I know I want to sing
So I know I can.
—Kyp Malone

Why did I write two songs about Egypt? O Reader, I had plenty of time.

My Eid Goat

Christmas brings a great deal to television, in themes and movies and commercial bumpers. The Mohammedan festival of Id al-Adha is no different. The bumper, a 3D cartoon, begins with a nervous looking sheep. A butcher’s cleaver falls from off screen just next to the beast’s head, who then collapses on his side in an expanding pool of blood. This similarly themed song is set to the tune of that classic nursery school rhyme, My Highland Goat. The notes at the end of each line are for the kids singing along—it is, after all, a childrens’ song.

Oh my Eid goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
Was feeling fine (e-ine-e-ine-e-ine)
Until he saw (e-aw-e-aw-e-aw)
What’s on my mind (e-ind-e-ind-e-ind)

It’s time for Eid (e-eid-e-eid-e-eid)
The crowd grew nigh (e-eye-e-eye-e-eye)
Out in the street (e-eet-e-eet-e-eet)
That goat must die (e-eye-e-eye-e-eye)

They took my goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
And tied his feet (e-eet-e-eet-e-eet)
We were all ready (e-ady-e-ady-e-ady)
For some fresh meat (e-eat-e-eat-e-eat)

I took my knife (e-ife-e-ife-e-ife)
And slashed his throat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
The blood did spill (e-ill-e-ill-e-ill)
Out of my goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)

We cut him up (e-up-e-up-e-up)
With our chainsaw (e-aw-e-aw-e-aw)
And took the parts (e-arts-e-arts-e-arts)
And stacked them raw (e-aw-e-aw-e-aw)

We cooked him up (e-up-e-up-e-up)
On our hot grill (e-ill-e-ill-e-ill)
Now my poor goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
Just a smeared kill (e-ill-e-ill-e-ill)

Now I am full (e-ull-e-ull-e-ull)
But I do fear (e-ear-e-ear-e-ear)
I’ll need a goat (e-oat-e-oat-e-oat)
For Eid next year (e-ear-e-ear-e-ear)

The Bedbug Blues

Our beds for 18 days in Dahab were infested with bedbugs, those “small, elusive, and parasitic insects of the family Cimicidae” (Wikipedia) that rise hungrily as you fall to rest. We saw them scurrying on the walls and pillows and sheets around 2 a.m. Like roaches, the durable pests refused to be crushed or battered. Amelia had experience with the deadly snakes and spiders of Oz, and she decapitated the parasites with a small, sharp knife. Ah, dear Cimex lectularius, for all our lost sleep in those late hours of unexpected carnage, I wrote this song for thee on the train back from Aswan.

I’m trying to sleep,
They’re trying to eat.
I got some bedbugs
Between my sheets.

They come out at night,
I’m feeling them bite.
Leave a buffet line of welts
When I turn out the light.

I got the bedbug blues,
I got the bedbug blues,
Won’t sleep tonight,
I got the bedbug blues.

I feel little footsteps,
They creep down my spine.
I turn to my baby,
She’s out of her mind.

Hopping all over,
Tangled up in her hair.
Those nightly terrors,
Run back to their lair.

She’s got the bedbug blues,
She’s got the bedbug blues,
Won’t sleep tonight,
She’s got the bedbug blues.

I go to the manager,
We got an infestation.
He sends up the bellboy.
To fumigate our vacation.

Ten cans of Raid,
Well they aren’t enough.
They get us high,
But bedbugs are tough.

We got the bedbug blues,
We got the bedbug blues,
Won’t sleep tonight,
We got the bedbug blues.

I asked the Lord,
Have mercy, Lord please.
They’re drinking my blood,
Soon as sun’s down on me.

I’m trying to sleep,
They’re trying to eat.
We can’t get along,
I’m no piece of meat.

I got the bedbug blues,
I got the bedbug blues,
Won’t get no sleep tonight,
I got the bedbug blues.

So goodbye, so long, the road calls me dear,
And your tears cannot bind me anymore,
And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes—
Can I kiss you, and then I’ll be gone.
—Tom Waits, “Old Shoes”

I met Amelia at the House of Peace after returning from Hebron, and we caught a 6:30 bus to Haifa, a peninsular town on the coast north of Tel Aviv. While we waited at the train station for our CouchSurfing host, Amelia found a packet of Tim Tams, the Australian Oreo, two wafers around light cream and coated in chocolate. Once someone asked her what cuisine Australia produced, and the only things she could name were kangaroo steaks and Tim Tams. (Vegemite is a Kraft product that found a market in Oz when Americans turned it down.)

She reprimanded me for thinking to eat them with cold milk. The Australians follow the British in calling their cookies biscuits and in eating the treats with tea or coffee. Tim Tams go especially well with the latter: bite off a pair of opposite corners and you can suck coffee through the porous wafer, although this trick requires perfect timing, and anything less will melt the Tim Tam into a crumbling tragedy. Amelia was very excited about the cookies. She shared them with the security staff, the women at the convenience store, and with Shimry, our host, when he arrived.

Shimry apologized for the mess of his car, a beat up little Honda, but it had been so long since we drove in any private vehicle that neither of us cared. A tall Israeli with a shaved head, he did tech support in Tel Aviv, spent most of that time arguing on the Internet, studied physics and philosophy at Haifa University—“It doesn’t really attract the smartest students,” he told us—and enjoyed good beer, which is how I picked him out from the lists of CouchSurfing. He drove from the train station by the sea halfway up the hill that Haifa occupies to his apartment. His long-haired roommate, a big cat named Looloo, and two albino lab rats shared that dirty but spacious flat. He cleared some things away in the kitchen so he could make coffee and enjoy a Tim Tam in the proper way.

There was an American-style bar down by the city zoo that was a little pricier than the “sleazy” one we tried for initially, but Shimry assured us they had a huge menu of international beer. I sat there in indecision, staring at the dark Trappist brews from Belgium and the wheat beers from Germany and the British ales and remembering the names and tastes of the ones I’d tried in those lands where beer is an art. “Look at him,” said Amelia, “now he’s never going to leave this place.” Eventually I settled on a Taybeh dark, from Arabia’s only microbrewery, outside Ramallah, and fell into a conversation about beer and Oregon.

The next day we had our minds set on a picnic. We bought cheese, salami, a baguette, and a cheap Israeli red wine at a supermarket and walked with it under our arms straight up the hill, past the point where “it can’t be much further,” and the point where “we must have passed it by now,” and made it to “why didn’t we take the bus?” when we finally saw, at the peak of the hill, a building so strange it could only belong to a university campus. The meadows of Carmel Park ran along the curve of a ridge and looked down on a forested valley that ran all the way to the villas on the sea. There were a few cars parked there and two locals rode through on ATVs, but otherwise we were alone with a pair of grazing cows, which looked on Amelia’s affection for pulling bovine ears with a violent disdain.

We made sandwiches with the treasures we had bought, so different from everything we’d eaten in the past three months, and finished off the wine, and talked until the sun started to set. I made unsentimental Amelia wait to watch the disc’s final plummet—it would be the last Mediterranean sunset either of us would see for a long time. “It’s just another sea,” said Amelia, “you’ll see better ones in Asia.” “But this is a sea with so much history,” I argued, “and Odysseus was lost in it, and the Romans called it Our Sea,” and she laughed at my insanity. We went to a cafe for coffee and a hollow doughy roll that Amelia remembered having in Czech Republic on our way back to Shimry’s apartment, then bought beer and some things to make vegetable soup and had a good dinner.

There were a few other places to see in Israel—the baptism mecca of Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee; the last Crusader fortress at Acre; our friends’ kibbutz near the fence of Gaza; the Palestinian village of Bil’in, where the Wall separates the town from its olive groves, and the protesting inhabitants are teargassed every week on Friday—but O Jerusalem! we were tired of religion and suffering and Israel, and wanted to get out and move on to some new road. This of course took us back across the King Hussein Bridge, where we paid $40 for the right to leave the country, to Amman. It was the fourth time I’d come to that city, and Amelia’s fifth.

I had to get an Indian visa in the Jordanian capital, since in Israel the embassy outsourced the work to travel agencies that took two weeks to do it; and Amelia was plotting her trip north to Kurdistan, the northern region of Iraq where people are safe, the economy is stable, and George W. Bush is a messiah. Flights there from Amman cost nearly $1000, so she settled on meeting Jean in Damascus, who also wanted to go, and taking the trying overland route. Eventually, Jean would persuade her to visit Iran instead, and they would fly into Tehran and receive 15-day visas in the airport, where Americans must pay $100 a day and be on a guided tour; but these plans had yet to come to fruition, and we had four days in Amman.

We checked into Cliff Hotel and found ourselves in the same Room Number 2 where we stayed last time, which still smelled of felafel from Hashem’s. Neither of us could take that stuff, so we went to get schwarma and tea and shisha (or teasha) down the street, falling quickly into old habits. We watched TV in the hotel common room, around the oil-burning furnace.

The next day, a Thursday, I went early to the Indian Embassy by the First Circle on Jebel Amman to request my visa. I had to run around making photo copies and printing tickets and getting money, but eventually I received the promise of a three-month visa in a week’s time. I would fly to Mumbai on the 17th, in ten days. I brought breakfast back with me, banana muffins, and we took a cab out past the lists of Western restaurants, bearing such shockingly out of place names as Applebees, Fuddruckers, Popeye’s, Burger King, and TGIF, and emerged in the wide parking fields of two great shopping centers, the Mecca Mall and City Mall. When I had seen that horror New Moon in Cairo, Amelia promised she would see Avatar with me and was true to her word.

We bought pizzas and milk cartons at the City Mall’s Carrefour, and picked out a bag of sweets for the show; when we received our box-framed 3D glasses, it seemed in most respects like some primary school date. We took our seats in the fourth row center of the sold-out theater and played with our glasses.

The Arab audience talked quietly through the first part of the movie, but at the flying scene, where the protagonists made a spectacular dive on their pterodactyls, they started whistling and cheering. The floodgates loose, this exuberance continued during the PG sex scene. During Jake’s big speech against the foreign occupation and its imperialistic greed for resources, the fervor exploded. The audience found it impossible to turn quiet, and a few scattered members kept whistling while the rest shushed them noisily, and a ten-year-old boy in the front screamed, “Shut the fuck up!” All through the last battle they cheered every explosion, every kill, every climax of the rendered action.

An effete, erudite (I tend to confuse the two) critic might call Avatar a cliched, uninspired film. The obvious political overtones, referring to “shock and awe” and “preemptive strikes,” were not lost on the Jordanian audience. The characters and plot devices are drawn from stock archetypes, and it is, at its heart, another sci-fi flick about scientists on an alien world—but it has a steady beating heart, a tender love to the bulk of its expensive creation, that involves the audience easily and inextricably in its predictable arcs. Like most of James Cameron’s movies, Avatar excels in the art of its storytelling, the creative depth of the world, and the leaps and bounds of its technology. Amelia and I left smiling, and we stopped in a store on the way out so she could buy a pea coat to keep warm in the mountains.

The bakery across the alley from the Cliff Hotel had cinnamon rolls the next day. Discs of flatbread fired noisily down the metal chute from the ceiling into a bin in the corner as I bought some pastries for breakfast.

Amelia and I went to the Wild Cafe up on the hill to use the Internet, and we reminisced on things. At night, we drank the arak I gave her for Christmas, then went out for beers with some Belgians and a Brazilian. The next day, a Saturday, was her last day in Amman. I went with her to the pharmacy for more eye gel and to the bank to change shekels. We got coffee and reminisced some more, both full of gratitude for good company on the unsteady road, for the inside jokes, for the easy-going, for the trust and the kindness, and for being more than a stranger to at least one friend.

That night could have been any other night, as we had a big chicken dinner. I bought beers at the liquor store where we’d once yelled to our taxi driver, “Stop!” on Kate’s birthday, the night we started our company ten weeks before, but the world keeps turning. We talked sparsely, feeling the imminence of separation. “It’s a sad day when you have to set your alarm,” she said. The world keeps turning. In the morning I walked with her out to the corner to hail a cab that would take her north to the bus station for a shared taxi to the Syrian border. We shared an embrace and a sad goodbye, and then our partnership ended.

It was the first time I’d been alone since descending through the Cilician Gates into Syria, and I missed my constant companions sorely, especially Amelia. In the week that followed, I kept busy uploading a backlog of photos and writing, and I would hang out with Australian soldiers, a Norwegian named Erasmus, a girl from Utah named Hannah who knew Santiago and had met Jean on his trip back to Syria, and a Nipponjin named Takato on his way to Yemen—“But Al-Qaeda is there, and they closed all the embassies. Isn’t it dangerous?” Amelia had asked him when we first met in the Peace House. “No,” said Takato, “don’t worry, they released him last week.” “What?” “The Japanese man they kidnapped. They released him. He was only in jail for a month.” But I still felt isolated, very far from home, and very glad and grateful to have the memories of the last three months.

Amelia, I thank you. India is next.

They fill the children full of hate
To fight an old man’s war
And die upon the road to peace.
—Tom Waits

Our bus returned Amelia and I from Bethlehem to the Damascus Gate, and under the setting sun we walked back up the Mount of Olives, through the crowded rows of the Jewish cemeteries. The Mount is prime real estate for the dead—the buried there end at the front of the line when the Last Judgment comes around.

Tuesday we tried to enter the Temple Mount, that holiest site of Abraham’s test and Mohammed’s ascension where one prayer is worth ten thousand, but the guards shut the gate in our faces. Only a certain number of non-Muslims could enter during the two daily windows the Mount opens to tourists, and we were two too many. Dismayed, we went up through the Old City, the streets full of Nigerian pilgrims, Zionist American tour groups with their hired riflemen, girls with unloaded guns slung over their backs huddled around some map as part of their army training. All Israel’s women serve two years in the army, and men have three, except the Orthodox Jews paid by the government to study the Torah.

After locating with some difficulty the rock-covered grave of Oskar Schindler, we walked northwest of the Old City to visit the Jewish Orthodox neighborhood there, Mea Shaarim. The inhabitants live and dress as their forebears did in nineteenth century Europe, locked in a simpler era by that peculiar regressive fancy that strikes every human faith in some way.

They wear the black clothes that the medieval Church demanded they wear, with tzitzi tassels hanging out the men’s jackets. Some wear the teffilin, a black box strapped to their forehead and black straps on their wrists. Most men have a hat: at least a kippa or fedora, and often the cylindrical Slavic fur hats, the shtreimel, spodik, and kolpik, of the Hasidic Jews. Beards and sideburns and sidelocks were common. The streets were bare of life and decoration as a ghetto. Stores sold simple, often handcrafted things, used books, and antique furniture, and, I noticed, the mattress stores carry no size larger than a twin.

The “residents faithful to the tradition of divine command” had posted the following sign: “To women and girls who pass through our neighborhood, we beg you with all our hearts, please do not pass through our neighborhood inimmodest clothing. (Modest clothes include: closed blouse with long sleeves, long skirt, no trousers, no tight-fitting clothes.) Please do not disturb the sanctity of our neighborhood and our way of life as Jews committed to G-d and his Torah.” Another stated: “Groups passing through severely offends the residents. Please, stop this.”

Ibrahim served a big dinner that night and gave us a talk about paying the bills, so we were sure to donate before we left the next morning. It was a crazed place, Jerusalem, and we were tired of the politics of faith, and ready to go somewhere secular and get a drink.

Tel Aviv called to us as the place to welcome the New Year. If Jerusalem was the locus of Israel’s religion, then Tel Aviv was the bastion of her Western liberalism. The glass coffins of offices and apartments lined the sunny beach like diamonds, and you could find people swimming in the sea and drinking at bars and washing clothes at the laundromat at all hours of the day. It seemed in its modernity infinitely far from the squalor and politics of Cairo and Hebron and Beirut and all the rest of the region. Though young, educated activists take to the streets in protest against their government’s treatment of the Palestinian problem, the Telavivans never leave their vibrant city to show support where it really matters.

Amelia and I were CouchSurfing for the first time in Tel Aviv. By that wonderful Web site, travelers meet locals who offer the hospitality of extra beds or vacant couches, and of a local perspective, a free guide. In some places, like South America and most of the Middle East, CouchSurfing can be difficult as the young people to whom it appeals live with their parents, but in Israel hosts were common (and I hear that Indians will invite their guests to stay for a week or two).

We took a bus up to the University and asked directions to find Ehud’s apartment building, and our host welcomed us inside. Ehud, a physics student, lived in a clean, well-decorated flat with leather couches and modern art in what used to be the wealthiest area of Tel Aviv, but took credit for none of the room’s taste. “It’s all my roommate,” he said. “I let her do everything. I’m useless at it.” He was in the middle of cooking an onion soup for her and had only a little time with us before he had to go to work, but that was enough to display his generous hospitality.

Ehud served us leftovers and then started mixing drinks, White Russians—“I used to be a bartender”—and some fruity liqueur as soon as a glass was empty. I asked about Israeli beer, and he brought out a Goldstar dark lager without a thought. His apartment stocked more booze than food. A week before, he and his roommate, Alinna, drove up to a small Orthodox town to buy food. Because every family there has at least eight kids (if you have eight children in Israel it nets extra benefits from the government), grocery prices are much lower. They came back with a trunk full of Goldstar and Absolut. Both Ehud and Alinna had that Russian biology common in Israel, where one in five speak the language.

“Jon,” said Ehud, “you studied history and seem like a philosophical kind of guy, so I have a philosophical question for you. What are you drinking?” He stirred another White Russian, then continued: “So, I don’t know if you’re religious, but religions say that God has a plan for everyone, that everyone has a fate. Everything you do is planned. It’s all destiny. You can’t escape it. There’s no, how do you say—yes, right, there’s no free will.

“In quantum mechanics, though,” and he waved at the big red physics book on its leather chair, “you see that at the most basic level, within particles, you can tell where an electron is, or you can tell how fast it’s going, but not both. Even with the most advanced computer in the world, even with a computer that nobody can make yet, you couldn’t tell. It’s random. There are tiny variations that nobody can predict. So I’m reading about this, and it just makes me question everything.”

We kept talking, applying Chaos Theory and the lawlessness of history to the mundane existence of a human, and listening to Balkan Beatbox, until Ehud’s friend Cho-Cho arrived, fresh returned from a tour of duty. Curious, we asked them about military service in Israel, where at 18-years-old all men serve three years and women two. Israel had consigned Ehud to an armored division where, after his eight months of busy training, his keen intellect languished with nothing to do. For every young Israeli conscripted to a job examining satellite photos of Gaza or working in a hospital or learning a martial trade, there are ten who sit idly at a dead border or deal with Palestinians going in and out of the Wall. No wonder so many Israelis travel for months after their release from such a purgatory of duty!

“It’s not dangerous,” said Ehud, “and it’s not useful. It’s just like any other thing. If you study hard in university, you have the same amount of discipline that you would if you took apart and scrubbed your rifle every day and marched around.”

Ehud finally escaped his mandatory service ahead of schedule via the neat trick of a mental breakdown. When Alinna came home from work, she told us that her two years were wasted time, that she started college two years later than she would have in any other country. We talked until Ehud had to go to work. Then we sat there watching TV with Cho-Cho and Alinna and eventually went to bed on the mattress they’d laid out behind the couch. In the morning when we were up, Ehud made omelets in his underwear, blaring Tchaikovsky’s 1812.

Ehud worked at a hotel down by the beach, a sleazy by-the-hour place where he could study physics behind the reception desk. His most common clients were East European prostitutes and Hasidic Jews—“Because they’re not getting anything good at home,” said Ehud. The prostitutes left him a small tip each time they came through, and the Hasidic Jews avoided his eyes.

We met him there in the early evening after exploring downtown Tel Aviv and having a beer at the mahogany and gold Brewhouse on Rothschild. Our CouchSurfing host poured us coffee from a thermos and then went to deal with something while we sat in the lounge next to an old woman from Ontario named Karen. Tel Aviv is nice, Amelia said, “but expensive. “Yes it’s expensive,” said Karen. “Don’t think we’re licking honey in Canada. I don’t want to tell you what we’re licking.”

There was a Californian named Mark working there as a handyman, who had first come to Israel as a professional soldier. He was heavyset and had a shaved head and an East Coast accent. Once he and his friends had packed up all their gear and ATVs in the trailer when a call came to each in turn: “Be on base in six hours.” They returned from Gaza City a week later to find everything gone.

“Where was your wife?” asked Karen.

“Come on,” said Mark. “I told you a dozen times. We’re not married.”—“What do you mean you’re not married? She bore two of your children.”—“Well we’re not married.”—“You should marry the girl. Isn’t she good enough?”—“She says I don’t make enough money. I make 200,000 shekels a year and she says it’s not enough. I give her a house, a car, groceries. She doesn’t have to work. Isn’t that enough?”—“Do you understand this?” asked Karen of Amelia and I. We shrugged.

Mark said, “You want to see pictures of my gun?” and I said, “Yes, definitely.” He showed us a photo of his M4 on his cell phone and told us about the armor piercing bullets and all that, then showed us a video of his Gaza team. “That guy’s always sleeping,” he said. “We stop for five minutes and he falls asleep. See, he’s sleeping here. We call that guy the Student, since he’s always studying. That guy has to wear a map on his back when we walk around. It really sucks. Oh, check this out.” He had a video taken by an undercover friend of his, of a Gazan lying on a stairway in the dusty street. Miliants would run up to the him and spray bullets from their Kalishnakovs, so the body jerked around and splattered. “He sold secrets to the Israelis,” said Mark, matter-of-factly.

We excused ourselves, said goodbye to Ehud, who was working all night, and went down the street to Momo’s Hostel. Our friend Rob of Perth, who we met at Ismaelia House in Cairo, was staying there, and we arranged to meet him later in Florentin before going to Mike’s Place for nachos and a pitcher of beer. Mike’s was an American bar right next to the Embassy, famous for being bombed in 2003, that served American fare with the atmosphere of a place just off the Interstate. The only Israelis who went there were after foreign girls.

Mollified, we retrieved Rob from his hostel and took a bus down to Florentin, picking up a few bottles of beer on the way. Denniz’s friend Rachel lived in the neighborhood and had told us that on New Years Eve the main street became a party, blockaded to traffic and filled with young revelers. The three of us pushed through them until we came to a corner under a streetlamp and met two Texans that Rob knew. I never got their names, but one was a large blonde girl with a tremendous affection for Black culture and the other looked like a Giovanni Ribisi action figure.

Florentin had no official countdown, so when Amelia’s watch said the time was right and the decade was about to change, we started shouting seconds alone. Our enthusiasm dissipated when nobody joined us. A dozen groups spontaneously did the same over the next few minutes. Eventually we decided it must be New Years and we could celebrate. We stayed a while longer until the lack of music got to us, and then we got on a bus back up the strip. The Texans started singing old 2Pac and Biggie songs, and they fell in love with Rob when they learned that the Australian knew all the verses.

We went back to Mike’s Place for beers. The band had stopped playing and their equipment littered the stage, and we sat on benches around a wood table and watched people. The Texans were confused about why Amelia and I were in Israel and why we had been traveling for so long. “So,” they said, “you just go to a place and look around for a few days, and then go somewhere else?” Yes, we said, enjoying their incredulity.

A drunk Hindu businessman from Bangalore named Gururaj started talking to us, and he invited me to call him when I come to that part of the world. His more sober friend was ready to leave and tugged Gururaj away. “Don’t let him do that!” cried the Texan girl. “If you don’t wanna leave, you stay. Just say this to him: ‘I will cut you,’”—she emphasized that cut with an extending drawl,—“Come on! ‘I will cut you!’ That’s what we say in Texas when we mean business.”

Our bill when we asked for it included a lot of extra charges labeled “Quality Discount,” and even inebriated we could tell they weren’t discounts at all. “What are these?” I asked the waitress. She went and got the manager, an porky American, who with an aggravated, overbearing friendliness asked us, “Hey, is there anything I can do to help you?”

“What’s this Quality Discount?” I wondered. “Well,” said the man, “here at Mike’s Place, we have a policy of not charging anyone cover, so y’all got in here free tunight. The quality charge is something we charge after ten, since there’s no cover. There are signs up everywhere.” “We didn’t know that. We didn’t see any signs.” The manager got very defensive, and I issued some platitudes about how much we respected his institution and its policies while assuring him that we wouldn’t pay the charge. “Oh, you’re not paying. You’re one of those guys,” said the man. “Well okay, fine buddy, great way to start out the new year. Well let me tell you something, karma always comes around. Enjoy your fourteen shekels. And don’t come back.”

We walked the few blocks back to Momo’s Hostel, complaining all the way, though I felt eerily heroic. Rob and the Texans went to bed, and Amelia and I started hailing cabs. It was so late that all the cabbies tried to charge us an exorbitant fee, until Amelia declared, “Let’s just walk back. I walk back home all the time in Melbourne. Sometimes for miles.” Instead of doing that, we got on a microbus headed most of the way to the University. Amelia said as we sat there, “Doesn’t it seem like there’s something off about this city? I don’t know what it is. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like a Western city, but something’s off.”

We tried to figure out what it was the next day. Tel Aviv is surely a bubble, a fresh, sterile, secular Western metropolis in the middle of an ancient, noisy, faithful East, and it seems unaware of its isolation—not arrogant, just blind. More than that, the population of Tel Aviv, compared to the other cities of the Levant, with their Arabs and Coptics and Nubians and Druze, and compared to the cities back home, was homogenous. Nearly everyone was Jewish and speaks Hebrew and English or Hebrew and Russian. They came with few exceptions from Russia and America and pockets of Europe.

(The most fascinating exception is the community found in Ethiopia, practicing a fundamental form of Judaism. Nobody knew where they came from, but the Israelis pulled them into airplanes, shipped them into Israel, and started teaching them Hebrew. ”I didn’t know what was going on,” anyone will tell you. “All of a sudden, there were black people.”)

New Years Day we took a break and went to a theater in the mall to see Where the Wild Things Are, and I gorged myself at the pre-Shabbat cafeteria on the thick, rich Slavic food you can find in Israel. The day after we picked out more of Israel’s strange traits, as I walked down the beach to Jaffa and Amelia tried to shop on the Shabbat. Along the grass promenade that ran along the sand were picnickers and cyclists and women in skirts and groomed dogs on leashes, and I was not being oggled as a remarkable aberration, a stranger in a strange land, an Other. “He was one of us,” as Conrad says, and no one treated me any different.

Old Jaffa, the Port of Jerusalem, where Jonah boarded a ship to Tarshish and where Christian pilgrims disembarked on their way to sites of pilgrimage, is a museum piece. I wandered through the quiet old town and had a grilled cheese sandwich at Said Abuelafia & Sons, since 1879. You can find many distinct foods in Israel, such as schnitzel sandwiches and salami and the largest concentration of sushi restaurants outside Japan.

That night we took a bus back to Jerusalem, though we had to wait until the Shabbat ended at six. We returned to the Peace House and got beds in the back room, and the next day the Temple Mount turned us away again. We went to the Israel Museum, to see the vast model of King Herod’s Jerusalem, the Second Temple prominent, and the Shrine of the Book where the Dead Sea Scrolls are maintained in worshipful solemnity.

As our contribution to Ibrahim’s Peace House, we made a soup with what we could find and what we were hungering for: Spinach, cauliflower, onions, and a lot of garlic, with potatoes and yams mashed into a paste to give more body to the tomato sauce broth. Ibrahim asks for donations to keep the place running, and those who can’t afford it help in other ways, by doing laundry or cooking for people. A group of German backpackers had shown up, asked Ibrahim to pay for their cab fee, and then stayed for a few days, eating their fill at dinner. “We’re pretty good at telling who will and who won’t donate,” said Irene. “They won’t.”

A good Muslim, Ibrahim never kicks anyone out from his house, although in their self-righteous bickering his lodgers often ask him to. Only once has he broken the Mohammedan principle of hospitality. An American man and wife had come to Jerusalem with their dog from some devout recess of the country, where a preacher told them, “God has spoken, and He wants you to stay at Ibrahim’s house.” The wife was pregnant, and Ibrahim gave them his own room and bed and took the woman to the hospital when the time came. On the roof at the same time, their dog gave birth to nine puppies, which ran around the Peace House making a mess of things.

A month passed and Ibrahim’s birthday came. He was holding a big party, and he asked the pilgrims, “Would you be able to move out of my room before then?” “No!” said the pilgrims, “God told us to come here, and we won’t leave until He says. If you want a place to stay, go to a hotel. Our Lord will get you a room.” Well, Ibrahim asked them to leave again and again, and finally a squad of Israeli police showed up.

“Ibrahim,” said the officer, “do you have Americans in there? They called and said you were trying to kick them out.” Ibrahim told the police what had happened, that it was his own bed he wanted the Americans to leave. The officer went to the pilgrims and said, “You have to leave.” “You’ll be punished,” said the pilgrims, “if you do this. God told us to come here, and we won’t leave until He says.” The officer replied, humorlessly, “Well then you call your God and tell Him to send down a fax in the next five minutes.”

While this was happening, the police found that the Americans had overstayed their three week visa by three months, and so God never had to fax the Israeli police.

I spent the next day apart from Amelia in Hebron. I had heard horrible stories of the city, one of the flashpoints for hostility between Israel and occupied Palestine, with one of the region’s saddest stories. In 1929 there was a massacre. Palestinian riots carried off nearly 50 of the Jews who still lived in that sacred city, the Canaanite city where Abraham was buried, though good Palestinian neighbors sheltered and saved the lives of hundreds more. The Jews left Hebron, and it became Egyptian and then Jordanian, until the Six-Day War. Victorious Israel sent 500 settlers to the West Bank of the Jordan to live in the ancient city, in the middle of 160,000 Palestinians, who call the place Khalil.

I arrived outside the souq with Catherine and Katerina, from Germany and Austria, who I met on the bus. They were volunteering at the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem and told me some things about the city.

The streets were full of Israeli soldiers and melancholic Arabs. Nets covered the souq like an aviary, to catch the trash thrown from the rooftops of the adjacent Settlement, a neighborhood on a hill closed off by a wall of sealed buildings and barbed wire and gated roadblocks, and there were watchtowers and sniper nests and spotters on all the rooftops. Israeli boys come out under military escort to slap Arabs and insult them. The Settler families are notorious in their zealotry and seem intent on removing the Palestinians from their Promised Land through antagonism and cruelty—turn them into refugees; let Jordan and Lebanon deal with their camps.

The Teutons and I left the souq for a great plaza surrounding the two shrines built over the Ma’arat HaMachpela—the Cave of the Patriarchs. The Ibrahimi Mosque and the Sanctuary of Abraham synagogue were once connected by the octagonal chamber around Abraham’s tomb, but now the heavy doors and walls and the bulletproof glass installed in the space between the two temples prevent any contact. The place is segregated by religion—no Jews in the mosques, no Muslims in the synagogue—for the safety of both. Fifteen years ago, a Jewish settler entered the mosque and killed 29 Palestinians at prayer.

When the Teutons left, I stayed to talk to people—to the Observers who watched the courtyards with cameras and notepads, who have been dispatched there by the six neutral countries participating since the massacre; to a man whose shop was closed and sealed since it was on a street adjacent to the Settlement, who is now unemployed. I asked, “When will the Israelis leave?” “Never,” he said. The Observers are in Hebron until they do. “The Israelis are supposed to leave?” “Yes,” said one, “it is in the Hebron Agreement that Israel will turn over control of the city to Palestine.” “Have they?” “No.”

I wandered the town alone, bought lunch at a kebab place and a kefiyeh in the souq, and set off for the return journey. On the bus back to Jerusalem, I sat next to an unknown girl, as terrifying a prospect in the Islamic World as it would be to an adolescent boy back home. The gentleman fears to look at, much less brush against or talk with those sensibly scarved Muslim maidens, flipping delicately through pocket-sized Qur’ans.

The bus re-entered Israel through the fortress gates of the Wall in Bethlehem, its sheer ten meters covered in as much political graffiti as the Wall of Berlin. There, next to a huge tower, I saw the sign that Denniz had painted there and shown us in a photograph: red letters on a white rectangle, a quotation by Kurt Tucholsky that also hangs in the entrance of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem: “A country is not just what it does, it is also what it tolerates.”

Jerusalem was a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohammedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present. Its people, with rare exceptions, were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through.
—Lawrence of Arabia

On Christmas Eve, as our taxi drove to the bridge across the River Jordan, we passed a convoy of fifty pick-ups, vans, ambulances, and tractor trailer trucks. They bore the flags of Palestine and Turkey, were filled with waving men and desperate supplies, and honked in return to welcoming Jordanians. The murals called them a “Lifeline to Gaza.”

The obese Palestinian man sitting next to us in the taxi said they were sent by George Galloway, an Englishman. They would drive to that Red Sea corner where Jordan, Israel, and Egypt meet at Aqaba, Elat, and Taba, and then cross Sinai to the Gaza Strip, and cross the sealed border at midnight on New Years. Several thousand volunteers planned to walk across the same border at the same time, bearing school supplies. They would celebrate with milkshakes instead of booze.

It was a complicated situation! The Gazans had nothing but what Israel would allow them, and that little was not enough. Egypt had buried an iron curtain along their border to stop the tunnel diggers. Humanitarians were putting themselves at the prows of boats, Titanic lovers in supply ships, and steering their craft at the blockaded shore. The zealots of Israel that had marched through the territory waited for trials that might never come.

What can I say, about this or any other facet of the Road to Peace, but what people tell me? The man seated next to us had gone to Jordan to visit his mother, who could never visit Palestine. He hoped he would be allowed back into his own country. We had our own hopes: Our visit to Syria, and the accompanying stamp in our passport, made us immediately suspect in the overtaxed eyes of Israel’s border guards.

Now, due to political happenstance and war, a Syrian stamp raises red flags at the Israeli border, but won’t exclude you from that country, so long as you say the right thing. You’re just there as a tourist, and have no intention of visiting the West Bank. Say the wrong thing—like the man who, when asked about his visit to Iran, said, “It’s a nice place, you should go there”—and the stone-faced Semitic Cerberus will slam a big black mark in your passport that bans you from the Nation of Israel for ten years.

Of the countries that do not recognize Israel’s rite to exist, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Libya take the added measure of refusing entrance to any traveler with an Israeli stamp in their passport, or with an Egyptian exit stamp from the Israeli border. Israel will stamp a piece of paper if you ask, although they’ll ask you why and accept only a very good answer; but those hostile nations of the Axis of Evil look for gaps in your passport dates, where you may have slipped unstamped into the territory of the Jew, and they look for the detritus of the sticker that the Israelis put on your passport at the border.

Only at the King Hussein Bridge can a traveler escape this black mark. There, the Jordanians and Israelis stamp a piece of paper, and it looks, to any intervening eye, as if you had been in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan that entire time. First, though, you have to wait in line for a long time, and then you have to ask them, “Can you stamp a piece of paper?” and endure their shouted questions, “Why? Why? Why?”

They berated the couple ahead of us for asking and sent off a bearded Palestinian man to wait for special attention. I asked him how he was when filling out some form. “I’m fine,” said the man. “Nothing more than normal. I was watching you, though. You should be careful about what you say. And that kefiyeh you are wearing is the Palestinian colors. You should take that off.”

I did what he said, then and in the interview I had with a young Israeli woman. I told her I was going to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, to see touristy things and party, and that I had no interest in West Bank. “I’ve seen Syria and Jordan and Egypt,” I said, “so I’m not really interested.” “Can you even get in the West Bank?” asked Amelia in her independent interview. She said she wanted to go shopping in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the Israeli lit up and wrote down the names of choice shopping malls.

By the time we got out of there, it was five in the afternoon and dark, and although we hoped to get to Bethlehem, we had nowhere to stay, only the tenuous offers to assist of some CouchSurfers already hosting full groups of pilgrims. We sat on a bench considering this, and an old man in a red checkered kefiyeh approached us. “Hi, where you go?” “The bus station,” I replied tersely, tired, and wary of trouble after pledging to avoid the Palestinian West Bank where Bethlehem lay.

He was also on the bus to Jerusalem, that short man with a sparse beard and a weak chin, approaching sixty but still animated by work and family and an inexplicable energy. He said his grandfather lived to be 140 with 75 grandchildren, and he showed us an interview in the 1959 National Geographic to prove it. “Everyone says, I don’t believe it,” said the man. In his half-senile, digressive way, he told us stories of talking with Prime Ministers and dignitaries and cult leaders, most recently with the same George Galloway who had organized the Lifeline to Gaza convoy, and he had visited Portland and Melbourne. He did not even have a passport, just a sort of international card. “I am not a citizen of any nation,” Ibrahim proudly declared.

I first mistook Ibrahim Ahmad Abu El-Hawa for the Wandering Jew, but he was a Bedouin Arab, though his family originated from the Turkish Black Sea. The international advocate of peace in the Holy Land invited us home to stay with him, and we said, Of course. We got out of the bus at the Herod Gate of Jerusalem and got into his son’s taxi, that took us up around the walled city to the Mount of Olives where he lived, just uphill from the Garden of Gethsemane and down the street from where Jesus ascended, in a big five story fortress he designed himself. Ibrahim had four sons and four daughters and 28 grandchildren—“Wait, one was born before I left. Twenty nine!”

Two of these families and 23 of these grandchildren lived in the house with him. We sat in the family room with Ibrahim and his wife, who he called his honey, and his wife’s deaf-mute sister, who howled intermittently, and the young children piled through to see their laughing grandfather. One girl started crying, and she clung to the old man’s presence like a shy kitten as he showed us through the rooms of his house, surprised at the new kitchen, and onto the balcony that looked out over the Bethany Gate in the Wall that wound across the hills about Jerusalem. The City of Peace is not on the flat arid plain where it commonly appears in Hollywood, but clasped within a circle of steep and verdant hills.

“My cousins live there,” said Ibrahim, pointing across the Wall. “There is Palestine, here is Israel, and there is Jerusalem. Three states, all right here. And everyone who lives here,”—he waved at his fortress and his neighborhood,—“is Muslim. No Jews live here. None at all. And everyone there,”—he pointed toward the other side of the Wall,—“is Muslim, too, but that is Palestine, and they cannot come here.”

Ibrahim dismissed the iniquity with a joke and a wave and led us downstairs to a deep open court between his house and the rock of the hill. His grandchildren rushed about, excited by the observance of strangers, and one of his daughters rushed inside to get a headscarf. We talked to a few people, at chicken and salad and bread and Coke, and then Ibrahim and his son Mohammed drove us off to the Peace House.

“There is room for twenty people,” said the old man. “I do not even know who is staying there. I don’t know how I know them! I will have to ask, How do I know you?”

In the crowded kitchen of the three-story house, he posed that question to a group of Ecuadorians visiting from a kibbutz near Gaza, where they plucked defected Hamas rockets out of the sown fields, and to a few other lodgers who had found the place by accident or recommendation. He sat us down around the table and a Maori woman named Irene served us all rice with vegetables and corn beef, and a chocolate cake for Ibrahim’s 68th birthday.

One Californian woman on one of many visits. Mohammed had seen her in the airport looking lost. “I was supposed to pick someone up,” he said, “but his plane was cancel,” and he told her about his father’s open house and offered to take her there. “I don’t trust you,” said the woman, “but I trust God. Lead on!” Her trust was not misplaced, as it turned out. She was there with the Israeli husband, a hairy bucktoothed fellow, whom she had met in that same house and their newborn daughter. It was a very strange company, and a very strange Christmas Eve.

In Bethlehem, 15,000 pilgrims crowded about Manger Square and lined up to enter the Basilica of the Nativity through the low Door of Humility, and within that chapel a Franciscan midnight mass broadcast itself all across the world.

On Christmas morning, Amelia said, “Presents?” We had each received money from family and notes from friends, but real presents are different. I gave Amelia the book and bottle of arak I’d bought her, having gifted her the wool socks a few days preemptively. She had told me that the present she bought me was weighing down her bag—“Doesn’t it look bigger?”—but that it was something I would surely use while traveling, and so I was surprised when she put a slim leather wallet in my hand, to replace the duct taped Oyster card wallet I’d been carrying since I first stepped into the London Underground eleven months before.

We left the Peace House that morning with two other lodgers, both about my age—Josh, an Iranian Jew and Los Angelene come to the Holy Land to learn the craft of wine-making from its Israeli vintners who have in recent years outgrown the sweet stigma of manischewitz; and Janina, a golden-haired German girl in a yellow Indian scarf with a red right hand, who volunteered on the same kibbutz near Gaza as the Ecuadorians, but needed a break from her constant companions—and took a bus to the Damascus Gate.

Old Jerusalem has seven gates: Damascus, Herod’s, Lion’s, Dung, Zion, Jaffa, and the New Gate. The eighth, the Golden Gate, was sealed in the sixteenth century—according to prophecy, God will come through that door at the End of the World, so the worldly Jews blocked the door to keep out the Rapture. The Damascus Gate leads into the largest of the Holy City’s four quarters, that of the Mohammedans, though those busy markets were not as crowded as on most days. Friday is the Muslim holy day, though this has little bearing on business in Jerusalem; Saturday is the Jewish Shabbat, and they shut down most everything in its observance; and Sunday is the Christian day of rest, so no beer is available. Thank God for the differences in His religions, that these don’t all come at once!

At the Jaffa Gate, past the yellow ranks of a Falun Gong protest, we saw a sign for the Free Tour company that offered a free guide for gratis at the end of the trip. Our diminutive guide walked us up to a rooftop at the center of the four districts, and under the window of Samuel Yosef Agnon, who wrote, “Jerusalem is connected by its rooftops and divided by its inhabitants,” we looked out over the calm strata above the crowded streets. The Muslim Quarter was a vast covered souq surrounding the Temple Mount; the quiet and posh Jewish Quarter showed signs of its recent renovations; the Christian Quarter was a skyline of steeples and towers and domes and crosses; and we had walked through the empty stone streets of the Armenian Quarter to get there.

Jokes and history ensued; we saw a street where Life of Brian was filmed, a new synagogue, and the Wailing Wall. The Jews lined up to pray against it, and they stuffed it full of their notes, and would not turn their back on it when they walked away. Obama had put a note in the wall on a visit of state, and it appeared in the paper the next day. Above on the Temple Mount stood the supreme golden dome of the Temple of the Rock, over the stone where Abraham would have sacrificed Isaac and the spot from where the Prophet ascended. A prayer there, properly performed, was worth ten thousand normal ones; a prayer in Mecca is worth a hundred thousand. To prevent violence, non-Muslims were not permitted inside the mosque.

One Rabbi came up to me while I stood ruminating over the and led me over to the last of the Second Temple wall. He kissed it and had me do the same, and then prayed for me: “Married? Then I bless your luck with ladies, your family, your business, your America.” He gave three Amens, three Hallelujahs, and three more Amens, then asked for a donation from this simple traveler. I thanked the Rabbi and wrote out a note to place in that sacred rampart. Every three months at 2 a.m. cleaners come around with a giant vacuum and empty the crevices. Until then, may God grant me my wish!

Our tour ended where it had started, and we four turned back to see in greater detail the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is a Byzantine church, sacred to the multitudes of Christian faiths, and strange in its devotions, and beautiful in its complex blend of designs; indeterminate and irresolute, like a candle’s flickering flame, and yet seemingly eternal in its heights and paintings and rich themes.

There is the stone where Christ was anointed, and there is the cave where Adam was buried, and there are the nails from the Cross, and there is where the Cross stood, in that Rock of Golgotha; there a procession of Armenians chants, and the singers prostrate themselves before a priest in a crown and another in a silver cape and black cowl; there is where he was imprisoned, in that dingy burned room; there is where he was buried, in that great shrine beneath the high dome, painted with stars and rays like the firmament, all Calvary carved away around it; and there are stranger crevices, burned black with soot from candles; and stranger processions from all over the globe: Italians and Spaniards, severe Muscovites, Indians chanting in Urdu, Nigerians in states of religious ecstasy.

What can you say to that place, five Stations of the Cross in such a line, the site chosen three centuries later by Queen Helena and the original church built by her son Constantine, Emperor of Rome? Of course it is not Authentic! But, it is Earnest, and a powerful conduit of the spirit of a persecuted religion of unmarked graves and secret meetings in the catacombs of Rome, a goal of Crusaders and Knights Templar, a wonder for the pilgrims of the earth. No wonder this is called the Center of the World! A city so over-pinned with dreams, it is like a dead insect on a mantle and under examination.

Our Christmas dinner was a travelers pot luck—Chinese noodles by Irene, and boiled potatoes, vegetables, and rice by Ibrahim and his honey—accompanied by tea and good company. Amelia and I had a bed downstairs in a long sitting room with four couches, all of them occupied—two Ecuadorians, a Quebecois, and Joshua the winemaker. There was a well-kept kitchen, a bathroom, a hallway that Japanese visitors kept disappearing into, and two bedrooms, one for a Born Again Orange County girl named Dawn, and the other for David and his wife Karmel.

The older couple happily received us in the kitchen and told us stories of the House and Ibrahim. David was a Jew and an Englishman and a medical psychiatrist and a whole lot of other things. He had a goatee to go with his frazzled gray hair, and the paunch that all old men are entitled to bear. He told us, in his soft, erudite voice, that “there are more poor Israelis here than there are poor Palestinians.” There have always been more Jews in Judea, and the Palestinian Arabs are Syrians and Jordans who flooded in after the creation of the State of Israel, before those two nations attacked Israel. “The truth is not what you think it may be,” said David. Obama had read his book and said, according to David, “That’s fine, I agree with everything you say, but—I have to remain President.”

The following day Amelia, Josh and I went back down to the Old Town and looked at the Austrian Hospice and climbed a fence onto the ramparts, which we followed from Lion’s Gate to Herod’s. We got lost in the warren of streets and received directions from a short woman who spoke like a newsreel during the Second World War. We had arranged to meet David and Karmel at Jaffa Gate at 2:30. Both our parties were late, and David’s included a pretty Moroccan woman named Jamila, who was volunteering at an agency for Palestinian settlements. Josh walked with her, Amelia with Karmel, and I with David, who strolled like an Englishman in a beret and red sweater, swinging a cane at his side, and talked about history and travel as he took us through the crowded streets of Jerusalem to Queen Helena’s Cistern under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Cistern was a rock cave with a deep pool, reached by stairs in the back of a small chapel, and dimly lit by electric lights and the well shaft of a cloister of the basilica. The curved walls and flat water echoed sound sacredly. Josh, who sang in a choir, set a sort of Gregorian chant from near where the stairs slipped into the water, and David sang “Come Bird of Paradise” and told us to listen close for its lyrical symbolism. Karmel asked us to sing something. “I can’t sing,” said Amelia, and I added that, “I’m also inept.” She ran us through a simple Hebrew La-e-la-a-ill-la-la.

A Brazilian man listened to our haunting songs from the stairway. “I heard that Brazilian women are very pretty,” David told him. “My son told me that, and my wife won’t let me go there. They’re supposed to be very pretty. So why are the men so plain looking?”

David took us to a Syriac Orthodox Church of Saint Mark in the Armenian Quarter that claims to be not only the first church but also the site of the Last Supper. The three black-robed priests were holding a service, chanting in Aramaic and waving censers before the altar, so David led us down some steps to the room where Jesus shared body and blood. It was a dingy space, and Jerusalem had risen above it on layers of construction. In the chapel, there was a famous Icon, which we viewed by candlelight, of the Virgin Mary, supposedly painted by Saint Luke. The historian evangelist did not know what the infant Christ looked like, so he painted Jesus as he knew him: a babe with the face of a man.

When the service had ended, a old nun, plump but active, came in to see us. Justina wore black clothes with a wrap on her hair and her sleeves rolled back. In twelve years overseeing the chapel, the ex-math teacher had witnessed five miracles—cures for cancer, the illumination of the dining room of the Last Supper—and one only a year ago. She told us the story:

“That day, I can’t forget it, a man from Russia, his job policeman in Tel Aviv, came to the Church for tour. No language between us. He spoke Russian, he spoke Hebrew. I speak English, I speak Aramaic. No language between us. For one hour I talk to him. I spoke English, he hears Hebrew. He speaks Hebrew, I hear English. For one hour, nothing strange between us. I thought he spoke English. He thought I spoke Hebrew. He says to me, ‘Justina, I feel peace in this place. I never felt it in any other part of Israel. I feel the Holy Spirit in this room.’”

Three months passed. The Russian man returned and spoke to Justina, but this time, she did not understand his Hebrew. The man got angry, but Justina could not ken the source of it. The priestess lit a candle and prayed before the Icon, asking Merciful God to send a translator. After ten minutes, a guide who she knew entered the chapel, who spoke English, Russian, and Hebrew. “I became happy,” said Justina, “because Alex translate between me and that man. I say, ‘Alex, My Lord sent you to me!’” Alex told her that his wife had a vision and demanded he take a taxi into town to see Justina. Another miracle!

The policeman told Alex how Justina had lectured him in Hebrew three months before. He was sure the old woman was trying to get rid of him by pretending not to understand. “At that moment,” Justina explained, “I feel power. Something put it in my brain. I understand what happened exactly.” The Lord had allowed her to speak to the Hebrews, his first children. “Glory to our God!” she exclaimed, and she waved her hands towards the sky.

After this epiphany, Justina went back to talk to Jesus through Saint Luke’s picture. “Why did you wait three months to show me the miracle? Why, why why?” She received an answer in “five days only.” A French professor, who had been there before, arrived and said he would translate for his companion, another Frenchman who spoke no English. The two Franks set at it, and Justina remembered that she had a book about the church in six languages, which would make an excellent addition to the professor’s library. On returning with the book, she heard the guide speaking in English! “Why you lie?” she said. “Why you say your friend no speak English?”

Then, as before, she realized what had happened, and to avoid appearing crazy, she “shuts up.” “I turn to Jesus and I say I am sorry, I will never ask you you must do something for me. Glory to our God!”

We thanked Justina for the story and went to a place called Miguel’s just inside the New Gate, owned by a Christian who served us plates of food and a fine Palestinian microbrew called Taybeh. David told stories to make us laugh. He talked about holistic remedies, and then said that he sometimes had prophecies or saw the spirits of the deceased around their surviving loved ones. On Amelia’s shoulders, he saw a shadow of grief. “There is some sadness in your past,” he said, “isn’t there?”

“Everyone says that,” she replied. I made a joke about seeing the spirit of my beer and got another Taybeh.

David and Karmel went to a lecture on medieval Muslim treatment of Jewish subjects, and Josh and Jamila to smoke cigarettes at the Wailing Wall; I walked off to the bus station with Amelia, still exhausted in the wake of a cold. Alone in the basement kitchen of the Peace House, she asked me, “So, do you believe it was a miracle?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t disbelieve her,” said Amelia. “She may have experienced something, but I can’t believe in miracles until one happens to me.”

“Well, I believe her. The world’s a much more magical place if you can believe in miracles.”

Anything old, you want to see it, you must go down.
—Justina

Amelia’s eye infection was getting worse. What started in Cairo as a swelling of the right lid had now spread to the left, and the drops she got from the eye doctor in Amman had run dry.

David recommended the world-renowned Eye Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, on Mount Scopus, and we took a bus there the next day. The doctors checked her vision and told her that some sort of eczema had blocked one of the tear ducts above her eye, which was swollen with oily tears (perhaps that is the specter of sorrow that David saw looming). They prescribed warm compresses and gentle massage, and a minor antibiotic gel for the infection.

The Order of St. John was originally a crusading order, also known as the Knights Hospitaller. They ran an institution of medicine on Rhodes, which doubled as a fortress against the infidel Turk, and was a steadfast thorn in the Sultan’s side. The Sultan tried but could not take the fortress of Rhodes, and so he concluded an agreement with the Christians that allowed them to leave with their swords and their dignity. The Knights sailed off to another island, became the Chevaliers of Malta, and renewed the fight against bacteria and Turks. The Eye Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem bears their noble crest, and signs of donations by the Knights Templar.

While Amelia and I were waiting in leather chairs in a sunlit hallway, for a doctor to print a receipt and certificate for Amelia to show to her travel insurance later, I said, “In the last two days we’ve seen knights and miracles. This is a pretty remarkable city.”

“Knights and miracles,” she repeated quietly.

Ibrahim brought to the table of the Peace House that night heaping plates of food cooked by his honey. There was buttered rice, tender chicken, mounds of vegetables in gravy, fresh bread, and tea with sage and mint. Our host shouted, “Welcome!” “Food!” “Eat!” and, “Thank you!” to everyone who passed by the open door of that merry room, and with words like those, made the world a better place.

He felt sorry for the capitalist way of life, those houses rich in possessions but poor in love—like Tom Waits sings, “A house where there’s love is a palace for sure.”

Poor, noble Ibrahim! His Peace House attracted some strange characters, the characters that travelers often talk of on their way out of the Holy Land, people with Jerusalem Syndrome who think they are Saints or Christ himself, and Ibrahim told us stories of some of them.

A man once stayed at the House who called himself Jesus. He was an American Jew and wore only a rice bag with holes cut in it. He stayed for twenty days, and every morning at 5:30 knocked on the door of Ibrahim’s apartment and said, “God has given me a new name. Call me this.” “Okay,” said the Arab. “I don’t care what you’re called.” One day the pilgrim said, “Ibrahim, God has asked me to move, and he wants you to give me a tent, a mattress, and a sleeping bag.” He took these items to the King David Hotel, where Presidents and Kings stay on visits to Israel, and set up a camp in the garden, and lit a fire, and left.

Ibrahim received a phone call. “Ibrahim, come down here or we will collect you.” The Arab raced to a taxi. Jesus had taken a stack of Ibrahim’s business cards with him and put them in the tent for the police to find. “Ibrahim,” they said, “What are you doing? You have houses all over town. You are welcome all over the world. Why do you pitch your tent here?” Ibrahim explained who it really was, and the police asked, “So what is his name?” “In twenty days he has twenty names. Which do you want?” “Well draw him.” “I couldn’t draw myself!”

A great many of Ibrahim’s guests, most of them Christians, attempt to convert the old Arab to their faith. He said he was Ibrahim, and Ibrahim would never change. And they fought, the Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and Ibrahim told us they should “Do what you want outside this home. Go kill each other outside this home.”

The Peace House set the stage for a clash of self-righteous egos, men who consider themselves holy by the mere fact of voluntary poverty and hardship. Those braggadocios and self-proclaimed messiahs spoke only in the first person, and had serrated conversations, looking for openings in the other guest’s holier-than-thou parables to tell a related tale about themselves and some spiritual conference they attended.

“We’re human beings who sometimes have spiritual experiences,” said Irene, the Maori woman who thought that her race was a lost tribe of Israel. “Nay!” spake the Bulgarian holy man, tangled beard on his chest, who was off on a three year walk to India, “We be spiritual beings, and sometimes we have human experiences!”

In truth, the pompous fools (who I called religious nutters and nutbags and nutjobs and worse things on most occasions) began to wear on Amelia and me. We retreated out into the sitting room to hover around the light of a laptop, or down into the basement where David and Karmel held court. Josh and Jamila were usually down there, and David told great stories around his kitchen table.

“This is a true story,” he began, standing over us like a king. “There was this old fisherman who sailed the waters of England, and I asked him, ‘Aren’t those seas rough?’ He told me, ‘Oh, yes, they are. The first time I was out, I went down below for dinner, and I was at the end of the long table, and the Captain, he looks down and says, “You going to eat that soup son?” and I says, “No,” so he says, “Well pass it up.” Well all the hands worked to pass up the bowl of soup, and the Captain eats it. I say, “Can you keep it down sir?” He says (patting his belly), “Well of course son.” “Good,” I says, “cause I couldn’t.”’”

Once David was walking with a group of pilgrims from London to Assisi, living entirely of what they could earn from begging, in emulation of the original Saint Francis. They would stand outside a cafe with wooden bowls for hours, until they had enough for a cup of coffee, and then go in and sit. When some rich Frenchman or Latin lady left an expensive sandwich half finished, David or one of his acolytes would ask for the leftovers. They received support in some places and even met Mother Theresa on the road through the Alps. However, it was hard yakka, as the Aussies say, slow and hungry work, and David got fed up.

“And I’m a Jew,” he said, “and we Jews talk to God, so I said, ‘Saint Francis, won’t you send us any help?’”

Following this outburst, a mangy dog appeared in the road from around the hedge row. It had no collar and would not be chased off, but followed the company doggedly, exemplifying all the “sagacious kindness,” to use Melville’s phrase, that canines can possess. The dog set point a few meters ahead of the band, begged with them, shared their privations, and would not be parted from David. It whined outside his window and put its head on his knee. David, being a sentimental man, developed an affection for his dog. He named it Leo, after Francis’ own constant companion, and found himself tugging sandwiches out of the hands of zealous waiters so the mut could eat.

One day, just up the road from Assisi, Leo scouted up ahead. From that direction there came the horrible, alarming noise of squealing tires. David ran up ahead. The dog was vanished. The Jew looked everywhere. He waded through the ditches and pushed out into the thickets, calling, “Leo! Leo!” but saw no sign of his dog. It reduced him to tears, and he never knew what happened to the animal.

In Assisi, a priest of the Church met their group. He said, “Go to the hotel and get a room. Don’t worry about a thing, I’ll pay for it. And you look hungry. Go to the restaurant and order as much as you want. I’ll pay for it all.”

David had an interesting biography. He lived in the West Bank until some of his friends received calls from Hamas: “If you let that Jew into your house again, we will blow it up with you inside.” Some of his genius progeny forced him to move, and he and Karmel had set up a sort of Japanese garden as a meditative retreat in Turkish Cyprus. As a medical psychologist, he developed a new field: Psychoneuroimmunology, preventing cancer by preventing the neurological shock of depression and disillusionment. He was like a faith healer, and trusted alternative medicine in concert with the practices of his mentor. He had told off the Prince of Wales and knew the Dhalai Lama and the President of America. He had survived an attempted poisoning by Kashmiri separatists.

David believed that old guru saying that there are many paths to one Truth. Under the name Baba Dovid, he wrote a book of New Age teachings called The Leaves From the Tree of Life. He gave a copy of this to Amelia and to me before we parted ways, along with copies of a pamphlet called “The Universalist” and an article about himself from Healing Today, titled, “Son of Nostradamus, Mystic Prophet of our Time.” As a journalist, I feel obliged to quote it.

“Like Nostradamus,” writes Anna Betz and Colin Vernon, David is a Jew. “Though recognized as a Jewish mysic, he is a Master of the occult with links to numerous esoteric groups world-wide. Known to the Sufis as ‘Shaykh Dawwud Ysuf al-Haqqani’; and to the Sikhs and Hindus of Northern India as ‘Babaji’; he has been recognised as a ‘Teacher’ by Buddhists, is a ‘priest of Isis’ and on the death of the chief Druid of Cornwall, was offered his robes by the widow.”

“Like Nostradamus,” the repetitious article continues, “he has made many predictions which have been fulfilled; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; the Gulf war; the dismantling of the Berlin wall. His prediction of a loss of a royal partner was fulfilled in the tragic death of Princess Diana, written in a letter to Prince Charles, three years before it occurred.” The abilities come “through him” and “not from him,” says the humble prophet. The authors continue that if you should ever meet Baba Dovid, “you will not doubt that the spirit of Nostradamus is still very much alive.”

On Monday Amelia and I went off to Bethlehem, on the other side of the Wall in the West Bank. The festivities around Christmas had ended. The police were stacking up their metal barricades and the garbagemen piling the refuse of ten thousand pilgrims. Through the souq we came to the Square of the Manger before the great church. Alleyways spoked off with other holy sites for the various faith, including the Church of the Lactation, where a drop of Mary’s sacred breast milk had splashed on the rock of a cave and turned to venerated powder.

The Basilica of the Nativity was a small thing over the grottoes where Jesus Christ is said to have been birthed. The marble square and silver star that a line of Nigerians prostrated themselves before failed to impress Amelia. “I thought he was born in a manger!” she said. “What’s with the marble?” There was a little manger on the other side of the cave, with a plastic Jesus nestled inside it, and the whole town was a cottage complex of woodcarvers who dealt Nativity scenes in olive, the same wood as the Cross to which that babe would be nailed.

I wore my boots out walkin’,
Poured my heart out talkin’,
I felt the pain and I broke the chain,
But I still got a long way to go.

Been on the road ‘til tomorrow,
Been through the joys and the sorrows,
Came through the flood,
And I pulled through the mud,
But I still got a long way to go.
—Railroad Earth

So we sat on a train back to the filth and ochre splendor of Cairo. We were afraid, since Denniz on his trip north had sat in a seat full of bedbugs that left 200 marks on his ass, and we were cold, since the Egyptians blast air conditioning all times of the year and all hours of the day. I had on my new jeans, long-legged to fit the Nubians of Aswan, and slightly flared at the bottoms, as was the local style—and had discarded those denim cut-offs that served me from the second-hand store in Varna all the way to the border of Sudan. Alas, and farewell!

Sven, Amelia, and I intended to go on from Cairo to the Siwa Oasis, where Alexander was confirmed into godhood. The picturesque palm groves and pools of Siwa border the Great Sand Sea of Libya. They are rarely visited, and the people, a mostly Berber blend, with a high proportion of hermaphrodites resulting from the magnesium present in the springs, are kind and welcoming.

Old Skip, the Reader will recall, had considered opening a backpacker’s hostel there, a quiet place to replace the hectic one he sold in Surfer’s Paradise, Australia. He stayed a month in November, testing the mineral waters and the sandy waves, as it were, and then flew to Los Angeles to pick up a large 1950’s bus with a shaggy 70s décor, which he intended to fix up and drive around America; however, he was dissuaded from this by greedy LA and the insensate American mentality. He sold the bus back to its owner and flew back to relaxing Egypt, a much better sheath for his sword.

I recently had received a message from Skip that he was on his way back to Siwa, but when he instead decided to spent another month on the Red Sea in Nuweiba, and given our general lack of motivation for such a long journey, Amelia and I decided to stay in Cairo for those days we had left in Egypt. We stayed at the Ismailia House, visited our old haunts, watched movies on the hotel’s television (I remember Amelia shushing Sven and I during King Arthur when we went on talking about the Dark Age wars of Angles and Saxons during the scenes of Clive Owen’s romance, though as usual the Egyptians had cut out all the kissing), and met a new cast of characters.

There were energetic bands from Korea and Japan, who kept to themselves for the most part, and Rob, a traveler from Perth, and Kyle, an American who had ridden his bike from Singapore, through the belt of the Himalayas, up out of Pakistan into the Tartar steppe around Iran, and then down through the Caucasus into the Levant and Egypt. These were the last legs of his trip.

While Kyle bought cardboard boxes to package his bike, so he could take it on the plane, we went with Rob of Perth to the City of the Dead, still very much alive. Fifty-thousand Cairenes built homes out of the crumbling yards of tombs in the city’s northern cemetery, under the degraded beehive domes of sepulchral mosques. Only the new bits tacked onto the old, like bits of tape on an old book, looked clean. Those who haunted the place invested themselves in cafes and tired shops and watched us walk through.

Kyle was a Georgian by birth, though the cold and wild breadth of Alaska had made itself his home. From Anchorage he flew out to remote locations, landing planes on glaciers or lakes. One in five Alaskans has a pilot’s license, and one in twenty a plane. He had watched the Aurora Borealis, “God’s paintbrush.” He had seen the Magic Bus of Christopher McCandless and the salmon migration and grizzly bears. But he was born in Georgia and lived there until he turned 19. An absurd incident colored his leave taking. At a concert he was arrested with five kilograms of mushrooms he harvested himself, after selling a handful to an undercover officer for $5.

He made his phone call from jail. “It’s okay,” said his father to the youngest son, who had never been caught doing anything wrong. “You messed up. It’ll be good to spend one night there, thinking about what you did. I’ll get you out tomorrow.” The next day, having talked to a lawyer, Dad said, “Alright you really messed up, but we’ll get you out of there in a few days.” The prosecution had three felonies on Kyle: Possession, Intent to Distribute, and Sale of Illegal Drugs. A week went by, then two, and Kyle’s father grew more desperate. “We’re trying to get you out of there. We want you to come home.”

Kyle had to spend that whole month in jail, without option for bail. Drug laws in Georgia are strict. He waited three months for a trial. A possible sentencing of five years jail time loomed like a guillotine over his head, but he pleaded guilty in exchange for two months in jail, five years probation, and a clean record following a clean probation. He was one of four white people in his jail, segregated from the rest of the 500 inmates, and his neighbor was a murderer.

“That set me straight, though,” said Kyle, as he told us his story over koshary and ful sandwiches in Felfela. “I was a undisciplined before, a little rowdy and wild. But when I came out I was so much more mature, and focused. I had been locked up, and now I knew what freedom and comfort were. I knew I had to work hard and stay straight.”

Kyle left for Anchorage the following day, and Sven for Siwa on the day after. The East German would see as much as he could before flying home on Christmas Day. I took a short trip the day after to see Alexandria. That ancient port languished under a sluggish smoke. The day was cold, and a wind blew dust and scattered refuse about the air. I walked up past the Roman ruins that stood out like scars among the grimy new neighborhoods to the custard sea, and followed the coast around to see the west and east harbors. The new Library of Alexandria was a structure like a dormant spaceship, and everything looked colonial and dim. But it was Alexander’s city, and that mere fact made it a wonder to me.

Egypt has a terrorist problem, or at least advertises one on television. We saw two commercials, in all that time watching the tube, warning people of the dangers of militants.

One began with a gift: money paid to a barber. The trimmer of hair, unaware of his role as a cutter of heads, passed on his tip to a shopkeeper, who took those same pound notes on to a blue-collared teacher in his classroom. The teacher took the money and passed through rows of starry-eyed young pupils at their desks and notepads, and down a ladder secreted beneath the bookshelf and the posters of the periodic table of elements and the water cycle, into a dusty subterranean lair, where masked figures fingered their Kalishnakovs during a break in the jihad. They accepted the paid-forward donative with zealous gratitude. Red words slammed into the blackened screen and dripped blood!

The second showed children in a brown and tan Arab street. The dirt road steamed dust and hazed over with heat like a fire. The kids stood there with footballs or bicycles at the ready, and contemptuous, pitiable looks. The ad cut to a posse of jihadists, kefiyes pulled over their mouths to hide distinguishing features. They were a mob of indistinct killers, faceless martyrs, unmarked graves with Kalishnakovs and rockets. And then the bicycle was upturned, and its wheel spun idly. The blood red letters, they bleed like old scars torn open by too much scratching! The wounds will never heal.

Our plan for Christmas was this: We would go to Israel via the King Hussein Bridge in Jordan, thereby avoiding the black mark of the passport stamp, and come to Bethlehem, to stay with someone Denniz knew from CouchSurfing. Then we would go to Tel Aviv and stay with Denniz’s friend Rachel for New Years. There was plenty to see along the coast and in the West Bank, and though the country was pricy, we would avoid the brunt of it by surfing couches.

On Thursday, six days after returning to Cairo, we left for Dahab. We packed up the night before. My bag was much lighter, as I had mailed home the tablecloth I bought in Damascus, a few gifts, and a great bronze shisha, which I bought from a salesman recommended by Yashar. The Iranian-Canadian had gone to the place two days in a row and slowly bargained the price down to something reasonable. I went in with a card Yashar gave me and in five minutes had arranged to get the same deal.

Both Amelia and I slept through our alarms that morning, but a nightmarish groan from a Japanese man in my dorm room woke me up a half hour later, at 6:45. Somehow we made it onto the 7:15 direct service to Dahab at the very last second. It felt good to come back to that warm and forgetful place. We checked back into Seven Heaven and shook hands with the proprietor, Samir, and all the staff who remembered us. Richie the Tae Kwon Do black belt, Maria the Danish diver, Saori the Japanese student, and Ahmed the optometrist. The touts and hawkers recognized us in the street, and at Friends cafe, we were welcomed back with a shisha on the house.

None of it lasts, however. Richie was leaving that night, along with an eager young American couple from Colorado. The Kiwi would go back to Liepzig, though he hated his job there. He said he would be back, but Maria did not believe it. “I hate goodbyes,” huffed Maria, a bottle of red wine in her hand. “That’s the bad thing—people are leaving all the time. I don’t like it. People leave after five days. I made a rule. If people aren’t staying more than a week, don’t get to know them. Not that it works.”

We had a clothes line outside our bungalow, and I considered doing laundry. “Yeah,” I said, “I need to wash my jeans. I still haven’t washed them at all.” But Amelia told me, “You don’t need to wash them.” I protested that “I’ve been wearing them for like a week.” “Denim is better when you don’t wash it. I haven’t washed my jeans since… Hungary.” “Oh.” Cleanliness is a strange state of mind, dependent on circumstance. In the woods, an occasional dip in the lake is sufficient. In the cold, a shower is a horror. The city requires a daily scalding.

Wednesday had been a windy one in Cairo. All that turbulence kicked up the seedy rot that lined the streets, which gave Amelia an eye infection to match her cold. This perked up in Dahab. Her right eyelid puffed out to the size of a pomegranate. Pharmacists, the clinic doctor, and Seven Heaven’s optometrist dive master Ahmed all gave different diagnoses, but Amelia trusted that of the latter. Every four hours she applied some antiviral cream he had recommended directly into her eye.

Meanwhile, she wore sunglasses when we walked around, like some victim of domestic abuse. We again ran into the Bedouin girl who had sold us our bracelets, braided Amelia’s hair, and threatened to knife Jean. She sat down next to us and took note of Amelia’s pustule. “Husband hurt you?” asked the girl. “Put ice on it. You go to doctor. Doctor better.”

Three days in that sunny haven. We sent out dozens of CouchSurfing requests to Bethlehem and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, hoping for a last minute host in that desperate season—or else risking the manger! Denniz’s contact in Bethlehem was renting out his home, and Rachel already had a Polish group staying on her floor for New Years. Dismayed and antisocial, we retreated into our cheap little bungalow and watched movies.

My netbook had a sparse hard drive, but it was enough to hold a few digitized films. From Aussie Steve, way back in Aleppo, I got Wall-E, Pineapple Express, The Castle, and The Hangover; from Yui of Japan, the Miyazaki animations My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke, and the Korean films Joint Security Area and Memories of Murder; and from the Seven Heaven Internet cafe, where downloaded movies languish, we found Man of the Year, Heat, Taken, Ong-Bak, Ong-Bak 2, Pixar’s Up, and most of the first season of True Blood, to which we addicted ourselves.

We watched Up while waiting for the ferry in Nuweiba. It left an hour late and arrived in Aqaba at seven, though luck propelled us through the obnoxious touts and got us a spot on a late bus to the capital.

Amman was colder and quieter than we remembered. The familiar hotels had no vacancies, so we checked into one called the Cliff Hotel. The kindly old proprietor showed us our room, and after a quick visit to Hashem’s across the street, we passed out. Suffering from the exhaustion of travel, we did not leave the hotel until after 1 the next day, and then returned immediately to Hashem’s.

Hashem’s Restaurant, as a world famous institution of street food, deserves more attention than I gave it here. The complex of street stalls takes up an entire alley. One cove fries felafels for sandwiches, one brews tea, and the largest makes dips and sauces. Waiters in red moved between the stalls and the tables set up between them, with trays of tea or plates of ful and hummus, doused in olive oil and sprinkled with chickpeas and a kind of salsa. They serve bowls full of hot felafels, stacks of fresh bread, with plates of tomato, onion, and mint to compliment the rest.

Coming so quickly from the overcrowded poverty of Cairo staggered us with the Jordanian affluence, like jumping from hot water into cold. We could not tell whether Amman had changed, or if it was only our perceptions that had changed. Urban Ammanites wore suits and western fashions, and the street stalls sold thick socks, gloves, hats, and scarves. All day, between calls to prayer, a mullah chanted Qur’anic verses unceasingly, insistently, as if reminding his nation of Mohammed’s humility by quoting the Prophet’s verse.

That was December 22, and we hoped to be in Bethlehem on the following day, although we had only a tenuous idea of where we would be sleeping. A quick stomach bug delayed our departure, but on Christmas Eve we emptied our bag of anything conspicuous, rehearsed our answers to the guards’ questions, and departed from Amman for the border of the Holy Land.

So friends and travelers; so gamblers and robbers, drinkers and jokers; so soul-searchers: Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

I hear a voice you cannot hear,
__Which says, I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
__Which beckons me away.
—Tickell

Abdullah drove a fifty-year old-Peugeot 504, a smurf blue station wagon, with a Qur’an on the dash and a luggage rack and seats for eight. He was a jolly, grinning man in a moustache and a robe, who picked us up at the Tourist Rest House in Al-Qasr just after breakfast. He drove us through a desolation of crags and dust and powerlines, towards the Kharga Oasis and Luxor.

In Kharga Town we picked up a police escort, on account of the American in the vehicle, and Abdullah told us in his pidgin English not to pay them any backsheesh when they asked. We picked up food and drove it 15 minutes out of town, to a little tea house with a television. Our driver wanted Amelia to dance like the women on television, but she said No and pointed to her anguished stomach—“Baby?”

As it got dark we entered a smoggy world of rubble and canals and palm trees. They still call it the Nile! The lifegiving river no longer floods with the astronomical precision that inspired the ancients. The High Dam prevents it. Irrigation drains it. The cataracts are gone. The trash on the palm-lined banks smokes and steams. The river is a polluted thing, bloated like a corpse, exploited in a slow autopsy by eighty million undertakers.

In nighted Luxor we took a ferry across the river to the east bank and climbed stairs up to the corniche that ran along the illuminated pillars of the Temple of Luxor, massive things shaped like papyrus scrolls. There were five of us, I remind the patient Reader: Denniz, Sven, Jean, Amelia, and myself. We circled the Temple and went straight to the Oasis Hotel, recommended by Yashar for its quality and the cheap food served on its rooftop terrace. The Hotel was full, but the manager laid out mattresses in a lobby and I passed right out on mine.

Jean, Amelia, and I had already been in Egypt for our 30 days allotted, and had to extend our visas. I went into a little photo shop to get passport pictures, and came out with several of those and also a very lame chop job of my face surrounded by Egyptian statues and pyramids. Some filter had cleaned my skin of every blemish so that I looked vaguely vampiric.

Immediately, we decided to return to take a group picture. The wall was coated with inspiration: Babies with Angelina Jolie and Beyonce dancing with them, women with their faces silhouetted in the background, glittering like diamonds. Denniz liked the picture of a toddler Photoshopped in front of a war zone, with a milk bottle grenade at his waist, an M16 over his shoulder, and a radioactive symbol on his diaper, but the photographer told us, “No, it is finished.” What we ended up with was nonetheless satisfactory.

The visa extending process took only two hours, thankfully, and that night we went into the Temple of Luxor, lit up by spotlights and the flashes of a thousand cameras. We meandered through the hieroglyphs and cartouches, columns and statues, until we had seen all the rooms, and then walked down the Avenue of Sphinxes, between a hundred of the riddlers. That road once proceeded for two kilometers to the Temple of Karnak, a structure that would fit the Luxor Temple in its annex.

We walked through the monumental contributions of Seti I, Ramses II, the Nubian kings of Egypt, and Alexander the Great, guided by an old man named Yusuf, who wore a woolen sweater under his shirt despite the heat. He told us of Ramses’ love for Nefertari, his first wife, and that even though he married 50 wives after Nefertari’s tragic death, none of them could replace his greatest romance. “Come to enjoy your eyes, by the miracle of the—earth,” said Yusuf as we entered the Hippostyle.

One hundred and thirty-four columns, ten feet across and spaced as far apart as they were wide, gave the impression of a redwood forest, but the roof, 120 feet up, was an open arbor of stone rafters. The light they let in cast lined shadows on the carvings on the wall, that staggering accumulation of symbols that meant so much to millennia of high priests and god kings. Some still maintained their original colors: deep blues, sanguine reds, golden yellows, and whites like eyes. The desert started at the edge of this hall, dusty palms and a slope of rubble-strewn strand.

I stopped to ruminate and write about it. “What you write?” asked Yusuf. “You talk to Amon Re? What do the gods say to you?”

“It must be annoying to be an American sometimes,” said Denniz, that night in the Sinbad cafe. The Temple of Luxor was just across the street. “Everyone has an opinion, and they must always want to talk about it.”

This did not stop Jean and I from debating it the next day, in the Valley of the Kings. We rented bikes from the hotel and rode them down to the ferry, on benches between men in robes and turbans and women veiled and hooded. Camels stalked the palmy banks, and the sun buried the clouds. We rode up a long highway through green plantations, past the Colossi of Memnon and the Tomb of Hatshepsut, and up a long winding hill to where the Pharaohs were buried.

Of the fifty tombs, most looted since antiquity but still displaying the painted frescoes that accompanied the dead kings into the afterlife, only a handful were open, and our ticket allowed us into a mere three. We chose Tausert and Setnakht, Ramses III, and Ramses IV. The last of these had Coptic graffiti everywhere, names and crosses and kindergarten depictions of saints, and in the final room a strange image on the ceiling with the sky goddess Mut bent over day and night scenes.

The place was empty except for a few Russian tour groups. Those leggy, light-haired women persisted in wearing short shorts and tank tops in spite of the cultural climate. The older they got, the crabbier they were, until they were hissing and clapping at Jean and I for talking near their guide-lecturer. We lunched on bread and Kiri cheese and honey, and began to speak about the United States. I said I admired the well-meaning naïvete and stubborn persistence that drives Americans to bumbling global crusades, though I despised the wars and those pulling the strings of honest people; and Jean had nothing but contempt for the simple, stupid salt of the earth. Our debate ended as many do, in an agreement to disagree.

“Well,” I said to Amelia, “Jean says that Americans are horrible since we live off resources we steal from other countries, and I said Americans are awesome because…”

“You live off resources you steal from other countries?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

Amelia and I had made three hand massage bets after that first one at the Egyptian Museum, and that night we checked the Internet to see who won; I lost all three. We had all developed a deep appreciation, approaching an addiction, for Egypt’s rice pudding—rice soaked in sweet condensed milk, sometimes broiled in an oven for a moment to give it a dark sheen. Jean and I made a couple bets with the desert as the prize. As it turned out, the Nile was the world’s longest waterway (Jean 1), and the Roman Empire did not use trebuchets (Me 1). The Frenchman was typically ecstatic over the former, shouting, “Fuck you!” at everyone who voted for the Amazon, and scornfully insolent when he lost the latter bet.

“Okay,” he said, “so I don’t know all this technical details about when the Middle Ages started, or Byzantine Empire, or whatever, so it’s not a real bet. And China had trebuchets in like 500 BC. Come on.”

Denniz and Sven also owed each other a few rice puddings. “Rice pudding is a new currency,” declared Denniz. Sven offered to just give the Dane the money, but Denniz said, “I only accept rice pudding.”

Denniz was mostly bedridden with some cold-flu, and Sven would send the most piteous, disdainful looks northward toward his neighbor. “Stop looking at me that way Sven!” “It’s pathetic, really. Unbelievable. Is this how they do things across the border?”

Amelia got word from a friend’s little sister, who bore the monicker of Little Budge, that the girl would have a free day in Cairo at the end of her week long tour. Jean was excited to meet the 23-year-old, but Amelia told him, “I think she’s out of your age range,” to which the Frenchman obscenely replied, “I put my tongue in younger stuff.” From his bed, Denniz asked, “Are we still talking about rice pudding here?”

And meanwhile Jean began to realize what Conrad called “the shadow of impending separation”—after two months traveling together, we had three more days. Jean wanted to return to Syria, and his visa expired in ten days. He also had to return to Jordan to sell his motorbike, which would never make the return journey through the Anatolian mountains in the frozen grasp of winter, and he did not know how he was getting back to Paris, or when, or even if he would return home before he went to live in Japan in June.

Our train up the Nile to Aswan, near the Sudanese border, left the next evening. We spent the day emerged in koshary and stuffed falafel and a cloud of shisha smoke, and then bid farewell to Denniz, whose overnight service to Cairo left at 11—godspeed, Sea Lake, thou Viking Turk, on your way home and back to the cacophonous road of possible futures that all the young must narrowly walk—and went to the station for our 5 o’clock train, which ended up leaving at 8. Thankfully and eventually we got seats, and Jean and I talked about literature and things while Amelia and Sven listened to the available iPods.

(Denniz had the tragic luck to sit in a nest of a chair on his overnight to Cairo, and woke up with 200 bites all down his back side. He was still finding more even after returning to Denmark on Friday. His story gave us a sleepless night on our own trip back to Cairo. “If I could chose between no sleep or all these bites,” Denniz said, “I’d take no sleep.”)

One man owns all the feluccas in Aswan, which is kith and kin to all the steamboats in St. Louis. He is a good man, the sailors say, but not a happy one. A homosexual, he made his initial fortune as a boy hustler. His fleet of shallow clippers, their triangular sails billowing in the wind, filled the panorama of the Nile in Aswan, sailing upstream and downstream between the town on the Eastern bank, the long narrow islands, and the barren eastern bank, where a few palm trees gave way quickly to steep dunes and rocky desert, marked by the ruins of noble tombs and a monastery, and overlooked the the Dome of Ali, Father of the Wind.

As we walked down the corniche above the rushing river, the owner’s touts aggressively proposed felucca voyages and day trips to our band, which must have seemed to them as four great dollar signs. We took the ferry across the waterway to Gaziret Aswan, which the Greeks called Elephantine Island, and walked through the Nubian village there. Nubians are proudly distinct from the Egyptians who have dominated their history. The ancient race of Kush and Meroe dwell in the south, near the Sudanese border, black-skinned, tall and sinewy, with a calm bearing and dormant intellect.

The Nubians painted the mudbrick walls of their dusty town in bright, earthy colors, and decorated them with simplistic art: the silhouettes of birds and beasts. A woman peeked her healthy face out of a doorway and invited us in for tea. Painted murals decorated the small inner court where we waited for our drinks, and the woman showed us her drooling offspring, Mohammed. We wandered up past the luxury hotels that loom above the marshes on the long, skinny islands northern tip, smoked a shisha at the Nubian House overlooking the island where Lord Kitchener planted an English garden, and then our hunger drove us back south to the ferry crossing, back across to the city to find chicken.

Aswan was cheap—my bed was $3, and a full chicken dinner cost but $2. We four shared a room with a desolate bathroom, and a shower that barely worked. “The cold robinet will not turn at all,” said Jean. “We only have hot water, and it’s boiling hot. I was trying on it for like half an hour, like hrrrr. It’s stuck man.” Sven went in next and turned the tap immediately. “Come on,” said the German, “what are you, a girl? I turned it right away. Are you a pussy or what?”

The town suffered from a prohibition of shisha, as Egypt attempted to stop an outbreak of H1N1 influenza, aka the Swine Flu, which had claimed 44 lives already and infected thousands. Those corkscrew tailed pathogens dwelt in the water bowl and hose and stand of the hookah, and launched themselves squealing at the Orientals. Thus, none of the restaurants could serve them. Old men sat around small tables looking grim and tired of the world, nursing a melancholic boredom in absence of the usual remedy.

Most who travel to Aswan take the tour south to Abu Simbel, the monument of Ramses II and his beloved Nefertari in old Nubia. Because the monuments lie close to the Sudanese border and three hours from Aswan, the tours leave in a convoy, under military escort, at 5 in the morning. Jean, Sven, and I got up at 3 for this voyage and moped about until the cars were loaded and checked for bombs. Most sites along the Upper Nile have been cut and disassembled and moved from their original locations to make way for Lake Nasser, the serpentine body of water formed by the High Dam. The four seated statues of Ramses look across a space of ground to the four smaller figures of Nefertari. They guard caves with painted scenes of fantastic battles, and more mundane collections of food images.

On the return journey we stopped at the (damn) High Dam, then the Island of Philae, to see the Roman Temple of Isis. Our boat pilot was a 16-year-old Nubian, who told me proudly that Obama was also half Nubian, and half-Egyptian. “Oh,” I said. The temple was a half-caste one, mixing Rome and Egypt. The columns bore different styles: palmy, swampy, Corinthian, and papyrus reeds.

At the Unfinished Obelisk, we three refused to pay the entry, but circled around the fence of the site looking for a free vantage point. We passed through a dirty alleyway onto a street and saw a cluster of women in the street. One pretty young woman came up to us and introduced herself as Lugna. “Obelisk?” she asked in her broken English. “Come, this way.” She took us and her brother and friends into a backyard, where we could not see a thing, and then started giving me her phone number and asking me questions.

“I love you, I miss you,” she said. I didn’t know what to say, so I called her, “Yimoza,” which means sweetheart in Arabic. At this her brother took on an expression of red rage, and started asking me for money. “Come on, you are American, you are rich.” We excused ourselves, and the brother escorted us down the hill with angry demands.

On our return we found Amelia still in bed, though she assured us that she was only napping. Together the four of us crossed the street to a little sandwich shop for something like lasagna. Jean went off to use the Internet—he left the next morning!—and Sven, Amelia and I got tea and sorely missed shisha. Were we suffering from withdrawals?

Later, Amelia and I walked down to a koshary place for noodles and rice pudding. Jean found us there, as we knew he would. Two months our triumvirate had been married! Our minds were connected, as Ahmad would say. We gifted our companion, on our divorcement, a pencil case and a drawing pad, with allusions to inside jokes written across the first page. He had been drawing in the blank pages of his copy of Robinson Crusoe, pictures of Egyptians and Scarabs and Vespas and Egrets. “For a long time I had my bike to worry about,” he said, “but now I’m kind of bored,” and in his boredom he turned to his old artistic hobby. Beaming with elation and gratitude, subdued with the worried expectation of the lonely road to come, he thanked us, and sent us ahead on the road back to the hotel while he bought us trinkets.

“Should we go to Cairo tomorrow?” asked Amelia, as we strolled up the boisterous Souq. “There’s not much to do here. I’d rather be somewhere with—.” She paused, and together, with the same impoverished, half-dreamy tone, we muttered, “Shisha.”

The next sunrise I got up at 6 with Jean and walked down to the station with him. We muttered a few things to each other on the way and tried to buy rice pudding, but the owner asked us for far too much and we left it. My friend the Frenchman boarded the train to Luxor, to pursue his many extravagant dreams, and I turned back into the street alone.

I’m on the pursuit of happiness and I know
Everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold.
I’ll be fine once I get it. I’ll be good.
—KiD CuDi

We had to stand on the bus, since we had no tickets. The 7 a.m. was full to bursting with Cairenes and their belongings, and we waited with Yashar, who had just returned from Aswan, for the 8 a.m. departure to Bahariyya in the Western Desert. Three of our gang got seats on the bus, and we alternated between these and the aisle for the five hour trip. We were six, including myself: Jean of Paris, Amelia of Melbourne, Sven the East German, Denniz from Copenhagen, and Yashar of Vancouver, B.C. This diversity confused the Egyptians when they asked, “Where are you from?” They called us a cocktail or the United Nations.

A mob of them met us when we stepped off the bus in dusty Bawiti, chief township of the Bahariyya Oasis. They shouted at us in a pack, then picked us out individually as we moved to get our baggage—touts for desert safaris and sand dune tours and hotels with swimming pools, men in robes and turbans or jackets and jeans. We set our bags up under the hot tin roof of the bus stall and each ended up talking to one or two guides, receiving prices and business cards, until Yashar announced:

“Alright, we’re all talking to separate people. At this rate, we’re all going to be on different tours. Let’s go eat lunch.” At lunch, in Popular Restaurant, we discussed our options, and a crowd of desert dundees listened outside. “This one has a pool,” said Jean, and a tout shouted, “No it doesn’t,” through the latticework.

Yashar wasn’t hungry, so while we ate he left to bargain. He got prices from one of the guides, a Mahmoud, proposed the plans to our table, and we chose the 300 pound option—two jeeps, two nights in the desert, and home in time for Yashar’s 7 a.m. bus back to Cairo. Yashar left to try to wheedle the price down and returned shortly after. “Alright, so it’s still 300,” he said, “but I got us each two free postcards.”

Our guides and drivers were named Mahmoud and Mahmoud. One was the owner, with a vest over his long robe and a kefiyeh wrapped around his hawkish face. He had the dignity of a sheikh and alternated between liberal humor and pious faith. The second Mahmoud was a small, energetic Egyptian, ill-tempered when he got too little sleep or food. Presently, he had not eaten lunch—our contract interrupted his invitation to Boss’s house for a meal—and that made him grouchy and taciturn. The back of his 4×4 read: “Desert Safary For Ever Of Road.”

Day 1: We left late as Mahmoud & Mahmoud had to buy supplies. A jeep bearing three Koreans in desert garb is following our convoy, even though we said we’d rather be alone. The driver’s name is Hamad. His marriage to a Korean girl netted him all the tourists from the southern end of that peninsula.

Mahmoud the Greater led our train out of town through the desert, to avoid the police checkpoint that would have assigned an officer to our car, a service they provide to any and all citizens of America or Israel. The convoy took the road to the edge of the Black Desert, where volcanic cones have caked the sand with ash. We drove off the highway and angled up on top of a dune to use the sandboard from the Korean carriage. There were no foot straps, so we just sledded down, except Amelia who had some experience with it. Yashar wrestled Mahmoud the Lesser and won, using dirty skills learned from having two older brothers interested in martial arts. We watched the red sun set amid mazy clouds.

Getting away from the dune proved difficult. Mahmoud the Greater topped easily a steep sandbank up to the highway that nearly rolled Mahmoud the Lesser. His jeep stalled halfway up that high slope, and he turned to his passengers and said, with a subtle but profoundly infectious terror, “Get out now.” They left in a hurry and got the jeep down off of two wheels and pushed it out of the sand, though the crew demanded to ride with Mahmoud the Greater the following day.

“I taught him to drive,” said the Sheikh Mahmoud. “One year ago, he had never touched a wheel.” We drove on down the highway for ten miles or so, then turned off and whirled onto more sand dunes, weaving up and down at the whims of nature and Mahmoud. “You know,” spake the Greater, weaving his stick like a wand, “this is our job, but we do it because we love it. But you must drive out here, in the deep desert, not on asphalt. That is no fun. You must be quick to drive out here. Not quick with strength, or you will break off the shift, and then you’ll be stuck. You must move fast and control it.”

Mahmoud the Lesser and Hamad the Other followed as well as they could. In a valley between rock and dune, the three guides parked their cars to make three sides of a box, so that the corners were touching and at right angles. They unloaded rugs and mattresses from the rooftops and used them to seal the inside of the wagon circle in a kind of wall, with Eastern couches around a small table, and a gas stove just outside. We all took off our sandals and curled up under camel wool blankets that still smelled like those strange beasts, and the guides passed around some rolled cigarettes of some strange Eastern herb.

Amelia began to interview Sven, whose fascinating history was largely unknown to our group. The German was born under the mothering aegis of East German communism and the German Democratic Republic. He was seventeen when the wall came down. His parents brought him over to West Berlin, and he spent his 100 Deutschmark gift on a tape recorder and bananas. “Yes,” he said, “the stories are true—we never had bananas.” He spoke of the good and bad aspects of communism deplored the way the former are usually swept under the rug of the victors.

His father was a mayor under the Soviets and a construction entrepreneur under the capitalists. His uncle had made his way up in the diplomatic circuits of the People’s Party, only to have governments change on him. He only recently returned to the field—to the secretarial job he first held when he was seventeen years old. Sven was training to become a mechanic during the change and had to move to Bremen for three years to finish his schooling. Presently he works to travel, though he feels lonely in this vocation and detached from his friends and his home. “I’m really glad I met you guys when I did,” he said. “It’s good to travel with other people.”

Mahmoud & Mahmoud made a pan of red coals and pressed a grill down on it to sear carved chicken. Hamad cut up the salad and cooked the soup. “Isn’t he a good cook?” said Mahmoud. The Bedouin feast they served was excellent—soup and salad and bread and rice and chicken in deep dishes. Yashar ate so much he felt sick and had to lie down to settle his ballooning gut.

The rest of us took seats around the renewed fire and wondered at the stars and the moonscape of the desert. Waxing Luna resembled Yashar in the fullness of girth, barely splintered at one side, looking down on our proceedings with a streaked face. Mahmoud the Greater officiated the pouring of tea, and Mahmoud the Lesser drummed on a plastic water can with talented fingers. He sang songs in Arabic and called on us to dance by country.

“I love the desert,” he said, in a still moment,—“the sky, the earth. Whenever I am sad, I come to the desert, with friends, not tourists. We stay for days and nights. We drink tea and Coke, and sometimes cry.”

In his wanderings and workings, he had dealt with many tourists from the Islands of Japan, and he showed us an impression of the Nipponese that I will endeavor to transcribe:

“’Ohhh,’” he began. “’I am from Japanese. How motch for des-sert tour, kudasai.’ Five hundred. ‘Prease, wait, matte kudasai.’” (He mimed using a calculator watch, then he writhed as if in mental anguish. “’Ohhh, ohhh—takai desu! Too much. Prease, student discount.’ Four hundred fifty. ‘Ohhh, ohhh, sank you, sank you, arigato gozaimasu—hai, hai.’”

The Koreans shared the tequila and beer they had the foresight to bring, and Mahmoud lit a small shisha with coals from the fire. The wood had burned out and the red coals were scattered in the sand like stars. Jean and I took a walk up to the dune’s slithering apex, and along it to scrabble drunkenly up some rocks to the top of a cracked peak. From there we could survey all the wonders of the landscape by the light of the moon.

Day 2: Hamad and Mahmoud the Lesser played a trick on our Sheikh the next day. They flicked off his four-wheel drive so that when he started, he spun out in the sand. They got out to laugh at their master, though the passengers who had switched cars to escape from Mahmoud the Lesser’s inexpertise were not humored when they found themselves again pushing a jeep from the sandbox.

Hamad and the Koreans left for a longer tour, reducing our convoy to two vehicles as we proceeded through the White Desert and into the forest of mushroom rocks that the Bedouin call Aish el-Ghorab. The bases of the stones have been sandblasted away over eons, leaving rocks on tiny legs, and strange, extra-terrestrial formations.

“Look,” said Mahmoud the Lesser, “there is a camel!” We saw heads and chickens, and when Yashar, Denniz, and I were riding on top of our jeep, clinging to the empty rack as we sped through the rocks, Mahmoud the Lesser leaned out his window and pointed at something, a rock he titled “Cleopatra on a horse.” Yashar said, “I’m going to need to be on mushrooms to see that.”

We got off the roof at Al-Santa, a 500-year-old acacia tree that has grown in a tangled, solitary way deep in the desert. Next we moved north to the oasis spring at Bir Regwa, the forest divided by fences into little rooms canopied by the arbor, with fire pits and tea pots ready. Jebel al-Cristal (Crystal Mountain) is a hill formed of fake crystalline structures, and while we were peeling off bits of it we saw a giant arachnid, the camel spider. That was where Mahmoud & Mahmoud told us we had to pay additional money for park entrance fees.

The convoy stopped at a hot spring for bathing and a late lunch. The sulfuric mineral water, opaque and aquamarine, fed a steaming concrete pool, and drained on the other side into a aquaduct that led out to the fields. We swam in it and splashed around until the food was ready.

Back in Bawiti, there was cause for alarm when Mahmoud the Greater told us our 300 pounds only covered one night, and he would need 50 pounds for a second. Yashar said he could not remember what he had agreed on. We all entered varying states of anger and dismay, and sat there for long periods of awkward silence, spent staring intently at points on the carpeted floor of Mahmoud the Lesser’s dwelling, while we waited for the supper his wife was preparing. I was of a mind to pay less than we agreed on and go to a hotel, but Denniz’s cooler head prevailed. The Dane assured Mahmoud the Greater with platitudes and negotiated a second night, close to the oasis, for 25 pounds more.

Mahmoud the Lesser served us massive plates of rice and noodles and bread and beans. We thanked the chef through the husband. (Amelia reported from the kitchen all the abuses the women railed at their husband, who deflated like a squeezed sponge under them.) As per the terms of our renegotiated contract, we would only take one jeep out to our campsite that night. Four crammed in the back, two on the passenger’s seat, and Mahmoud the Lesser drove us a short ways out of Bawiti to a fenced enclosure with two yurts and a fire pit at the edge of the palm groves. We set out carpets in one of the yurts and mattresses around the fire, and sat there enjoying the cool night.

There was a story in Bahariyya that six years before, the largest skeleton of a dinosaur ever discovered was found in the Oasis. Americans funded the paleontological project, and Germans dug up the bones; but when the Egyptian laborers found out that the Americans would be taking the skeleton home, they stole and hid two of the largest bones. Mahmoud had worked on the project, and when we asked if he knew where the bones were hid, he only showed us a sly grin.

We had to get up early the next morning to take Yashar back into town for a 6:30 bus to Cairo, so he could catch his flight to Morocco that afternoon. “When I do not get enough sleep,” said Mahmoud, “people ask me, ‘What is wrong with you? You seem different than before. Are you angry?’”

Yashar received our farewells, a sadness for Denniz especially. The two had first met on a Couchsurfing road trip out of Aleppo, and despite being complete opposites had formed a connection on the strength of similarities, both their fathers being refugees, from Turkey and from Iran. They had run into each other regularly on the road south—but no longer, since they would be on different continents. “Or,” said Denniz, “maybe you’ll get home for Christmas, and I’ll be having tea with your mom. Surprise!” Yashar went to the bus station, and we went to Popular Restaurant to drink coffee until the sun rose. The rest of us had decided to continue on through the desert to Luxor.

From the roof of a building across the street from Mahmoud the Lesser’s house, you could see the whole spread of the Bahariyya Oasis. It was no mean thing, no little puddle ringed by palms like the columns of some Hellenic dome, but a vast island of densely cultivated forest in a sea of sand. Our vantage looked over the verdant and jagged roof of this hall, the date-bearing, orange-growing canopy, and toward the dry, sandy hills on the far side.

Our bus to Dakhla Oasis left around noon, and in the time we had, our band walked down to a grotto in the jungle of the palm grove. The stream that ran through it was clouded with minerals. We talked about the difference between a sleaze and a slime, and explained to Sven that he could call a girl easy-going, but he shouldn’t call her easy. Denniz’s mom was in the hospital with meningitis, and he went back to check his e-mail for news. Amelia went with him, and Jean, Sven, and I continued deeper into the oasis.

We walked under the date palms and orange trees, between the fences and streams, until we were well lost, and then turned back into a field full of newborn butterflies. A white egret landed and strutted around the place, picking for worms. “What do you miss from back home?” asked Sven. “Food,” said Jean and I, though we later added other things worth missing. We got to talking about separation, and how it is to reconnect with friends on a return.

“I’m gone six months,” said Jean, “and that’s a long time, but fifteen months? You go home, and what do you have to talk about? Your friends have had jobs, some of them have had children, they have done lots of things, without you. And you, you have been doing crazy things, going all over the desert and to Pyramids and India. Do you just tell them what happened, and then it is like before?”

“Yes, I experience that, too,” said Sven. “When I go home after my ozzer trip, the one-year one, I feel like I am different. My friends zay I am stranger to zem. I feel very—what is the word?—disconnected?”

When we eventually found our way back into the town, and after we had eaten a breakfast of rice, potato stew, and pickled vegetables at Popular Restaurant, and had moved to the bus station to wait for our coach, I asked Amelia about it. She said, “You change, but, well, you’re still the same person. Your character is still the same. It’s just what you’re into that changes. I’m into travel and seeing live bands, and I have friends who aren’t at all. I have friends who are into very different things, but we can always get together for dinner and a beer.”

The desert between Bahariyya and Dakhla looked like a construction zone or a parking lot at a fairgrounds, with trees and stone pillars on the horizons. Past the small, dusty Farafra Oasis, the bus rode down around a sand sea, vast and flat. Sprinklers sprayed water over the rebellious parcels of green that disturbed the contemplative monotony. We passed through another small oasis, and then down onto the waste, and through it to the oasis.

We arrived in Al-Qasr after dark, but just in front of the Tourist Rest House, the only hotel in that small town. Our caretaker Mohammed had a reputation as an upright, trustworthy sort of chap. He set us up in two rooms around a lounge on the second floor. There was a sort of veranda outside on the stairway with a picnic table, and the stairs went up to the roof, where we sat for the large dinner that Mohammed served—great tubs of rice and boiled things. The abolition of hunger ceases all discourse.

Al-Qasr is an old city, and the next morning we investigated its oldest part. A mudbrick minaret, 800 years old, stands as dilapidated watcher over the entrance. There a man in a blue robe and white turban met us and led us on through a maze of crumbling and roofless buildings, shaded by the three story walls and high bridges of bisected palm trunks. The slim windows had posts in them like prison bars. The dusty air had a stale, sour quality, as if the same air had been current since the city’s ancient founding. Few people still lived there.

At the Madrasa Court we found stairs up to the rooftop, as dusty as the road, and it sagged like a trampoline under our weight. In courtyards off the main road, our guide showed us an olive press and a filter for oil, and a grain mill to grind flour—all bound from branches and metal and stone. He walked us to the entrance and we paid him his due backsheesh.

The Rest House is the only place to eat in Al-Qasr, so we took our lunch there, then hired a car out to one of the hot springs. The water that bubbled out of the ground into a concrete cistern, then down into a second cistern and out into the soil. It was smaller than the one in the White Desert but much hotter; it took a while and a slow entry to adjust to the heat. Palm bushes fenced one side in and the dirt road ran along the other, looking over a fallow grain field.

Two boys rode up on a donkey cart and stared at us, slowly moving closer until I got them to pose for a picture. More people trickled closer, until there was a scattered crowd of them milling about in robes, waiting for the Westerners and the White Woman to leave so they could partake in an after-work bath. Amelia wore a black T-shirt over her swimmers out of modesty but could not help attracting attention.

While the others were drying off, I went over to the two boys, who were climbing all over their donkey cart, to ask them how much it would be to Al-Qasr. Five pounds, they said, and we shook hands. Somehow we loaded the four of us in the back of the donkey cart, putting our weight over the wheel so as not to overburden the beast or tip its carriage, and the two boys sat on the frame whacking the donkey with a stick. We felt bad for it, so we got out where the road to the spring rejoined the highway and walked back the last ten minutes.

Denniz had caught some cold or flu bug and stayed behind to rest. He felt a little better when we returned. Sven and I were hard into a chess game on the roof when Denniz arrived with a backgammon board tucked under his arm to challenge Amelia. His Turkish father had made him familiar with every aspect of the game.

“The Western ones are all padded, but they make the boards out of wood for a reason. You’re supposed to slam the piece down, to make a noise,” he said. “There’s tactics, but there’s only so much you can do. At a certain point, it’s all about the dice roll. You have to take risks, and then hope for the roll you need. It’s about taunting.”

He blew on the dice, slammed down pieces, and laughed maniacally. When Amelia lost her third game in a row, he told her, “Put the board under your arm. Now, kum parğına git!” — Get to the playground!

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.

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.

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.