It is dark when I wake up, and the ashes of the Bedouin fire are still warm.
The dozing bodies of a dozen tribesmen lie as still as the dead, buried
beneath layers of blankets round and about the low tent they call the makhad
— the meeting place. The moon rests on the crest of the western jebl,
throwing long shadows from watchful camels as I walk across the wadi, the
sand crunching like frozen snow. The sandstone crag crumbles underfoot and a
cold northerly scours the ridge.
I’m just in time: a moment later the western horizon stretches and splits, a
red gash that creeps like a bloodstain over the Arabian Peninsula before the
first flames set the mountains ablaze. The stars fade as the Sinai emerges
from beneath a blanket of darkness, revealing its weather-beaten topography
in all its magnificence.
This mystical desert triangle, a near- impenetrable wedge driven between
Africa and Saudi Arabia that split the Rift Valley in two and engendered
three religions, is enigmatic and poorly documented. We know that the
pharaohs mined turquoise, copper and gold here, and that Moses led the
Children of Israel across these sands in 1200BC, but the great desert
explorers — Burton, Lawrence, Thomas and Thesiger — seemed more entranced by
what lay across the Gulf of Aqaba, as though this quarter wasn’t quite empty
enough. It is untrue, however, to suggest that the Sinai is unexplored: back
at the makhad, Chief A’id el Abu Ali and the people of the Mizayna
tribe know the land like the back of their sun-leathered hands.
“We came from Arabia,” explains A’id over a fireside breakfast of hot farashia
bread and cardamom coffee, telling a story of double deals and bloody
feuds, of oriental intrigue and internecine wars, throughout which the
Mizayna, naturally, occupied the moral high ground. These days the disparate
Bedouin tribes are united in a struggle to resist the pull of urban
settlement and at odds with a government uneasy with the idea of
unregistered persons wandering, untaxed and unaccounted for, in a land that
they alone understand. The Egyptian administration offers permanent housing,
running water, electricity, education and work on the neon strip at Sharm el
Sheikh — all the means with which to embrace a consumer lifestyle. All the
Bedouin have to do is let themselves be led into temptation.
“Our children have to go to school now, and we have to live in houses. It’s
the law,” sighs A’id. Then he grins. “But we still sleep outside.”
Smoking a corkscrew roll-up of a fragrant local weed, his gold teeth gleaming
in the sun, he tips his dregs onto the embers and recites his personal
mantra: “Bedouin, strong like the desert, soft like the sand, moving like
the wind: forever free.”
I’M HERE with the Makhad Trust, a non-profit organisation created to “sustain
the heritage of the region and to cherish the indigenous wisdom of the
people”. After a five-hour 4WD ride from Sharm el Sheikh, we aim to follow
the Moses Trail, travelling with the Bedouin as we make our way across the
wilderness to the famous St Catherine’s monastery, then climb Mount Sinai.
The interior of this desert remains unsullied by tourism. The air is clean and
fresh, the sky a mesmerising blue and the land a thrilling, wind-sculpted,
water-riven dreamscape of ravines, precipices, dunes and shimmering plains.
It is also a world of surreal contradiction. Without the desert, there would
be no rain — grains of Sinai sand seed the clouds of southern Europe — and
the primary cause of accidental death in these arid parts is drowning in the
flash floods that tear up the wadis in winter. I look upwards as I mount my
camel — zero chance of precipitation today.
Misha has long legs, thick lashes, fragrant breath and, in common with her
gender, the permanent hump. She is 10 years old, which is late twenties for
a camel, and she’s currently single. She sashays across the sands at a
steady 3mph, stopping every now and then to stare at the scenery, as though
still stunned by its beauty, or totally lost. The Bedouin call her Ata Allah
— God’s Gift — and doesn’t she know it.
We dismount to explore a canyon reminiscent of Gaudi’s Parc Güell, in
Barcelona, where the wind sings sinfonia through organs of its own making
and whirling loops of scarlet, turquoise and gold defy geological
explanation.
“Created by Gaudi, Bach and Michel- angelo,” suggests Makhad’s Aonghus Gordon,
but when I share this theory of provenance with A’id, he shakes his head.
“It was created by God,” he says, “and God is great.”
After a lunch of hummus, olives, freshly baked limba bread and karkade
tea, A’id points at an outcrop in the desert at the crossroads of ancient
trade routes.
“That was made by man.”
The 30ft cliff face is covered in carvings depicting houses and temples, and
showing armed men on short-legged steeds harrying footsore civilians. As
scholars have yet to study this remarkable monument, its interpretation is
open to question. Is that structure the Tower of Babel? Are the horsemen
Egyptian? Could those harried exiles be the Israelites? A’id shrugs and
points upwards to yet more engravings, made when the desert floor was 10ft
higher. He tells me he can take me to dozens more ancient message boards on
long-forgotten trade routes, then opens his hand to show me a cloudy,
peach-coloured jewel.
“This was made when a meteorite hit the desert and turned the surrounding sand
into glass,” he explains. A mile or so later, on a low limestone plateau
amid an ocean of sand, a brief inspection turns up three superbly preserved
sea-bed fossils in as many minutes. Persistent local rumours hint at
priceless ancient treasures awaiting rediscovery in one of the countless
labyrinthine gullies that surround us.
WE BID farewell to the Mizayna beneath the 3,000-year-old beehive tombs of the
Children of Israel and cross into the mountainous territory of the Jebelaria
tribe, hiking under a waxing moon along a rocky trail into Wadi Tilla.
Despite appearances, there’s water here, a subterranean river that pools in
a series of granite sumps beneath the valley floor.
Until recently, the region was famous for the ancient gardens that reached
like green fingers up the gullies of the Sinai massif, but now most are
desiccated and deserted, abandoned by families who have left for the coast.
Tourism took them away, and now ecotourism, in the form of the Makhad Trust,
is bringing them back.
The scheme is in its infancy, but the dream is dynastic: to restore the
gardens of St Catherine’s, and thus the fragmented culture of the Jebelaria
tribe. Established by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century and built
around the Burning Bush, St Catherine’s was once home to the Codex
Sinaticus, the oldest Bible in the world. The Codex is now in the British
Library, and the Egyptians want it back, but the Burning Bush is still
there, the fire extinguisher positioned beneath it a sign of Orthodox wit,
or hope.
Here in the overgrown Amran Garden, plenty of bushes need burning, and
although I was apprehensive about breaking rocks in the hot sun with a bunch
of right-on Conscience Tourists, I needn’t have worried. One morning, I slip
away from work and climb high above the garden. From a boulder split with a
vein of moonstone, I have a bird’s-eye view of Bedouin and Brit working side
by side as they dig and weed, bury pipes and shift stones in the Amran
Garden. Above, the sky is so blue and so deep that to stare at it induces
vertigo, and the crisp mountain air echoes with laughter.
We sleep in the Starlight Suites. These eclectic and highly individual
quarters consist of a mattress, a pile of blankets and a candle, laid out
beneath the desert sky on carefully raked sand between the Dali-esque
boulders that stud this beguiling bewilderness. For those who have never
watched meteors rip the sky as Orion strides silently across the mountains,
I recommend an early night.
AFTER TWO DAYS in the garden, we move on, following the Moses Trail high into
the mountains. A cold night in the inaccurately named Wadi Shag, at 5,900ft,
is followed by a glorious trek on secretly marked Bedouin trails to the
friendly village of Aleben, where Ramadan, a hyrax-breeder and musician,
entertains us to lunch. As we dine, veiled girls set out baskets of uncut
amethyst, as though offering charms for our onward journey.
It begins with an innocuous zigzag across the scree, but as we reach the
overlying sandstone mantle, the trail takes a sinister turn. Suddenly, I’m
surrounded by wind-carved dragons, demons, hellhounds and hideously
distorted skulls that gape from the crags like tortured souls. Awestruck, we
climb on in silence to the shoulder of Mount Sinai, to the exact spot where
Moses received God’s Commandments, an empty, windswept place, heavy with
dread and offering precious little protection from lightning. The sun is
setting and the temperature is dropping, but that only partly explains the
goose bumps. From somewhere behind me, Aonghus is reading from the book of
Exodus, his voice echoing across the empty valley.
“And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have
brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou
shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in
the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
That night, I bed down beside a Bedouin fire of crackling acacia. We will rise
long before dawn and descend to St Catherine’s, and there, after six days in
the wilderness, I will rejoin civilisation, my soul purified by this holy
desert and my body smelling like a gypsy’s blanket. In the meantime, I sip karkade
in the starlight, trying to recall all Ten Commandments as I watch, with
covetous eyes, a passing tribesman. It’s a long way from here to the valley
floor, and I’d kill for a ride on his donkey.
Travel details: Chris Haslam travelled as a guest of the
Makhad Trust (01242 544546, www.makhad.org),
which offers eight-day itineraries in the Sinai desert, including road
transfers from Sharm and a two-day working project at St Catherine’s, for
£975pp. The trust donates 40% of this sum direct to local projects and
ploughs the bulk of the balance into preserving Bedouin culture. Excel
Airways (0870 169 0169, www.xl.com) has
return flights from Gatwick to Sharm el Sheikh; from £250. Other operators
include Explore (01252 760200, www.explore.co.uk),
which has a 10-day trip from £645pp, and Exodus (0870 240 5550, www.exodus.co.uk),
which has a nine-day tour from £695pp.
