Monthly Archive for November, 2009

The City of a Thousand Minarets

On November 27, 2009 from Egypt. 0 Comments

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

We waited morbidly in the Seven Heaven lounge, morbid because we were finally about to leave after a three week stay, and because the road to Cairo put us one step closer to inevitable separation.

My arm still hurt from Richie of New Zealand’s Tae Kwon Do twist. The lanky second-degree blackbelt, third in the world in the senior division before he discovered alcohol, had been drunk when he showed me some holds. He taught English in Liepzig and regularly patroned the English pub there for rugby matches up until a few months ago, when he came to Dahab and got a job in the Seven Heaven dive shop.

“Glory?” scoffed the Kiwi, swinging his leg around in the air to show a power move. “There’s no such thing as glory. It’s all ego, mate.”

While Jean attended his Facebook, Amelia and I listened to a wild tale from Maria of Denmark, which I will here relate. Maria first arrived in Dahab four months before, for a short beach vacation to precede her Arabic course in Alexandria, with a glowing Norwegian girl in tow. They met a Kiwi with an Egyptian friend, and the four of them went together to one of the cafes on the esplanade for drinks. After, the Norwegian girl rose to freshen up; the Egyptian got up moments later, to make sure she found the bathroom; and when the girl returned, it was with a disheveled outfit and a tortured countenance.

“He tried to rape me,” she said. The Egyptian had pushed her into a stall and pulled at her clothes, but the Norwegian pushed free and did not know what to do. Maria and the Kiwi started walking the girl back to the hotel, and the Kiwi worked himself into a fury at his acquaintance until he said, “I’m going to knock him out,” and turned back towards the restaurant. The Scandinavians continued on to the hotel, and Norway broke down in the courtyard, sobbing and screaming. Maria lay her down on the bed, and Norway would sleep and wake and scream and sleep again.

They called a doctor, who ruffled his robe very officiously and said, “She needs to be told to calm down, that everything will be okay.” Maria shouted, “No, she doesn’t! Give her something!” then shouted, “What are you giving her?” and took morphine and vicodin out of the prescribed cocktail. When the girl was asleep, Maria went to find out about the Kiwi, who had laid out the Egyptian on the floor of the cafe and made their case look very silly.

The next morning at 9, Maria and Norway went to the police station. They sat around all day doing paperwork and describing the event. “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” said the policemen. “I can understand you!” said Maria in Arabic. “Oh, well, I was talking about someone else.” The girls identified the accused local face to face and left the station at 11 that night. A trial date was set for a few days later.

In the following days, people came up to them, strangers in the streets and in restaurants, staff at their hotel, and said, “Sign the peace treaty.” “The what?” “Sign the peace treaty. He is a young man. He has a sick mother and a family. Who will take care of his children if he is in prison. Sign the peace treaty!” “It’s not our fault he did what he did,” said the girls. “He knew what the consequences would be when he tried to commit the crime.”

But the Scandinavians asked about this peace treaty and could not get a straight answer. The police said it would call off the trial and put the Egyptian in jail for three months. Locals said it would save his family from poverty. Finally, a hotel manager told them, “No, if you sign the treaty, it will cancel all charges. He will go free. And, he will be able to take you to court for all the money he lost not working while the police held him.”

On learning this, the Norwegian decided not to sign the treaty, yet her problems had not ended. In the courtroom, the defense attorneys asked her every sort of question about the bathroom. How many stalls were there? What color was the door, and what did the sink look like? Ad nauseum. Any mistakes in descriptions were duly noted. (“Jesus,” said Amelia. “I’m going to start keeping track of everything when I go to the bathroom.” “I already do,” said Maria.) The Egyptian paraded his family around and begged for mercy, on his mother’s behalf.

Nevertheless, after a long and trying process, the man was sentenced to a few months in jail—justice served against horrifying odds.

We got in at 7, and a hastily arranged taxi took us past new mosques and hotels and through an ancient cemetery of desiccated domes, like some ruined city in India. The streets were silent, but the driver warned that in an hour they would be full. He dropped us off at the Ismaelia House, a hotel on the eighth floor of a building across Midan Tahrir from the American University of Cairo and within sight of the pink palace of the Egyptian Museum, abutting the Nile. The rickety free-hanging elevator spilled us out, and we met Yashar, who had recommended the place and was on his last day there, checked into the gender-segregated dorm rooms, and looked out at the city from a balcony.

Cairo has a thousand minarets. It’s rooftops, bedecked with rubble and old furniture and satellite dishes and billboards, recede into the smoggy infinite like the waves of the sea. The stale, cracked tan, the colonial craftsmanship, and the Islamic artistry of its buildings gives the impression of some artifact purchased in a far off port of call and left to gather dust on grandfather’s shelf—something of inner beauty, exotic mystique, and tacky ugliness.

It toiled to life like a newborn. Immediately below our balcony, a ful stand and a felafel one served their fare to Egyptians who stood eating around tables between the cars parked in the alley. The felafel came in newspaper, the ful in metal bowls. People boiled out of the buildings, and the streets became like arteries. The flow of traffic generated a consistent blare of horns, used on Cairo’s lawless streets like reverse sonar, to let everyone else know where you were. The cries of humanity drown you, and the songs of the minarets are beautiful, for only the best can sing here. Otherwise it would be a constant drone.

Amelia fell asleep in a curl on the couch, Yashar had business at the post office and train station, and Jean and I ventured out into the young and polluted sunlight. We asked at the American University for TEFL courses and walked up streets north of the Museum. We saw strange things: troves of old Peugeots, motorbikes with side cars, a camel tied up between the fruit stalls and those selling old Iraqi banknotes and loudspeakers and other random things; boats parked in the street, a synagogue under guard, a basilica under construction; and always that constant press of humanity, which by its multitudinous activity diminishes the individual. I felt as if I was moving in slow motion, and all the trackless others at full speed. It was strange and surprising and exhaustive.

In Cairo, 20 million people need jobs to support them. Walk into an empty bakery in the early morning and see a mass of employed inefficiency. Behind each dish of sweets and savories stands an attendant, and in between them a man takes payment and gives you a token to be redeemed by the server two feet away. Finally, a woman stands by the door, with the sole duty of opening it for you. They earn nothing and are expendable. They are Cairenes.

We found our way back to Ismailia House and woke Amelia, who came with us to the street food stalls for lunch. Egyptians are generally a warm, energetic, friendly people, as extroverted as they are self-conscious. Outside of the country’s many tourist trips, where touts sharpen their fangs on the bones of a globetrotters, the locals help you for nothing and crowd about you as they would a marvel. Few tourists travel Egypt on their own, and those who do are rewarded.

Amelia rode with us on the Metro, south to Mar Girgis, and not on the woman’s carriage. We arrived in the Coptic Quarter and went into the wide courts of St. George’s Cathedral. “This is not what I expected to see on my first day in Cairo,” said Amelia. Greek lettering and candles marked the Orthodox icons. Beneath the chapel were relics of George’s torture. A little girl was wrapped up in his chains and asleep. Some of the tombs in the somber Coptic cemetery were broken, and we wondered if it was grave-robbers.

In the maze behind the cathedral, we went into the Church of St. Sergius, its ceiling built like Noah’s Ark. The synagogue had a metal detector at the door, and the guard asked, “Do you have any bombs?” The Hanging Church is the holiest Coptic site—a shrine built on two pillars without a foundation, on one of the resting places of the Holy Family in their flight from Herod.

Leaving the walls of Old Cairo we went up into the warren between it and our House. Children playing football kicked the ball our way and mobbed us. They were only ten but sweet talked Amelia—“You are beautiful. Take off your glasses. Oh! Your eyes!” The streets were made of dust, and from up ahead came a thump of bass and music. A group of Egyptians were loading suitcases onto trucks and dancing.

Women howled when they saw us. Jean started recording wildly on his camcorder, and a boy came up to Amelia and I and rubbed a stick on his finger. When I did not understand, he grabbed me and took me back into a red room with an open wall and two billiards tables and a dozen boys. They challenged me to pool, and I am grateful that Jean showed up since otherwise we wouldn’t have won. Everyone clapped and cried out at the click of the billiard balls. An old fat man came in near the end and started shouting at the boys, who backed away from the table to give us room.

When we won, they cried, “Money, money, money!” with hands outstretched, and we left through the gaping wall. We kept on north through the slums, up through a wall and onto the busy river of a highway, crossed like in Frogger, then back down through another wall into a new ghetto of auto-repair shops and markets. The meat market stretched before us, for miles. Let me describe it:

Herds of sheep waited for the slaughter behind the dead, stripped corpses of their brothers. They wear painted marks on their backs. Cows were tied to the posts of fences. Id al-Adha was four days away, and everyone needed a sacrifice. They loaded sheep into the backs of trucks or cars or taxis. How much does fare for a sheep cost? we wondered. We navigated the stalls, stepped over the puddles of dubious providence, avoided the constant traffic of cars and people—sometimes missing an accident by the twist of an ankle away from crushing wheels, the swivel of hips from a scything side mirror—and gazed in gruesome wonder.

There were lines of carts, and each held a different body part in a pile: camel legs, cow livers, sheep heads, anything you could think of. Some stalls were set up like circus tents, all bright colors and lights and mutilation. One had an announcer on a wooden stage, and he shouted, “Hey! Hey! America!” when he saw us. Someone in black pushed his way past us, with a train of stick-wielding vigilantes in hot pursuit. There was a fight ahead. Amelia and I kept losing Jean, who was taking too many photos. We found, at length, a subway, and pressed into it like sardines to get home.

Yashar was asleep on a couch when we got back. Cairo is exhaustive, but he loved the city. He described it as “a constant heart-attack” and a “28-hour a day city.” Amelia went to bed, and Jean and I went with Yashar to Felfela, a popular Egyptian restaurant with a sit-down area for foreigners and tourists and a fast-food standing area for locals, which costs half as much. Yashar entertained us with energetic stories, as Jean ate chicken and I stuffed pigeon. Yashar left that night for two days in Luxor and two in Aswan, and then he would return and go with us into the Western Desert. Alright, we said.

After Yashar had boarded the metro to the train station, we met Daniel of Perth in the hotel and settled for tea and shisha at a place on the side of the street. The Aussie had come to Cairo from Dahab the same night as us, but because he had not bought his ticket beforehand, he had to more or less bribe his way onto the 1:30 bus, to the seat next to the driver. He had seen the Pyramids and the Souq and would fly home the next day. It was the penultimate day of a year-long trip, a fact his mind was just beginning to understand. Since Amelia was not there, we talked about helicopter blades and George Lucas.

We slept in the next day, and set off late to visit the oldest Islamic districts and the Khan Al-Khalili Bazaar. Our cab let us off outside the Al-Azhar Mosque, one of the open enclaves of clear-headed tranquility in cluttered Cairo.

The caretaker of the mosque, a compact and energetic-looking man, asked us where we were from. “France.” “Australia.” “Germany.” “Ah,” he said. “Alemania! Come, Hans Christian. Good no Americans!” “I’m from America,” said a voice determined to be heard. “Oh, well, Obama?” “Yeah.” “Obama good, Bush bad,” said the Muezzin. He mimed spitting on the floor of his mosque. An earthquake had come close to destroying the building in the last decade; many countries donated money for its restoration, but—“America does not. Iraq, Afghanistan!” He could not find the English words, so he mimed a sort of weapons, with spit for bullets.

The Muezzin gave some defensive religious books to Amelia, who had her scarf tied over her head. He gave a pamphlet in Chinese to Jean. When I tried to look, he pushed me apart and said, “They are for her!” He showed us the Madrasa for the blind and the tomb in the back, a service for which we refused to make donations, and so he sent us out with a curse: “No Americans come here! No Americans!” He refused to take his books back, but his anger echoed down the long stone galley as we put our shoes back on. I looked at Amelia’s books on the stairs outside, but the Muezzin appeared like a goblin behind us and snatched them away. “No books!” he said. It was the first time in the Middle East anyone had treated me poorly for being American.

We crossed under the street and entered a medieval world. The roads twisted through narrow tinkling warrens of silver and goldsmiths and jewelers and watchmakers, through filthy side streets where pedestrians with bags or baskets of bread balanced on their heads walked across gaping holes on the exposed pipes, like the obscure remnants of some ancient empire in the midst of all those ancient customs and old buildings. We sat on seats against a mosque and drank tea as we watched them pass. Blacksmiths pounded on metal plates or ground hooka stems on wheels or welded in the street. Most of the work of stalls spilled into the road, so there was chaos.

The main artery from the southern gateway to the northern wall of the Souq was cobbled and lined with beautiful mosques, which at night lit up in mild and warm colors. They bear the names of heroes: An-Nasir Mohammed, Al-Hakim, Qalaun, and Al-Ghouri. Inside they were beautiful, and we listened to the muezzin sing the call to prayer. We ate in the streets, and I tried some strange desert of couscous and powdered sugar, a cousin of the rice pudding that Egypt loves.

We ate more in the new marketplace across from the Khan Al-Khalili Bazaar, where locals shop for clothes and car parts and meat and anything else they need. We bought oven-roasted yams from a street vendor and koshary cups from a cafe, and ate them on the steps of a huge mosque. We felt very anxious eating there, but an imam came out to offer us napkins and a rubbish bin. The taxi back to Ismaelia House took longer than walking. Woe to the Cairene drivers!

The next stop on our flash flood tour of the Land of the Nile was the Egyptian Museum, a pink-stained warehouse of antiquities near the river.

“Everyone says we should get a guide,” said Sven when we were standing in the courtyard the next morning, along with Jyunko, a hair-dresser from Tokyo. “It’s a very confusing museum, and a guide is only one hundred pounds—that’s twenty each,” he continued. A stunned silence! “Just look at their faces,” said Jean of Amelia and my phrenologies,—“They never spend money on anything, they’re so cheap.” I apologized for the virtue of thriftiness, though inwardly I thanked it. Plenty is a wonderful word that can make life dull.

We wandered around looking at the old things. The artistry present in those rocks, from an age when the Greeks and Romans and Europeans yet dwelled in huts and caves, had Jean speaking of alien origins. Jean and Sven paid 200 extra pounds to see the mummies of Rameses II and other heroes, and Amelia, Jyunko, and I went around to see the gold of Tutankhamen and the wonders of his tomb.

Waiting outside for our friends, Amelia bet me that Jean would come out raving about the mummies, and I bet that he would be disappointed because of the heavy cost—a Pyrrhic victory brings no joy to the general! We bet a hand massage, (Jean once had a Colombian girlfriend who taught him, among other things, the means of massaging hands and heads; Jean showed these techniques to Amelia, who taught them to me) which is a better bet than money or the slap-bets described by Daniel of Perth. “It has to be the first words out of his mouth, though,” said Amelia.

Jean’s first words: “Yeah, it was awesome. You would have been disappointed, though.” It was contestable, but I agreed to pay up in the end.

On our way to Felfela for koshary, we ran into Bernard of Amsterdam, the Dutch troubadour. He was a skinny young man of Nordic features with a wispy goatee and long hair who had been sick when we left him in Dahab and now looked better, though exhausted as could be expected after a day spent seeing the Pyramids and the Museum. Like Daniel, Bernard had only one day in Cairo.

Jean, Sven, and I met him later under our building to get tea and shisha. We grabbed some more rice pudding at Felfela, picked up a South African from Praetoria who was there by himself, then went up to the Tawfiqiyya Souq, which deals in produce and auto parts. We turned left into the first alley, stepped over a pile of cabbages, passed two cows, and found the Sun Restaurant exactly where Yashar had told us it would be. It was a high old building wedged back in a narrow alley, strung with lights and neon, and looked something like a medieval tavern or a western saloon.

We talked about travel, which could sometimes be dangerous, as Maria’s story certifies, “but you’re from South Africa,” I said to the Afrikaner,—“you must have some crazy stories.” Well, he had once been the victim of a gas attack. The burglars had pumped gas through his open window to knock him out, and he woke up on a bare mattress in an empty apartment.

Bernard had to leave the next day, and we told him, “It must suck to go back.”

“Nah,” said the Dutchman. “I have a girlfriend waiting for me, and an okay job. All my friends are there. I wrote a lot of songs while traveling, and I want to try and publish a CD. Life is good.”

“Yeah, I like to travel and all,” said Jean, “but Paris is my home. I have friends there. We’ve been friends for twenty years, some of them. It’s good to see the world, but I want to have, you know, connections.”

“Roots,” said I, I who have traveled but never come home from it.

“Yeah, exactly. It’s important to have roots. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s okay to travel for a few months, even two years, maybe, but all these people who travel for five, ten years—what do they have to go back to? Their friends have moved on. They can’t keep in contact for that long.”

Denniz arrived that night, Yashar’s Danish friend, exhausted after seeing the sunrise on Sinai and leaving Rachel at the border at sunset. His father was a Turk and an exiled communist, who received Swiss, German, and Danish asylum and visas when he showed his own wanted poster to those countries. He fell asleep drunk on a train with some Germans and woke up in the capital of the latter. Soon he met a Danish communista, and soon after Denniz was born. His name means Sea, and his middle name, Göl, means Leg.

As a boy his big ears and wide face earned him a spot in a Danish television ad for frozen chicken. There he was, in the midst of a family enjoying their dinner. He put his glass down on the end of his fork, which catapulted a piece of chicken cradled on the other end straight out the window. The father rose from his seat and dove out the window to grab it. You cannot waste good food!

The Turkish Republic forgave his father’s opinions a few years ago, permitting the family to visit and buy property. Denniz’s grandfather is a content old man who spends his time gardening and cooking at their home on the coast near Izmir. Then the road called Denniz, and he quit a good job at a sports channel, left his slowcore band, the Lightning Choir, and came to Eastern Turkey for a real world education in photography, which lasted through Syria, Jordan, and Israel.

He came with us the next day to see the greatest funeral cairns mankind ever constructed, the oldest and the last standing wonders of the ancient world. Getting there was an ordeal, and the three monstrous stone stacks popped out of the morning smog between buildings to surprise us. From the bus stop we approached them up a long road, past a golf course and tourist shops and a hundred camel touts, and through a ticketed gateway. This opened on the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which stepped up to the sky. Perspective made it look smaller up close than it really was, and still we marveled at it.

People swarmed around it and up the steps to the tomb’s entrance, but we had not paid for tickets. Stray dogs or Bedouin had shat on the pyramid steps, and they slouched around staring with carnivorous intent at the globetrotters that passed, carrion already. In truth, the hassle was not as bad as you might hear, the crowds much smaller than we expected.

We circled Khufu’s Pyramid and the outlying buildings and came to that of Khafre, for which some of us had bought tickets. The ramp led down and straight and back up into a bare and humid chamber with a slanted roof, carved from a single stone. All about the Sphynx that Khafre built, with leftover stone from his cairn, Russian tourists posed as boxers or heavy lifters, and Jean and I joined them in parody—but who can tell the satires from the enthusiasts?

The third Pyramid belonged to Menkaure and was the smallest, though its lower levels were sheathed in unworn granite blocks. Walking through the debris surrounding Menkaure’s tomb, we talked about the aliens that built the structures of Egypt.

“Come on,” said Jean. “Everyone else in the world was building huts and living in caves, and these guys had high art. And look at that: does that look like anything from Earth?”

We crossed a Saharan plain to the sunset panorama, but before the orb had dropped, the policemen informed us that the park was closing early. Denniz checked his calculator watch—the Danish are a nation of niche-dwellers, and Denniz had that timepiece and a vinyl collection—and told us it was only four—but tomorrow was Id al-Adha, so this was like Christmas Eve. The vendors had already packed up their stalls, and all the tourists were gone. We were the last, guided by two police on camels and by a stray dog who took the lead and growled at other strays, and we left singing national anthems: mournful Denmark, bloody France, proud America, and quaint Australia.

That day, I must add, was Thanksgiving, and although such a holiday is not celebrated in Australia, France, Germany, or Denmark, we all celebrated it together. A cart out front sold us yams hot from the oven, and at a restaurant we ordered a feast as close to Thanksgiving as you can get: chicken, salads, fries, spiced tomato slices, tahini sauce, and Arab flatbread. Everyone had something to be thankful for, and I did not feel lonely, even on the other side of the world from where I had always been.

After we had shisha in an alleyway place called Zahred al-Bustan, when we were watching television in the House, my parents called Amelia’s Egyptian number; it was the first time I’d talked to them in a long time—forgive an ungrateful son! I am thankful for your safety and support.

The feast of Id al-Adha marks the beginning of the pilgrimage to Mecca. Good Mohammedans celebrate with a pious feast, and piety requires that the animals be freshly slaughtered. Well off families buy their own goats and sheep and take them home, and wealthier ones send cows into the slums while feasting on delicate kid. So many people, so much meat—the streets run red with blood!

The Turks call it Kurban Bayram, and it is something my friends in Istanbul despise. It colors Istanbul as crimson as the day the Turks took it. Turks in Deutschland carry out their sacrifices in secret, jetting blood into bathtubs and showers to keep the German streets clean and lifeless.

We wished to see some carnage. “I want to see a cow killed,” said Denniz, his Nikon at the ready. A subway took us to the Sayyida Zeinab Mosque, near the meat market and the slums we had explored on our first day in Cairo. The streets were already so stained we feared we had missed the show, but in an alleyway we saw a commotion. A pack of Cairenes were gathered around a convulsing cow with an open neck. Blood pooled around it, and a man hosed everything down. Its rear was brown with feces.

“Allah akbar,” came the gratitude! The crowd was ravenous and ecstatic. The men watched intently, the children in horror, the women out of duty. One girl in a hijab explained the ritual to us, and told us its meaning.

A butcher stood apart from the crowd, near a truck that held two more doltish beasts, chattel for his knives. He wore a white smock stained red, and a belt with a half dozen blades. Six men helped to pull a new beast out from the truck and into the street next to the fallen one. They tied its legs, though it kicked at the thongs, and pushed it spasming onto the ground. Six leaned over it. The butcher drew his poniard and cut the leash. The six held it down and pulled the head back, and the butcher had a machete. He slashed the blade across the throat, quick as a cobra, and blood sprayed across the thrashing flank.

“Allah akbar,” screamed the women. Children shivered and clung to parents, and some looked ready to cry.

The butcher emerged from the pack. He had blood splattered down his smock and across his feral face, and he rinsed it from his mouth at a spigot on the wall and spat in a basin. He laughed, the hero of the day, and wiped his mouth on the gray wool robe of the man next to him. The man smiled, and the butcher laughed again and went back to get the chainsaw.

We left soon after. “Eid sayeed,” we said to those we passed. Sven bought a roasted yam from a street cart, but the rest of us were not very hungry. We retreated into the Mosque. Amelia found the women’s section to be a kind of closet, but the men’s area was a vast enclosure. The faithful were singing around the tomb of Sayyida Zeinab, and the muezzin handed us metal cups with a sweet sanguine drink that we all mistook initially for blood.

That’s Just Fine

On November 22, 2009 from Egypt. 0 Comments

Time wasted is existence, used is life.
—Young

Jean pulled his bike up in front of Ali’s Shop and took a seat at a table.

“You’re back,” said Ali.

“Yeah,” said Jean. “How are you? Can I have some lunch?”

Ali served a large plate of mincemeat balls in a thick tomato sauce, and when Jean had finished, he asked, “So what are you doing?”

“Well,” said Jean, “I wanted to get into Egypt, to take the ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba, to meet my friends. I knew it would be a big hassle. I got to Aqaba but the man told me, ‘It’s very expensive to take your motorbike. I wouldn’t do it.’ I need a report filed back in France, and a deposit in a bank account. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay.’ But he told me, ‘I’m not letting your bike on my boat.’ So now I need to find a place to store my bike.”

Ali did not have to think. “Not a problem,” he said easily. “You can store your bike at my house. Some French climbers are keeping their gear there as well.”

Jean trusted the man, had heard his praises from other Frenchmen, and said, “I’ll only be gone two weeks.”

Ali laughed. “Two weeks, a month, it does not matter. I think you will probably stay a month.”

Arab men ask about politics; Arab women ask about family. This husband knew much less English than his wife, and so she turned around in the passenger’s seat of their old Mercedes, which had picked up Amelia and I on the road to Aqaba.

“His father have twenty-three children,” she said. She was a plump, cheerful woman in a hijab, on her way from Ma’an to Aqaba for Sunday shopping. “Have nine wife. He is good. Have one wife. He have more, I—,” and she mimed his murder with a thrashing fist. Her stalwart husband laughed and attended the road. “You are married?”

“No,” we said. “Just friends.”

“Oh. Amelia, you have children?”

“No children.”

“I have three children. One girl, two boy. I expect another boy soon. I do not want twenty-three. Maybe six. How many you want?”

“Mmm,” she said demurely. “One. A girl.”

“Yahyah,” she said to me, “you must have a girl. Amelia, you have love in your heart for Yahyah?”

“Inshallah, habibi.”

“Yahyah, you have love in your heart for Amelia?”

I blushed but laughed and echoed, “Inshallah.”

In Aqaba we found the ferry office, then took a taxi to the port. The one hour ferry across the Gulf of Aqaba to Nuweiba scheduled for noon really left at one. The Princess slogged across the straits, bypassing the Israeli toehold on the Red Sea, and then tread water outside the Egyptian port while the slow ferry from the day before disembarked its passengers, twenty hours after leaving for a three hour tour.

To save time, the Egyptians stamped passports there on the ferry. Most of the passengers were Egyptian, marked by their dark skin, kinky hair, and sallow Berber features, and they lined up behind a little kiosk in the front of the boat, while some prostrated themselves before Mecca even on the moving boat. “How do they know which way to face?” asked Amelia. A guard saw we were white, and he gave us what we needed and took us around the line and the prayerful and had our passports taken, to be returned in the port after we payed for a visa. We shrugged and sat down and whiled away a few hours. The crowd grew anxious looking out the window.

Announcements in Arabic interrupted a marathon of music videos of pop sensation Elissa (lucky us—Jean had to watch Egyptian snuff torture movies). We got up, sheep to the mob, and moshed back towards the exit. Guards told all to sit, and six senior whites pushed through the parted crowd with roller bags in tow. “Follow them,” said Amelia and I to each other. We tagged behind, along with a few other Whites and an Asian traveler, into a back room near the exit, where another guard told us to sit down. Outside the Egyptian crowd was riling itself into a lynching frenzy at this segregation, and they glared venom in through the door before a guard slammed it shut. We heard them shouting terribly as a security officer entered and had his noble picture taken with one of the tourists. Sometimes the door would open to worry and shame us with their maddened faces.

Soon we descended and followed the mob through a pyramid that said, “Welcome to Egypt,” inside, and onto a bus that took us 500 meters into a wild courtyard. A hundred coolies bustled carts of luggage around and screamed at each other and us. In a tranquil shack that said BANK on the front we bought visas for 11 Jordanian dinars, and we went around the corner into an office to retrieve our passports, praise Allah for their safe delivery, and have them stickered and stamped by a grinning and corpulent official. While waiting we met two Czechs and a Dutchman and Jordanian also heading up the beach to the campsites. The Jordanian took it upon himself to guide us all.

The outdoor courtyard was ravaged but vacant in the early dusk; its bustle had moved into a warehouse with a single working X-ray. We pushed between the howling Egyptians and their colorful cloth bags, stuffed big as two of the coolies put together, and put our bags on the conveyor between pieces of a man’s furniture set. As we picked them up, he was trying to shove a loveseat into the machine, and everyone was trying to help by pushing on it or shouting advice from a circle of spectators.

The Jordanian found us a young Bedouin taxi driver in robe and turban, who led us into a van and insisted that we get inside before agreeing on a price, lest the police assault him for haggling with tourists. Like most Egyptians, he drove with the headlights off, to save petrol. His haggling more than matched the Jordanian’s, and we did not hear a price until we payed. The Bedouin wanted $30 to take us out to Sawa, the campsite at the end of the strip where Skip was staying, and though we pushed this down to $15, it was still too much for Amelia and me, who got out with the Dutchman and Jordanian at a nice hotel, with a lobby of teak and leather and earthy brown tiles and cool-lighting.

We followed the owner around for a sampling of the rich lifestyle—comfortable lounge chairs, fruit cocktails, snorkeling gear for the nearby reef, a pair of lesbians studying some modern dance on a projector screen—and said, It’s very nice, and we are very poor. Down the way we found a cheaper hotel, and further down the beach a place called Sababa with $4-per-night reed huts that were more our style. A place to rest our weary feet, cracked by the desert dryness; our empty wallets, spilled into the tourist soil, where so much blood has been spilled before.

Nuweiba was an ideal place to begin our ensuing lethargy. Small hotels and resorts stretched along the strand in all directions, all as empty as ours. Sababa Camp had rows of huts with fans and beds and mosquito nets inside. The covered lounge had a bar and a stereo and squares of floor-level cushions for couches, and outside across a path of sand was a shelter just alongside the lapping water, with more couches and tables. A reef kept the water shallow, but it was beautiful and warm.

Amelia and I were nearly alone. The Sababa staffers were too high on hash to care much, although they had a young puppy that rolled all over us. There was an Egyptian with his French girlfriend. An Israeli couple was staying there, but they left the morning after we arrived, and left us a joint in exchange for checking the weather on my laptop. The wadis were flooding, and it would be a difficult road.

Egypt was the first Arab state to accept peace with Israel—Jordan is the only other—and is ostracized by the region’s regimes that take legitimacy from that conflict. Until the treaty, Sinai was in the hands of the Israelis, who say they did not develop the Red Sea coast because they knew they would give it back—though the Bedouin laugh at this. One condition of the peace was that fifteen-day Sinai visas are free, and up until a bombing a few years ago, Israel was the nation best represented on the beach.

Our first full day there was very empty and relaxing. We sat around the shelter on the beach, ate bananas and yogurt, read, swam, played backgammon, and tried to contact Jean or Skip. Jean finally arrived at 9 that night, and we put together a salad and enjoyed the cool of evening and the full moon.

Our reunion offered an excuse to sit around for a second day: swimming, reading, and laundering. The dust of the desert was part of our clothes, and it turned the basin water brown. We were the only ones in Sababa. The stoned bartender turned on a full five hours of Yanni music, so we swapped in an iPod and played Sunny Ade and Toots and the Maytals. Jean took us down the strand to Soft Beach, where a French couple he had met was staying, and Amelia and I sat on the sidelines while he told stories in his native tongue. Listening to a story you know told in another language is intoxicating.

Wednesday we took a taxi into the desolation of Nuweiba City and, as there were no buses, bargained a ride to Dahab down to $7 a head, though the driver took a friend and stopped to get German pamphlets in a Bedouin town called Bir Israel. We drank tea with them on a shaded porch. Children peeked around the buildings, an an old mother laid out what jewelry and trinkets she had to sell.

Dahab lined the arch of the coast with tourist spots, like a lacy fringe between the bleak desert of Sinai and the calm blue of the Gulf of Aqaba, between the hot sun and the cool sound of beating waves. The cafes had couches on the floor with colored pillows under a thin roof of reeds or umbrellas, and padded lawn chairs out in the sun. They all played the same music, and the hawkers said the same thing. “Hey, you want drink? Happy hour!” Cats with long Egyptian features wandered through, and we scratched their backs.

Most cafes were around Banner Fish Bay. South they dwindled out into construction projects and ghost villas, all the way to the blue lagoon. North were resorts all the way to Blue Hole, a hundred meter deep dive mecca. Lonely Planet recommended Seven Heaven, and we followed the Bible because we were cheap—nay, faithful! though these are often the same. The roof, three stories up, had a line of rooms like garden sheds that were $4 a night, and the restaurant had good deals on big meals. The showers sometimes had hot water, which emerged in a drip; the beds had bed bugs that left trails of red welts wherever they drank, and they seemed to prefer my blood to others’.

We sat down in a bar called Friends for tea and shisha, and saw in the street the fighting Spaniard who we met in Petra showed up that first night. He and an obnoxious American joined our table to complain about the Israeli border crossing. You see, Jean’s ferry from Aqaba was canceled at some point, and the Spaniard and the rest of his group went to take a bus across the Israeli finger on the Red Sea, a route with a heap of trouble. Jean waited with a French couple who were having their exit visas revoked, and while waiting heard that the ferry cancellation was canceled.

Bedouin girls with covered heads came around selling tassels of colored thread. One annoyed us with how funny she was, and any endearing qualities lent themselves to her business acumen. She had a happy cherub face, and said, “Buy one. Buy five. Five for twenty. Come on, you need them.” The American kept offering to buy her beer and said, “I’ll buy one if you take your headscarf off.” Amelia had her sit on the couch and showed her how to braid hair, though the girl tugged painfully at it and was hopelessly inept. I bought one of her tassels, and she got it in her mind that I had stolen another. She called me a thief and threatened to stab Jean in the back several times before she found the missing ornament under a cushion.

We started talking about Michael J. Fox after the girl had left. His condition was tragic, but, “He married a fox,” said Amelia.

“What?” cried Jean. “He married his cousin or something?”

The next morning Jean came running back into the room and said, “Hey I ran into this Japanese girl. I met her in Venizia Hotel, in Amman. She’s taking SCUBA lessons, and she got me a good deal. I’m taking SCUBA lessons.” He grabbed some things and left.

Amelia and I shrugged and got up an hour later. Time in Dahab gently dawdles forward, as it did in Ohrid or in the Garden of Eden; for eighteen days we were there. We were downstairs in the restaurant by noon and lounged patiently around one of the three low tables against the windows until Mohammed came to us. “Two Turkish coffees,” he said. He knew I would order a Spanish omelet and Amelia the English breakfast, but he let us order them ourselves anyway.

Jean’s class lasted a week, and by the end he would be a certified advanced diver. He would dive down thirty meters to the HMS Thistlegorm, a British transport ship sunk during World War Two, along with its load of motorcycles, tanks, jeeps, a railroad engines, and leather shoes. The dive-bomber thank sank her was shot down, and lies on the flat, shallow grave of the sea floor a few hundred yards away. “It’s one of my dreams to do this,” said the Frenchman.

Amelia and I could not help but be unenvious, though we appreciated the excuse offered by Jean’s quest, to stay in Dahab and wait for him. We sunbathed in one of the cafes around the bay. The water crowded with SCUBA divers and snorkelers on the calm days, and on the windy ones with windsurfers and kitesurfers who jumped and sailed. We went to the azure lagoon and swam, and sat in the dust to watch the windsurfers practice on the bend in the coast, and looked up on the barren ramparts of Sinai and the sky that watched over the Exodus. We snorkeled off the coast and saw confetti-colored reefs, partially bleached by sun and chemicals, and aquatic schools and lone wolf fish with rainbow scales and strange features. The rolling shimmer of the sea let in rays of light that glittered off the dim coral.

We went and sat down on the carpeted cushions in a restaurant called Sphinx, overlooking the still shallows, and the waiter said, “Jug beer? Shisha?” since that’s what we always ordered. There was a felafel shop on a side street, and a bookstore and fruit stand. At King Chicken you could get a half a bird with rice, salad, pickled vegetables, potatoes and gravy, baked beans, tahina, and bread for about $4. We smuggled $3 vodka into restaurants and mixed it into fruit drinks. We watched movies on my laptop, and sought out free Wi-Fi and cheap beer.

At night a gang of us walked up the arcade and talked to the street hawkers to see what kind of deals we could get. It was off-season, and everyone was offering something. A place called Friends had a cool, multicolored, tasseled atmosphere, and they played more than Bob Marley and Tracey Chapman—usually afrobeat or chillout music. They knew us there and always gave us a good bargain.

During the day we set goals for ourselves: buy fruit, get a haircut, mail that package. Sometimes, we accomplished one. Amelia sat in a chair while a barber went to work shaving off a month’s mane and trimming my beard with a folding razor. He held the blade in front of my face and said, “See my hand? It shakes,”—laughing, razor at my throat—“How much you like your boyfriend?”

Jean was around only a little. We saw him in the lounge, working furiously with a French diver’s manual with his dive partner Yui. Her career ended when its intensity contributed to a mental breakdown and she realized that life is more than advancement. She travels to France to learn French and hopes to dive off the coast of Yakushima, the smokey, forested island that inspired the western wilds of Miyazaki’s Mononoke-hime, when she works there next year. She could fold her eyelids inside out and twist her tongue around. She shared movies with us and showed us pictures she took, and she joined in a massage train we started one night in the restaurant with a Portuguese guy.

The world is small, the Middle East smaller, and people usually run into each other. Keith arrived soon after us, and we met him at Sphinx for beer and shisha and went to a chicken place for dinner. He had gone through Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and told us crazy stories of Hebron and Jericho and Jerusalem, which got Jean and I into a big argument about whether it was right for young women of Israel to deal with Arab elders who considered interaction with women to be disgraceful. The Kiwi left the next day, his trip faster than ours.

And one day Adam Leo popped his head through the window and said, “Hey! What was your name again?” I met this Aussie in Rhodes, the Reader may remember, and since then he had traveled to France, picked up a Parisian girl, and came to Egypt.

Seven Heaven hosted as interesting a cast of characters as any hotel I’ve stayed at—Danes and Brisbaners and Nipponese, Tae Kwon Do champions and optometrist dive masters and Dutch singer-songwriters—but we held true to our own. Amelia and I felt out of place among the divers, and bashfully answered, “No, we are not doing a SCUBA course, and yes, we have been here a long time.” They say that three is company.

We were as dependent on each other as we had been autonomous when traveling alone. We knew the asymmetries of each others faces and grew used to each others ticks. Amelia’s lips pursed rampantly and she made a gentle hmmm when she thought, and she rubbed her feet together. Jean had a habit of making a French poot noise and saying, “Forget about it,” a phrase gleaned from Donnie Brasco. I emitted a hoarse ahhh when confused and said, “Sweet,” when excited, and my eyes were curious and unsubtle. We cultivated inside jokes.

And so we fall into a familiar habit, a Walden Pond state of mind: walking, swimming, thinking, talking, reading, writing, eating, and drinking, in “sublime uneventfulness.”

One night at the Chinese restaurant across the street from Seven Heaven, Amelia and I gorged on noodles and rice and spring rolls and lay back on the cushioned palette while I sipped the rest of my beer. There’s something to be said about that eastern style of eating. You eat more and digest better lying on the floor, though you become very lazy, and leave the table only with a tremendous effort.

“Twenties are your best years,” said Amelia, “but I like being thirty a lot more than I thought I would. Before, you care what other people, what strangers think about you, and try to impress them and make them like you. Now I just be who I am. If people don’t like it, then I don’t try to impress them. My friends like me for myself, and know who I am.”

When we came back to Seven Heaven, Jean and Yui were sitting with their chins on their bags and their bags on the diver’s table, waiting for their expedition to the HMS Thistlegorm. Adam was supposed to go with them, but had at the last minute been driven to the hospital, an oxygen mask strapped across his face. “It’s 99.5 per cent sure it’s not decompression sickness,” said Jean, “but it could be. It’s scary, man.”

Adam, we found out after Jean and Yui had taken the plunge, had an amalgam case of exhaustion, the stomach flu, and minor decompression. When Pauline found out, she fainted in the courtyard. When the doctor found out how much medical insurance Adam had, he prescribed a dozen IVs and pill cocktails. When Adam’s insurance found out, they booked Adam and Pauline into a fancy, recuperative hotel. He was back in the Seven Heaven lounge the following day, looking at expensive cameras. “It’s so boring there,” he said. But his hotel had high speed Wi-Fi, and we accepted his invitation to use it.

Unintentionally, our visit intersected a fight between Adam and Pauline, which submerged itself just under the skin at our arrival. He had met Pauline in Paris and invited her to tour the Middle East, without any serious intentions, and now Pauline was, as the Aussies say, cracking the shits. “Why do girls always think that just because you sleep with them, you’re in a relationship?” Adam queried later, when he came alone to Seven Heaven. “Yeah man,” I said. “They’re nuts.”

Yashar showed up that same day, having hitchhiked from the border. “At one point,” he said, “I was totally alone on the highway, no cars in either direction, and I just turned on this Depeche Mode song, Sound of Silence, and danced in the middle of the road.” Amelia met the Iranian-born Canadian in Damascus and Petra, and Jean and I in Dana. He had a good humor and an inexhaustible energy and interest, though he was so tired on arrival that all he wanted to do was drink a beer and scratch a cat he named Mes—My Egyptian Sphinx.

There were a number of cats about Seven Heaven. Black and white Taxi was the only one that Mohammed owned. Two tabby twins were eternally curled up with each other. Mes became a constant and energetic guest, as did a ragged little creature that looked like he had gone through a vacuum cleaner, and which at one point we attempted to save by force feeding with a straw. A huge ginger tomcat attended dinner every once in a while to check on his harem and chase away the odd stray bachelor that wandered in. This Ottoman of the Alleyways did not deign to beg, but sat on the sidelines waiting for an offered meal. He held his tail up high as he passed, and Amelia remarked, “That’s what I don’t like about cats, is that they flash their poop chutes all the time.”

Jean had finished with his program, so went snorkeling with Yashar the next day. His heavy duty camera was waterproof up to 10 meters, and we used it to take a few snapshots. He loved the life of the reef, and soon after he was signed up for a dive course, looking for hash, and courting a Dutch girl.

Yashar’s Danish friend Denniz arrived a few nights later, with a liberal Israeli girl named Rachel, from Tel Aviv. Their relationship was fast as a whirlwind and twice as disorienting, though they both enjoyed it. Yashar and Denniz were both avid Couchsurfers and had met on an organized road trip in Syria. They had a few arcane things in common, a shared interest in photography, and a common itinerary, so that after running into each other repetitively, they agreed to travel together.

My sister was co-hosting a radio show called Common Sense on her university radio station, and she had invited me to call in and share my glorious presence with her. Flush with pride and vodka, I accepted, and at 11 p.m. Cairo time, 1 p.m. Pacific, I connected with KBVR via Yashar’s Skype account. “Hello?” said a voice. “Hi, umm,” began my presence of mind, “I’m calling for Katy McDonald, for Common Sense? I’m her brother?” “Oh,” said the radio. “Katy, it’s your brother. Okay, you’re on the air.” My first line was, “What?”

For my sister, whom I love, I had organized an excellent program. I spoke about the joys of traveling in such a place as Dahab, cheap and warm and interesting. Yashar got on and impersonated an Iranian immigrant: “Hello America! I love Osama, I mean Obama! I am Persian, like the cat. Prrr.” Jean described Eurotrash fashion for my sister’s upcoming birthday bash and sweet talked her in French as I averted a terrible glare. Amelia introduced some fair dinkum Aussie slang and explained some of the ways we passed the lazy days in Dahab, including our recent invention, Waxed & Wasted Wednesdays.

I was vastly hungover the next day. In the wake of my victorious debut, all the weight of vodka hit me like a truck, and I ended up very drunk and pleased with myself. We went out from the hotel courtyard to the arcade to get koshary boxes from a handcart stand there.

Koshary is a wonderful dish which, if served at home, would be taken for leftovers or whatever was left in the fridge. Fried onions and a spicy red sauce is served over macaronis and short noodles, sometimes with mincemeat mixed in. It is, however, delicious, and admirable hangover food. Like most Egyptian food, it is a cheap dish, simple but well-spiced, and served in huge portions. Jean, Amelia, and I ate ours on a concrete wall overlooking Banner Fish Bay, and then went back to Seven Heaven, where I got fried eggs and toast and coffee.

We had planned to leave that day or the next but decided multilaterally to stay when one of the divers, a Danish girl named Maria, proposed going to the Blue Hole site the next morning for some good snorkeling before all the tours arrived. Divers are not creative cartographers in their guileless names. Blue Hole was a circle 100 meters across and 150 deep, formed by a curve of coral on the coast just north of Dahab.

Our group entered at the Hell’s Bells, a fissure that sloped down into the open sea outside of Blue Hole. From the wall the bank fell to 200 meters, and the clear water on that still day cut out to blue at fifty. Looking forward was looking into an empty void, though shafts of light played at the edges of your vision and made it look as a tunnel. Glittering ribbons of fish in their millions traced down the rolling walls of jagged marine life. Larger shapes, pale and indiscernible, flickered in the deeper shadows.

Five free divers gathered around three weighted guide ropes. They wore nose-plugs and wetsuits and long flippers. The less you move underwater the less air and energy are consumed, and these divers trained to swim deep for upwards of three minutes. They knew that when your stomach clenches with its need for air, you still had half your supply, and they were relaxed enough to use it all.

One diver wore a silver suit with a single flipper like a dolphin. Another dove down into the haze and reappeared thirty seconds later. He could dive deeper than a SCUBA diver, over a hundred meters, since he did not have to worry about a gas mixture or changes in the density of the air in his lungs. We watched them for a while—a squad of bobbing heads in the middle of that wilderness.

Jean, Amelia, and I swam back along the length of the wall to Hell’s Bells to exit. We practiced free diving as deep as we could, holding our noses to equalize the pressure in our ears. At the cleft, Jean got out first, and Amelia second and frozen stiff. “Are you okay?” said the Frenchman, and he went over to rub her shoulders warm. “Dude,” said Amelia, shivering as she backed away, “I think you need to take care of something.” A great mass of blood and snot was plastered to the side of his face, in a ring where the mask had been. “I think I went too deep,” he commented later.

We dove later and saw two divers with huge boxes on their back, in addition to the air tanks strapped to their sides. They had masks on their faces like fighter pilots. The boxes were of some silent make that emitted no bubbles, though sometimes they turned to the conventional SCUBA tanks and sent up a shower.

One night, as we sat in the Chinese restaurant, a Russian baroness led two local coolies out between two cafes to the surf and had them unload the two lobsters they carried stacked together into the saltwater. Set them free! spake this savior. Her charges were not young red pups hardly deserving their boiled fate, but huge, black crustaceans whose old and tired bones might appreciate a good hot bath.

She waved them a tearful goodbye, I imagine, and then turned and headed back to the road and whatever man sponsored her idiocy, and soon as she rounded the bend, the two coolies jumped in the water and dug around for the runaways, too fat and healthy to let fly. Their boss showed up to monitor the search. A few minutes later, they walked back to the road, lobsters under arm, and their feet left damp footprints in the dirt.

The greater world was not so sleepy as we, enjoying a venture into the Abyss and the taste of slimy noodles—the World Cup this way comes, and Egypt had a bare-boned chance at a slot in its brackets. In the days before the first contest with Algeria, we heard baseless rumors of an Egyptian holiday, and the day of saw locals wearing the red, white, and black of their flag on T-shirts or cheek-side tattoos. Those colors flew from flags on every restaurant and bicycle and truck, and exploded like napalm when Egypt beat Algeria 2-0.

We watched the end of the game with Adam and Pauline and Yashar in some cafe that projected it on the wall and sold cheap beer, although we spent the duration taking photographs, learning French sweet talk, and coming up with our own: Of the cross-eyed sort of expression that Amelia could assume, and of the roll her tongue could perform, I said, “When your eyes vibrate, it is like electric massage. When your tongue rolls, it is like the rolling waves of my heart.” And her lips moved coyly when she thought, so I said, “When your lips dance, I feel they are inviting me to the party,” and thought myself very clever.

The clap and howl of a human tempest signaled the Egyptian win. We filed up to the backstreet that King Chicken occupied and fell in with a honking parade. Victorious patriots danced on trucks slowed to a stop by the dancers in the street. They banged garbage can lids and waved flags and shot fire out of spray cans. They sang and cheered. “Allah ackbar!” God guide our footballs and destroy our enemies! We followed the riot down the street to where it focused in a massive demonstration, and then flew in the back of a truck to King Chicken for a satisfying dinner.

A few days later, Egypt lost to Algeria in Sudan. “The Egyptians are the sorest losers,” someone later told me. Rumors say they threw stones at the Algerian players so that three could not attend the match, then blamed the Algerians for the violence—they beat themselves up to make Egypt look bad! When Egypt eventually lost, chaos consumed Cairo for three full days, then sputtered out into a stupefied, hungover dismay.

In two weeks in Dahab I had drank more bottles of vodka than I had snorkeled, and with this deficiency of cold hard adventure in mind, we set out to do the Mount Sinai hike that all the Bibles of Travel will speak of. Thou shalt leave the hotel before midnight, and arrive at the base of the Mountain of Moses at two, and thou shalt climb it, alongside masses of tourists of Korea and Russia and Italy and Spain, and thou shalt freeze, even in summer, and then the holy light of dawn will pay for all those labors, for so the Lord hast decreed.

In our ragged little bus, Amelia put my borrowed coat against the window as a pillow, and I fell asleep on her shoulder, to wake only just before our arrival. The windows had frosted over, and the metal walls of the van were icy cold. We bought our tickets at a stone shack and continued driving. Outside we saw a great wagon circle of tourist buses, and in the middle a huge crowd of pilgrims and seekers, and vendors hawking scarves and gloves and hats. Their stalls lit up strangely the clearing, and the hushed crowds and the chill made it surreal as anything.

Jean, Amelia, and I disembarked with Nishanti, a Sri Lankan adopted by Holland, and a small gang of other Dahab travelers. Amelia was so wrapped up in clothes borrowed from a Dutch girl that she looked like an astronaut. Our driver ran up to us after Jean and I had bought checkered kefiyehs and told us we had a tour guide, and, hey, where are all the others? Somehow he tracked down the young couple from the bus, but the Austrian, the Chilean, the Dutchman, and the two Russian girls eluded us. We met the first three under the imposing stone walls of St. Catherine’s Monastery, where the tourist police were holding them for lack of a guide. We had Abdul!

Abdul had his wide kefiyeh tied around his head so it covered his neck. He wore only flip-flops, and had a jacket tied around his waist. He chatted pleasantly with us as we came out into a wide valley beyond the Monastery. The shadows of Bedouin rustled in the gloom of that moonless night. Some of them huddled around fires that bloomed red in the night. Our eyes picked out the shapes of camels lining the trail, and every once in a while a torch passed over dozens of the beast, and there were thousands in the valley. We smelled them and heard their groans.

The path led up and twisted back and forth, and we thanked the deep night for hiding its challenge from us, and for showing us a glimpse of the galaxy overhead. Every few minutes a camel would charge out of the dark toward us, attached by a leash to a fleet-footed Bedouin, and someone would shout, “Camel!” so everyone had time to get out of the way. Abdul taught us some words in a strange language, but he did not know enough English to tell us what language it was. On the slopes, he left the path for the rocks alongside it so he could rush ahead of us and the pilgrim line, and after waiting on a rocky perch shouted, “Sinai!” This was our group name until we came to another group using it, and then we were Cleopatra.

At tea houses on the road we took short breaks and sipped the water we brought and counted shooting stars, then Abdul waved us onward. In the valleys below, a thousand flashlights marked a long trail back to the parking lot. Soon our camel trail joined the Stairs of Repentance, those 3,750 steps lain by a most penitent monk. We climbed the last 500 of these, in the midst of a huge section of Korean pilgrims.

The top of Sinai was a plateau. We found a seat, wedged into it, and shrouded ourselves in sleeping bags. God spoke law to Moses here. We enjoyed his other gifts. Our bottled whiskey, altitude and exhaustion made us drunker than we should have been, so we took a lot of pictures of ourselves and made a lot of noise. The stars had fled, and the eastern horizon was a line of red and gold. We watched it forever, and then someone cried, “There it is!” A pinprick of light appeared between two peaks. It grew into a disc, and emerged rapidly as a chariot into the open sky, as if from beneath the world.

The Walls of Rum

On November 1, 2009 from Jordan. 0 Comments

When he first started, the roar of the world he had left still rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings a little after the train has passed through. But when he had put the Mutteeanee Pass behind him that was all done, and Purun Baghat was alone with himself, walking, wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the ground, and his thoughts with the clouds.
—Rudyard Kipling

As I read it several times, and it formed the core of the site’s romance and my interest in it, and, on reaching it, the foundation of my awed perception, here follows for assigned reading T.E. Lawrence’s depiction of the Walls of Rumm, which turned that Arabian formation into a Western tourist destination.

“We were riding for Rumm, the northern water of the Beni Atiyeh: A place which stirred my thought, as even the unsentimental Howei-tat had told me it was lovely. The morrow would be new with our entry to it: but very early, while the stars were yet shining, I was roused by Aid, the humble Harithi Sherif accompanying us. He crept to me, and said in a chilled voice, ‘Lord, I am gone blind’. I made him lie down, and felt that he shivered as if cold; but all he could tell me was that in the night, waking up, there had been no sight, only pain in his eyes. The sun-blink had burned them out.

“Day was still young as we rode between two great pikes of sandstone to the foot of a long, soft slope poured down from the domed hills in front of us. It was tamarisk-covered: the beginning of the Valley of Rumm, they said. We looked up on the left to a long wall of rock, sheering in like a thousand-foot wave towards the middle of the valley; whose other arc, to the right, was an opposing line of steep, red broken hills. We rode up the slope, crashing our way through the brittle undergrowth.

“As we went, the brushwood grouped itself into thickets whose massed leaves took on a stronger tint of green the purer for their contrasted setting in plots of open sand of a cheerful delicate pink. The ascent became gentle, till the valley was a confined tilted plain. The hills on the right grew taller and sharper, a fair counterpart of the other side which straightened itself to one massive rampart of redness. They drew together until only two miles divided them: and then, towering gradually till their parallel parapets must have been a thousand feet above us, ran forward in an avenue for miles.

“They were not unbroken walls of rock, but were built sectionally, in crags like gigantic buildings, along the two sides of their street. Deep alleys, fifty feet across, divided the crags, whose plans were smoothed by the weather into huge apses and bays, and enriched with surface fretting and fracture, like design. Caverns high up on the precipice were round like windows: others near the foot gaped like doors. Dark stains ran down the shadowed front for hundreds of feet, like accidents of use. The cliffs were striated vertically, in their granular rock; whose main order stood on two hundred feet of broken stone deeper in colour and harder in texture. This plinth did not, like the sandstone, hang in folds like cloth; but chipped itself into loose courses of scree, horizontal as the footings of a wall.

“The crags were capped in nests of domes, less hotly red than the body of the hill; rather grey and shallow. They gave the finishing semblance of Byzantine architecture to this irresistible place: this processional way greater than imagination. The Arab armies would have been lost in the length and breadth of it, and within the walls a squadron of aeroplanes could have wheeled in formation. Our little caravan grew self-conscious, and fell dead quiet, afraid and ashamed to flaunt its smallness in the presence of the stupendous hills.

“Landscapes, in childhood’s dream, were so vast and silent. We looked backward through our memory for the prototype up which all men had walked between such walls toward such an open square as that in front where this road seemed to end. Later, when we were often riding inland, my mind used to turn me from the direct road, to clear my senses by a night in Rumm and by the ride down its dawn-lit valley towards the shining plains, or up its valley in the sunset towards that glowing square which my timid anticipation never let me reach. I would say, ‘Shall I ride on this time, beyond the Khazail, and know it all?’ But in truth I liked Rumm too much.”

With this in mind, Amelia and I got a ride in Skip’s hired car, an old pickup, along with some other Arab we picked up along the way. “So I’m paying fifty,” said Skip, “they’re paying five each, and he’s paying nothing—what’s the deal? Hey, you like English girls? Very pretty huh? Now he shuts up.”

The car dropped us off at the intersection of the Aqaba highway and the road to Rum, and from there we hitched into the Visitor’s Center with a Czech family. (For hitchhiking, no combination of personalities is better than the young, clean-looking couple.) The desert sun and the ramparts described by Lawrence loomed over us, we in an avenue of flattened sand amid a fleet of camels and off-road jeeps, and especially the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the seven-columned formation named for Lawrence’s book.

A jeep took us into Rum Village, a town of a few residences and shops, an old police station, and the Rest House, where tents were $4 a night. Amelia and I rented one of these, since Jean had packed his own bivouac, and found a map of the park. To the west, the kilometer high wall of Jebel Rum shaded the valley and ran north to south along its length. Jebel Um Ishrin, just as high, ran parallel to this one to form a great avenue.

We went to Lawrence’s spring, and I was like Schleimann going to the Hall of Odysseus—in a castle of memories, all of them imagined; like remembering a childhood event as a photograph. A promontory offered an excellent view. Behind us in the steep gorge, green with wild mint, schoolboys cheered and jeered as mates repelled down a high boulder, and below was the town and the avenue. I told the stories I could remember Lawrence telling better. A cistern collected the water that dripped out of the rocks, and we collected some of the mint that water fed.

Leaving the spring, we walked down the stairs into the village, all the way to its edge, and looked out at the open desert, fortresses of rock receding in the distance. The Bedouin asked us, “You want to ride a camel?” Children stared at us, curious or angry. A girl gave Amelia a plastic heart-shaped trinket, and then retreated to her sanctuary behind a car door, where her sister waited. “Same same but different,” the children say, and, “Cool with no school.”

A 4×4 stopped, and the young driver talked to us. He pointed out his cousin’s passing camel, a towering, magnificent beast worth $5000. He himself possessed twenty camels, each worth $1500, but he did not want to marry just yet. He added, slyly, “There are many girls out there. French girls and Polish girls and English girls, and American girls and Australian girls.” He drove us back to the camp in the waning light, and I climbed up the great rock that oversees the village. From a sort of promontory, I looked both ways up and down the valley, in the red light of sunset.

As an exercise I wrote my own description of Wadi Rumm, but it is not worthy of being expressed in the same venue as Lawrence’s opinion. We will leave it in the notebook and in my mind, where it belongs. The walls stagger my minds eye, like the blue bruise of a bright flash, and I won’t forget them.

Amelia and I were starving. Left to our own devices, the only things we had to eat that day, after a small breakfast in Wadi Musa, were a bag of cookies, some sunflower seeds, and presently a single expensive beer, which we shared on the long covered couch that wrapped around a concrete oven at one end of the Rest House. A crazy man in a stained robe stumbled through the camp, collecting things, and our empty stomachs absorbed the beer’s good qualities rapidly. Where was Jean? we wondered. Our French friend, who was to visit Petra in the morning, pick up food at noon, and drive it to Wadi Rum in the afternoon, was nowhere to be seen.

Jean did not arrive until after sunset and had bought no food. The deprivation of hunger muted our sense of betrayal, and while Jean set up his camp stove and brought out the bullion cubes and spices and tea herbs he had on him, Amelia and I went to one of the general stores, the Lawrence Market, and bought noodles and vegetables for soup, and eggs and cans of beans, and a jug of guava juice. We cooked it all, except the guava juice, ate it with a starved relish, and afterward made tea with some of Jean’s Bulgarian herbs and the fresh mint we had collected.

Other than our party, the Rest House was almost entirely occupied by French rock climbers, who dumped the ropes and harnesses and carabiners of their kit on the cement floor of the pavilion and shared stories over the fires of tiny stoves. Wadi Rum, they said, was one of the best places to climb in the world. You could not climb as high as in some places, but the routes up the jebels had a unique, winding quality to them. At the tops the mountains were fields of domes and mazes of paths known only to the Bedouin, who climbed them barefoot and sure as goats.

These Gallic mountaineers dreamed of someday visiting Yosemite, which they called, reverentially, “The Yoz. Climbers camp there for six months at a time, climbing every day. There is so much to see.” They named routes around Half-Dome, and dreamed up at the star-strewn sky. By then it was late, and we all turned in to sleep.

To-day we rode for hours while the perspectives grew greater and more magnificent in ordered design, till a gap in the cliff-face opened on our right to a new wonder.
—Lawrence of Arabia

Something strange leers and smiles, long face on a recurved neck. Eyes like a hermit’s shine with sagacious sobriety and abnegation. The back is fat and humped. Spindly legs support a fat gut and humped back, and twist unnaturally on three joints. The ankles bend softly to sooth the march of wide leathered feet that thud off the sand. Leathery cushions under the arms insulate the hairy stomach against the sun-baked heat of slate and sand. Among these creatures, the men moan and violently refuse to do the work that women silently endure.

We watched these things while we cooked our breakfast: scrambled eggs (“I’m so sick of hard-boiled,” said Amelia) and bread with cheese and za’atar. Za’atar is a Syrian blend made of oregano, thyme, marjorum, and sesame seeds in olive oil. That was Saturday and Halloween, though I did not know it, and our only day in Wadi Rumm. We planned to take a long walk and see what we could see without paying for a camel or jeep tour, or for the Bedouin Experience of camping in a desert tent with hordes of French tourists.

Before leaving, we stopped at Ali’s Place, a cafe down the village’s main avenue. Jean had heard of Ali from several French globe-trotters, who attested to his honesty and kindness. The Bedouin, his face young and kind, offered us tea and brought out piles of notebooks and portfolios full of maps and mountaineering routes, most of them in French. The climbers at the Rest House had recommended some places and spoke of a labyrinth called Zarnoug Al Dahbbeh that went through Jebel Um Ishrin, the rise east of the village. We looked for topographical maps to guide us through.

We three trekked south from the village out through a suburb of laughing children, into the sand—creased by passing jeeps, tiger-striped by the wind, patched with cloud shadows that shifted and flowed. The crazy man of Rum was rolling in the red dust, and he sat up and waved harshly and said something to us. We traced the tracks of birds and lizards and wondered at them. We followed the flat sand of a tire’s trail until the desert and its monuments swallowed us, in sun and wind and empty silence. The sand was wide, and distance blued the receding towers in all directions.

Across the wastes we came to two rocky bluffs called Debbat Algewafleh, under the stone fortress of Jebel Khazali. One of these had a sand dune leaned against it, and the other was bare and desiccated by the eternal wind. We climbed the escarpment beneath them and saw suddenly at the top a fleet of jeeps and a throng of French people anxious to climb the dune. From the top of the second hill we watched their struggle, and watched the clouds mingle, and looked to their shape for meaning.

The French demand for originality carries them to the far corners of the world. They are the ones for whom Lonely Planet says, “An out of the way but charming place, rarely frequented by globe-trotters,” and all places so distinguished are full of French people and Francophonic signage. The pathology of uniqueness mounted Jean on his Yamaha for the long trip to Aqaba, and in Aleppo, Skip marked it in his beloved Peugeots.

“Leave it to the French,” he said, “to do things the opposite of everyone else. All cars number their pistons from the back, one, two, three, four, but if you look in the Peugeot—that’s Pyu-joe in American, Jon—it numbers them four, three, two, one. They put the whole thing in backwards. On car doors, you push down the plug to lock the door and pull it up to unlock it. It’s just the way you do things. But in a French car, you pull the button up to lock it.

“Once I had a problem with the drive belt in one of my cars, and I took it in to get fixed. They called me and said, ‘Skip, we’ve tried tried everything. The engine should be fixed, but we can’t get it to cycle.’ I thought about it a moment and told them, ‘Well, it’s French, so put the belt on the opposite way of what you would normally do.’ They said, ‘Okay,’ and called back a few hours later and said, ‘Skip, I don’t know why it worked, but it worked.’”

Jean liked to think that his trip was original and did not like evidence to the contrary. “When you travel you do not like to run into your own fellow men,” he later said, “because when you travel you get the impression like you are unique. And when you see your fellow men—how do you say? fellow men?—and there are these crowds of French people in Petra and Wadi Rum, you feel like what you are doing is ordinary.”

This is the best way to understand the French.

Amelia’s rubber flip-flop broke on the way down our little hill—boldly, they were the only footwear she brought on the trip, though she had since purchased a spare, and they had lasted from Poland to Jordan. She hitched a ride back to the Rest House in exchange for writing her driver’s English text messages. Jean and I continued into the black, wet, narrow of the Siq of Jebel Khazali, which ended for us in a wall with a pool beneath it, though we watched a Bedouin climb this damp surface like a spider.

Wadi Al Khishkhasheh looked small but took fifteen minutes to cross, to Jebel Qaber Amra, and beneath it a rock with a rock bridge called Rakehbt Al Wadak that provided good photo opportunities and a satisfying place from which to urinate. North of that we entered a wadi between three mountains. A soft vroom-vroom came from over the hill, and a boy followed, pushing a wheelbarrow to a satellite phone lodged for good reception at the end of a pole planted in the sand.

Past that farmstead we and through a fence and a field full of camel dung, we came to a high red sand dune leaned drunkenly against one of the mountains. The climb exhausted us. We ran down the other side in a snaking trail, and stopped short at the top of an unexpected cliff. Below us, an amphitheater of stone tumbled down 500 meters into Wadi Um Ishrin and the road home. We swore as we stared at it, and then picked a path down as carefully as we could. The sun was setting, and the descent went steeply down the crumbling slate face.

The sun was setting when we reached the wadi, and it was too late to attempt the labyrinth. We instead followed the trains of jeeps that smoked across the sand, back around the south tip of Jebel Um Ishrin, called Traif Al Maragh. A lone Bedouin on a high and mighty camel passed us by. He whipped his camel with a rod until the beast stopped and leaned back its head, roaring at the vicious master, to his embarrassment before the watching foreigners, but a few heavy blows had it back in its paces.

“I kind of wish we could stay another day,” I said, marveling at rock and sand and sky, “but Amelia wants to get to Aqaba. Maybe she’s seen all this before in Australia.”

“She’s a beach girl,” said Jean.

“Well I’m a desert man,” I said. “A man of the wastes. A full moon rambler. Dune camper. Midnight gambler.”

“Wanker.”

“I like to pee off high places.”

The magnificent castles of cliffs stretched on into a suggestion. The sunset polished the clouds gold.

“You know,” said Jean, “I don’t really think I’m here. It’s so surreal.”

“Lawrence said it was like a memory of a childhood dream of desert. It’s how a desert is supposed to be.”

A line of camels passed with a jeep driving them. When the herd was sure to find home, the driver offered us a ride into town, and we jostled in the back across the waves of the sea of sand. In truth, I liked Rumm too much.