Sinking Sands

Kings and queens, prime ministers and presidents, the weight of your rule has been counted; the scale bends your neck. Can you not feel the burden of your vision, or has your crown become so coarsely embedded in your skull, your sight has become dim? Has there ever been even one who would shift the weight of balance?

Poverty ravaged the land. Starving animals forced to work until they dropped dead, literally, or they stood weakly with no life in them. I could barely look any more.

Beside these, were the thousands of starving people who made money from tourists that never came, so if you happened to be going to one of the ancient sites unguided, heaven help you. Hordes of them blocked your way to get as much as they could from your pocket. In the end, you gave up trying to go to places. It was just too much of a burden. Then there were the thieves and liars who would take you up the road in their taxis a few hundred metres away and charge you the earth for the short journey. And, of course, the beggars lining the streets, mostly fleeing from turmoil in their own country. If you gave them something, they clung to you for more. Lastly, the homeless children who did the same, running away from a home too broken and cruel to be called a home.

As for the ancient mystical Egyptian cat, it is hardly recognisable, having interbred with other breeds, they have taken over rooftops and whatever nook and cranny they might find to breed their illegitimate litter around the streets of Cairo. One of them actually found a garbage bag to have its kittens in on my balcony, which happened to be on one of these rooftops.

There is always hope to be found, even in the darkest places. Garbage City, the poorest of people, shunned by the rest of society, collect rubbish around Cairo for recycling. Children play in the streets oblivious to the filth around them. Their skins marked with sores, like lepers, from living in the filth that line the streets they collect and dump for sorting. They come up and touch you. Your skin begins to crawl with invisible diseases from their touch. Yet, their eyes sparkle in delight, seeing foreigners walking the streets of their petty existence. You force a smile on your face and shake back the fear of contamination in your mind. The horror of what you see around each corner makes walking brisk. Finally, a bridge out of the nightmare. A road leading up to heaven, carved and painted by the hands of these poor people, depicting Biblical stories through carvings or paintings. Each one a masterpiece. At the top, a church has been carved out of the rock, shaped like an amphitheatre, decked with wooden benches and a large open stage. One priest had given these dwellers hope with his vision. Tourists come by bus from the other side of the mountain, not through Garbage City. No one wants to walk through a garbage dump. Very few locals know of its existence.

During this time, the Sinai peninsula was a red zone, considered to be very dangerous to visit or travel, for the expat community at the time because of kidnapping and terrorism. Another leap off the fence where I often sat, contemplating my next move, took me on a weekend trip with a group of Egyptians in a bus from Cairo bound for the Red Devil Mountain. It was a hiking expedition. I put my name down.

We had to go through a checkpoint along the way and the group gave me a white scarf to wrap around my head, telling me to pretend to be asleep, with my face cast downward. It had worked, the officials looked around the bus and left quickly. We were on our way.

We arrived at the foothills in St Katherine, Sinai, where thousands of pilgrims came each year to climb the so called Mt Sinai, a mountain close to where we were heading. From here, we walked to a Bedouin’s home in the mountains and stayed in miniature stone huts. The Bedouins had served us a tasty meal on arrival, all home grown from their plantations, as well as some spicy tea. Delicious.

Early the following morning, we rose before dawn, ate chocolate for breakfast because it would give us energy for the climb, I was told. Chocolate for breakfast, I ask you. The hike soon turned into a rock climbing expedition, as we clambered over huge boulders and short rock faces, all the way to the top, sweating profusely from the heat.

From here we could look across at Mt Sinai, which was slightly lower than the mountain we had climbed. After a late lunch and Bedouin tea, it was time to get cracking again before the sun went down. The journey down started with even bigger boulders and a cliff face we had to walk along, with a ledge of around five centimetres to walk on and a few cracks in the rock to cling on to. I was terrified! Surely I was going to fall off. No ropes. Who cared? It seemed only I did. One wrong move and a drop of at least eighty to a hundred metres to the bottom, full of rocks. I imagined being smashed to pieces on those rocks below, but would finally make my mark on the world, with a few Bedouins in the area to declare my existence. Inshallah! No, I prayed all the way! I made it, even after freezing half way. You can do it, a gentle voice from one of ones who had made it assured me. The rest of the climb was boulder hopping, knee scraping, dangling in the air and jumping to get to the bottom. My thighs ached, my knees wobbled from the pressure of jumping all over the place like a mountain goat. Our Bedouin guide was definitely a mountain goat. He kept running all over the place to help people.

I was about sixth in line. We waited for around two hours for the rest, wondering if they were going to make it, as it had got quite dark by then. They came in dribs and drabs, but finally everyone had made it down and we were heading back to Cairo.

The leader came to me at the main camp and told me I would have to go a different route from the rest of the group because, if I was caught out there at this time, there was no way they would allow me to travel. I had to miss the first police checkpoint and the only way to do this was on a narrow road through the mountains that passed it. The bus would meet us somewhere on the other side. He came with me, thank goodness, and during the trip we both learnt that there appeared to be some sort of conspiracy theory going on which was holding tourists back, because the Bedouin driver firmly believed all the terrorism in the area had nothing to do with them. They were being blamed for the terrorist attacks when in fact it was another party.

I learnt later that the Bedouins were not Egyptians, and had been brought into the country originally as monks of the Catholic faith to look after the Monastery, growing produce and looking after livestock. This was in the 6th century during the Byzantine period, according to historical accounts, from a region around Romania. Since then they have interbred.

In fact, on one holiday a Bedouin shared my breakfast. He simply sat next to me and started talking and eating my breakfast. I thought it was quite amusing at the time. He spoke perfect English, and even sounded like an Englishman. He had been taught by a British man that had lived in the area when he was a child. It was from his lips that I learnt that Sinai was a beautiful place until the Egyptians came and messed it all up.

He was trying to coax me into spending money on a trip into the mountains on a camel for a few days, all alone, just him and me. Then, when that was not successful, he tried to persuade me to pay him to take me snorkeling.

Most of the Bedouins live in harmony with nature. It’s an amazing experience to sleep at the foothills of these mountains on the shores of the Red Sea. Nuweiba, a strange little town, north of the Red Sea in Sinai, which was mostly a holiday destination for Israelis up until a few decades ago, when they were not allowed back. A section of the town marks the spot where investors began building, but couldn’t finish. A pipeline runs into the ocean, close to the Hilton Coral Reef Hotel, the remains of an attempted desalinating plant, streaming with coral fish as coral grows on the abandoned pipes. The area attracted mostly Russian holiday-makers then, who spent their time sun-tanning on the almost abandoned beaches, taking advantage of the specials the hotels offered to attract their customers.

There were once plenty of diving schools in operation, which probably flared up after an American archeologist claimed he had found the real Red Sea Crossing that Moses had taken the Israelites across, fleeing from Pharoah.

This was my reason for going there too. I wanted to see proof. I had been on the other side, in Saudi Arabia. I had hoped to find one of the gold chariot wheels that this archeologist had claimed to have found on the Egyptian side, but my two dives had been in vain. We had not found the right spot; we had been diving in the wrong place.

So, instead I went looking for Imhotep: the architect, who the same archeologist claimed to have been Joseph, starting at the first pyramid ever to have been built. This was just outside Cairo. One of the things he discovered were huge pits excavated into the sand that still contained multiple seeds on the floor.

Accessing the original site, columns lined the hallway. He believed it was the place orders were received and taken for the grain during the seven years of famine, and that this was just one of the many places where people could get food. The closed architectural type entrance suggests a high level of security. However, according to Egyptology timeline, Joseph never existed. There is no record of him written in the sands of time, or is there?

Only more recently have I discovered an amazing documentary covering this. Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus. It must be incredibly frustrating for any archaeologist who finds something that doesn’t fit the theories of time lines, recorded in concrete. There have been many artefacts and sites found, which are thrown out, simply because they do not fit the pattern of time that has been created, based on theory.

Leaving all my failed findings behind me, I decided to complete my Advanced diving course in Dahab. Alone once again, I met European travellers from Sweden and Finland. The two men from Sweden were soldiers. At the end of our training, I enquired about the Camel trip to Ras Abhu Galum. The men were interested too. So, the next day, the camels were loaded with oxygen tanks and bags containing necessities for the three day journey, and off we trotted.

Typical of all tour packages, it had been advertised that the only way to get to this spot was on a camel, because there was no other way in. It soon became evident that there was a jeep track close to the Bedouin camp. Not only that, one morning, the tranquil ocean was blotted out by a huge passenger liner that had somehow managed to make its way into the small bay and sat like an unnatural whale in the still waters, while divers jumped off a platform. Its image ruining the whole setting in front of us.

Nevertheless, it was worth it for the rest of the time. Cute little Bedouin children bringing you tea in the hope of getting a treat. Rockfish and abundant other types not far from the shoreline, the milky way to gaze at, and the silence of the desert behind. Occasionally, an Egyptian cat emerged from behind a rock, looking for scraps to chew on. I sat a couple of times at dusk and dawn, staring across the ocean, remembering a time I had had on the other side a few years back.

I recall now what had become of the column on the Saudi side that King Solomon had erected in honour of the Israelite crossing: It had been taken up to Haql and placed in a mosque. The one in Nuweiba still stands.