Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
A solitary night in the Sinai turns into an eerie and magical encounter. By Tehila Lieberman. Excerpted from 'Travelers Tales: Women in the Wild.'
Oct 1, 1998 | There is an hour in Jerusalem when one can almost smell the burnt offerings. When the sky, purple, orange, sage, cracks open for a moment to allow in the day's load of prayers and curses, then closes up again, majestic and mysterious as the lights come on below the ancient walls, and cars weave down the thin roads that lead out of the city, and silence blows in from the east.
At this hour, I would usually pull a chair outside the small cottage I had rented and watch evening approach, or take a walk down to Mishkenot Shaananim to watch dusk soften the just-lit walls, to hear the bells of mules in a nearby village mingle with the unintentional medley of opposing prayers.
It was 1976 and I was 21 and living in Jerusalem with the conviction (that one can only have at that age) that I had found my place in the world, had stumbled upon where I was supposed to be.
I had fallen completely and passionately in love with Jerusalem with its strange golden light, its babel of languages, its bougainvillea and almond blossom, its disputed and thrice-claimed god. I had fallen in love, too, with the country around it. Had I been asked to explain it, I would have said that it was as if I had stumbled upon in those teeming streets, by the turquoise sea and in that shimmering heat, the maelstrom of some recurrent dream.
Whether it was the East with its sultry ways, its lid full of half-turned instinct and mystery, or whether it was the thrill of having left behind the life that had been prescribed for me, all I knew was I wanted to be a part of this beautiful and complicated place, to move in its sultry rhythm, to learn its veiled Levantine ways.
So that when I heard everyone talking about the Sinai desert that lay hours south, I knew that I needed to go. Travelers described dunes alongside a brilliant blue sea, Bedouin on camels, beautiful reefs. In the few weeks that remained before classes began, I gathered together a few new friends and headed for the great hills of sand, for the ancient tongue of sea said to lick like a memory at the banks of two lands.
We left Jerusalem at midnight to avoid the heat, five of us piled into an old green Renault. The sleeping countryside sped by us; Arab villages, some small Israeli towns, a few kibbutzim, then the dusty welcome of Beersheba, after which there were only a few scattered lights dotting the large, dark stretches of the Negev. About an hour out of Beersheba, we pulled over to the side of the road so that our only licensed driver could have a short sleep. I walked down the road for a little while, breathing in the night air of the Negev. The darkness was thick and silent but I could smell the desert, knew that around us were the pink sculpted hills of the Arava.
As dawn broke, we continued on, stopping as briefly as we could to grab breakfast in Eilat, eager to leave its "skyline" of five star hotels, its tourist boats and shops. Then we continued south; to our right, the dry red mountains of the desert, to our left, the glittering sea.
What we finally arrived at was this: Nothing but dunes, shifting seething dunes, rolling softly to the sea, crashing up against great palms that hung with drunken fruit and shade. The water was stretched as far as one could see, clear and sparkling with its coral reefs, its brilliantly colored fish. The sea was bordered by soft burning sand that would scorch the soles of your feet if you dared to venture out during the day from your homemade tent, or your small circumference of palm tree shade. Across the water, like a picture out of focus, the light pink haze of mountains that lined the coast of Saudi Arabia.
This was Nueiba. It housed -- at that time (it is now, once again, part of Egypt) -- an Israeli moshav that grew watermelons, the probability of a hidden army encampment, and then between the sea and the ochre colored range of desert mountains, a long stretch of sand that rose into soft sculpted dunes, dotted here and there with tall palm trees. We decided to stop here. Others traveling down to the Sinai went on, on buses, motorcycles or hitchhiking, to the Bedouin fishing village of Dahab, to the hallucinatory reefs of Ras Mohammed, or inward, to the monastery at Santa Katarina. But Nueiba was where we wanted to be.
It was the mid-seventies and the sixties were just arriving here. And with its voluptuous sands, its seemingly hash-induced mirages of Bedouin women in long colorful trails by the water's edge (no mirage; they appeared and disappeared at various times of day, emerging in groups from their hidden tents to cool the soles of their feet at the edge of the Red Sea), this desert was luring us, along with scores of Scandinavians and Europeans, to leave our lives behind and learn its ways. To learn the soft, almost imperceptible way the dunes reshaped themselves in the late afternoon, the way the pink light lifted in a haze off the mountains, the way dates, hanging like desert gold, would fatten and wrinkle, then fall from the tall palms from which they hung. The taste of coffee at the end of the day, cooked in a blackened Turkish coffee pot, desert bread, as biblical and full of sand as thousands of years ago. The terrain of prophets and outcasts and lovers who wanted, however briefly, to leave their bodies.
We left our car at the parking lot that adjoined the gas station and small cafe run by the moshav and walked for an hour and a half into the dunes, following the sultry curve of the water. At first we passed large tents with every convenience, gas stoves, even televisions. Then clusters of young people speaking German, then French, then the soft sparsely inhabited "hill country" of the dunes. This was where the serious desert travelers came, many of whom had come here for a few days or a few weeks and gotten hypnotized; ended up living in tents made of anything they could find, or settled for a year or more between the branches of some huge and sprawling palm.
We found a palm tree among the dunes that was so large and strangely shaped from years of desert winds, that it almost seemed like two palms growing from the same cluster of roots. We unpacked the various colorful sheets we'd brought and constructed a "house" a few feet from the tree to protect us, where the tree wouldn't, from the seething sun, the night winds, the late afternoon's mist of sand. And then we settled each into his or her own silence. With every day, we spoke less and less. This was not a decision but a response to the extraordinary silence around us.
Every day I stretched out on a thin colorful cloth on the sand, first in the early morning's still gentle sun, then for hours, under the large leaves of the palm, clinging to every last inch of shade.
For days I just lay in the lap of the desert's strange and rustling silence, listening for the nomad's secret footfall, the shift of dunes, the play of waves. Until I knew, as the motionless Bedouin knew, as those before me who had in that starkest wedding, met the most ancient sparks of their souls, that if one chose, one could sleep here the sleep of centuries. That the sun rose and the sun shone and the sun remained for most of one's life baking its great lengths of sand and that one lay in it, not chosen, not spared, but without a will -- half-cactus, half-rock, all thought falling away like wizened fruit, all abstractions and all previous truths dissolving in a world grown thick and real. That one grew slowly dull and parched and that still the sun shone and shone. That one hid in the thin shade of the trees, pressed one's face against the darkening bark and that still the sun mercilessly shone. That water grew precious and language scarce. That now and then a specter of breeze lifted mirage-like from a distant dune and one turned one's face slowly right into it, lifted one's face gently right into it.
That each day it would come to this. The morning with its rustling sea, its shifting sands, its quickened breeze would slow daily into this gaping and chimerical stillness. The Bedouin children would dissolve from view, the flapping tents stand still and full, the dunes which only hours before had not been able to keep their form would stiffen like sphinxes by a plate-like sea, not a grain evolving, not a scorpion's slide breaking across the trailless sand.
And then the day would draw to a close. We would wake up from a heat-drugged sleep, feel a breeze lifting, see the palm leaves above us begin their delicate dance. We would pass around the precious jug of water, then start a fire for the afternoon tea, as the huge and biblical sun fell lower in the sky, then plunged angrily into the water. The colors of the sky would deepen, a fiery orange, then pink, then only a golden veil rippling over the face of the water.
Then night would arrive with its great web of stars which loomed so close, so large, you felt you had only to reach up and catch some in your palm. We would wander around the surrounding dunes collecting branches, bits of desert brush, then we'd light our night fire, sit quietly around it, or drift off on solitary walks across the dunes or down to the rustling water.
I would usually wander down to the water. Leave my jalabieh on some rocks and swim beneath the thick net of stars, beneath the strong beam of moonlight lighting the dark pools round my arms, then the parched hills of Saudi Arabia. And what I remember thinking one night, if, in fact, it could be called thinking, that merging of thought and sensation as the moonlight danced around me, illuminating the gills of the water, the mountain crags, the still space, was that I had arrived surely to the edge of my senses, was reeling at the very edge of my senses; that I was floating suspended somewhere between heaven and earth.
It was a week and a half into our stay when we experienced that strange and moonless night. We were beginning to grow aware that soon we would need to go back to Jerusalem. That we would need to reenter our city selves so as to be able to return to what awaited us: schedules, classes, university.
As if in preparation, the friends with whom I was traveling began to grow restless, to take long walks back to the small cafi at the entry point, to return with tales of other travelers, with food and small treats they had bought. Only I had no desire to do so. I was unwilling to move away from this wonderful silence, this rhythm of the desert that we had entered, that followed unquestioningly the imperatives of survival, the position of the sun in the sky.
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