge is by nature a lonely experience. There is no room on the mountaintop for the multitudes – even if they had chosen to climb Mt. Sinai rather than delegate the terrifying meeting with God to their leader. Moses, on the other hand, could not stay on the mountain forever, indulging in his peak experience - his surrender. He had to go down and tell, to share his knowledge with his people.
*
After the relatively easy climb to the summit of the dark Jebel Abas Basha, we go on to its pink granite partner, Abu Mahshur, with its narrow cracks and steeply slanted surfaces. The dark volcanic rock erodes in a way that makes its ascent much more gradual, as was the case with Jebel Katarina, the highest peak of the Sinai mountains, which I climb a year later without any difficulty. The pink granite rock, on the other hand, maintains its domed forms, demanding the near-mountaineering skills which we were forced to adopt on our first mountain, the bare dome of Abu Tufaan. On Abu Mahshur, several days later, I am better prepared for the climb on the precipitous granite rocks, especially, as I have been spiritually strengthened by the all-round view of the mountain landscape.
Abu Mahshur shelters many little valleys tucked deeply inside its rocky mass. Unlike an ordinary valley, formed by a river penetrating at one end and going out the other, the farash is an enclosed, wise little valley. It offers another kind of knowledge, very different than what is attained from the stark peaks of hardened lava that shoot up to transcendent heights, with their consummate perspective. It is not a knowledge gained from looking out and over, dominating the land, but one of focusing inward, of understanding, of self-contained, centered being - of surrender.
The difficult descent from Abu Mahshur takes much longer than expected and after treading quite a distance through a broad, gravelly wadi, we arrive at our campsite in complete darkness. In a far corner we discern the silhouettes of our camel drivers around a campfire, making the traditional Bedouin bread as they whirl the dough up in the air, like dancers in a shadow play.
The last night of our trek, we camp at Wadi Shag, in a tiny valley at the foot of the dark, volcanic Jebel Katarina and its inseparable partner, the red granite Jebel Ahmar, which we are to climb the following morning, after which we will return to our starting point at the crossroads-village of El Milga, closing the full circle of our journey.
I wake up in the middle of the night, when the moon is out casting an ethereal light on our secluded valley surrounded by massive mountain shadows. I find myself a rock to sit on and gather my thoughts, to listen to the mountains, to take leave. After five nights in the desert, I have come to know their language.
As they stand all around me, I feel the mountains grow larger and darker. Without looking I can sense the presence of their huge, silent bodies, almost touching me, speaking to me without words. And now after six days of walking around this mountain massif, looking out into every direction of the compass, I have come to a stop, gained a foothold.
It dawns on me that our circular trek through these mountains is like the ancient rite of circumambulation of the Tibetan Buddhists in the Himalayas, who walk around the sacred Mount Kailas as well as other shrines – a rite that prepares the soul for completion, for wholeness and enlightenment. I would add, for surrender.
Sitting on my rock, I draw the mountains into me, knowing they will remain inside me long after I have left their domain. They radiate a sacred knowledge that is both spiritual and erotic – a knowledge of completeness, of being whole - connecting my innermost sentiments to the events in the world outside.
It is a knowledge that is tightly intertwined with the taking of responsibility. For once we have opened ourselves to this knowledge, writes the poet Audre Lorde [4], we will no longer settle for mediocrity and suffering – we will be empowered from within to act against all forms of oppression. (5)
In the high little valley, illuminated by the Succoth moon, I know I am ready to go down the mountains and face the reality I have been avoiding. And most of all, to take action, guided by my inner voice, as I re-enter that torn and troubled land.
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Notes
1. 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.”
Turner applies the concept to 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.
2. I thank Mordechai Beck for pointing this out to me
3. Surrender – a concept developed by Kurt H. Wolff, in Surrender and Catch, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht Holland, 1976, p. 188
4. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, in Sister Ousider, Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 53-59.
"When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For, as we recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. "