Walking the Bible (37 page)

As a former resident (and perpetual romantic), Avner didn’t like taking either path. He suggested that we hire three camels—one for each of us, and one for our bags and lunch—start out on the camel path, but quickly veer off when we reached the rear of the mountain. We’d spend the day visiting early Christian holy sites in a secluded part of the mountain once populated by hermits, have lunch in a centuries-old orchard believed to be the place where the Ten Commandments were
given, then climb up the early Byzantine trail, which has been abandoned for decades, before arriving at the peak by sunset.

The scene in the small resting area was chaotic, a Middle Eastern bazaar, with fifty or so camels and their handlers angling for the services of what, at the moment, was barely a handful of climbers. Avner had prearranged a ride with a friend and we stepped off to the side and began assigning our gear. Camels—or in this case, one-humped dromedaries (
Camelus dromedarius
)—are curious-looking creatures, around eight feet tall to the tops of their heads, with sandy-colored hair and large, shaggy humps that look like marshmallows covered with toasted coconut. In general, looking at a camel reminded me of looking at a clown, with everything rather misproportioned, the too-tall legs, the bony knees, the molded jowls. Clowns design their costumes to accentuate their oddities; camels seem to come that way naturally. The observer’s eye goes directly toward the hump, the loopy neck, the long, hooked nose that looks like a bunch of bananas, arching down to the stem. This sense of the absurd is only enhanced by the saddles, large padded thrones made from a grab bag of anything squooshy: foam, blankets, plastic garbage bags, old T-shirts, bedouin rugs, pom-poms, rubber welcome mats. If you find it in the desert, you find it on a camel.

The reason for all this effort—and iconography—is simple. Riding a camel is to life in the desert what riding a bike is to childhood: a rite of passage, a way of life, a source of freedom, a pain in the butt. Almost anyone who spends time in the desert is forced to confront, in one way or another, the tyranny of the camel, the only mammal capable of surviving without water for as much as two weeks in the summer, and two months in winter. Camels don’t store water in their humps, as once thought, but in their tissues and cells. They conserve water by constantly increasing their body temperature to match the climate (as much as twelve degrees Fahrenheit), thereby eliminating the need to use water to cool themselves down. In fact, camels “store” no extra water at all, drinking only what they require to live. Humans, by contrast, must maintain a steady body temperature. When we get hot, we use water as
a coolant, evaporating water via perspiration and making our bodies thirsty for more.

Camels have other idiosyncrasies that make them uniquely suited to desert life. Their humps are filled with as much as eighty pounds of fat, which enables them to live without food for long periods of time. They have broad feet that permit them to walk in the sand without sinking, and tight nostrils they can seal off from blowing sand. Their eyes are particularly well adapted, with thick bone visors on their foreheads that block the sun and an extra eyelid that moves from side to side like a windshield wiper to remove sand from their eyeballs. In a sandstorm, camels can actually close this third eyelid and see through it. As further protection, camels also have extremely long eyelashes. I also have long eyelashes, which at the moment I swung atop my camel I hoped would be taken as confirmation that I, too, was somehow genetically aligned with the desert—or at least kin enough not to be unceremoniously flung off.

One reason for my concern is that camels are notoriously nasty, the earliest exemplars of road rage. “Stay away from camels,” more than one friend advised. Camels are known to hiss, spit, vomit, shake, and, on occasion, go suddenly berserk. T. E. Lawrence, in his famous book
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
wrote that Arabs of means “rode none but she-camels,” since they were smoother under the saddle than males, as well as being better tempered and less noisy. Also, they were patient and would endure to march long after they were worn out, indeed until they tottered with exhaustion and fell in their tracks and died: whereas the coarser males grew angry, flung themselves down when tired, and from sheer rage would die there unnecessarily.” Emil Ludwig, in his book on the Nile, describes how the skeletons of so many dead camels mark the desert like milestones. “Their shadowy, bleached bones, quickly cleansed of flesh by sun and vultures alike, are the cleanliest remains of organic life, and, if they stood upright, would look like some carefully prepared model in a museum, the Platonic ideal of a camel.”

But for sheer directness, nothing beats the story of a friend of mine,
who received a postcard from a friend of hers visiting Egypt. On the front was a picture of a camel; on the back was a single sentence:“Whoa doesn’t mean stop to a camel.”

By nine we were on our way up the mountain. The handlers, teenage boys with red-and-white-checked kaffiyehs and sandals, walked in front of the animals, occasionally swatting them with short sticks wrapped in duct tape. The pack camel went first, followed by me, then Avner. The path was about five feet wide, lined along the edges with red granite boulders about the size of bread loaves. The sand on the trail was also red, the color of ground-up flowerpots, and seemed particularly suited to the gentle gait of the camels, who put one pad in front of the other in a rocking, metronomic rhythm. If anything, the animals seemed almost lulled by the routine. They didn’t look around but stared straight ahead, plodding forward like blank-faced Teamsters. They even had their own CB code—a mix of clicks, gargles, and hisses—that they used to communicate with their brethren. No oasis for six hundred miles; no rest stop for forty years.

Sitting on the camel did prove uncomfortable. Despite all the padding, the twin prongs of the wooden saddle—one in front, one in back—still managed to break clear, pressing against my back and groin. Even resting one leg over the neck of the camel, as the bedouin do, only uncovered a new set of citified muscles for the saddle to grate. I felt a bit like a plum being squeezed by a pair of chopsticks. In no time the ride reminded me of one of the worst days of my childhood: spent on a donkey descending the Grand Canyon. The donkey wanted me on his back even less than I wanted to be there. It was a struggle of attrition, which both of us lost.

In a way, the scenery also reminded me of the Grand Canyon, with its palette of rusts and browns, its stratified layers of rock, its complete isolation. The one difference, of course, is that we were going up, not down. Indeed, within half an hour we were high enough on the mountain, and far enough away from the monastery, that the scenery lost all sense of proportion. The sun, by now high into the sky, beat down
relentlessly. There was no vegetation visible for miles. The rocks were sharply jagged in places, like scales on a crocodile, and in other places more gently rolling. The tops of the mountains, which had seemed so imposing at dawn, took on a sad, droopy feeling, like melting dinosaurs. With the winding path, the camel, and the steep vertical climb, the scene took on the feel of one of those Chinese scroll paintings, which always include a hut, a bridge, or a path, to stress that nature is more fully realized when a human being pauses to consider it.

The higher we went, the more solitary the atmosphere seemed. A wheatear alighted on a boulder. A flock of doves took off from a ridge. The path grew steeper, the camel a tad more ornery. The air began to pinch my nose. Perhaps it was the bucking of the animal, perhaps the heat, perhaps the fact that we were climbing Mount Moses, but I felt a renewed appreciation—and awe—at the changes the Israelites had undergone during their journey, beginning in Mesopotamia, arcing down through the Fertile Crescent, descending deep into the Nile, and emerging to face an unknown mountain. Not since they passed Syria, almost five hundred years before the Exodus, would the Israelites have faced such imposing peaks. And whatever route they may have taken, this terrain would have been ideal as a place of revelation. Come face-to-face with the high mountains of southern Sinai, and whatever one’s orientation, one pauses with anticipation. The Bible says that when the Israelites beheld Mount Sinai they “trembled.” At the moment I could understand why.

By a little past eleven we had arrived at an intermediate peak and disembarked from the camels to begin our hike. Avner brought over a small piece of stone imprinted with what looked like a fossilized branch of fir needles. “These aren’t fossils,” he noted, “but minerals—manganese crystals—that accumulated here in this shape.” Like the
tafuni,
the weather-worn holes in the rock we saw a few days earlier, these impressions were made when a hard, mineral solution seeped into the cracks and later expanded into tendrils that looked like fragile twigs. “Byzantine visitors decided they were the remains of the burning bush,” he said.

“So the burning left this scar on the rock?”

“Remember,” he said, grinning, “you are standing on holy ground.”

And frightful ground, too. Though the mountain may seem poetic from the path, from on top it can be wickedly cruel. Almost anyone who climbs the mountain at night to see sunrise reports that the experience was the coldest of their lives. An average of ten people die of exposure every year. During Avner’s tenure a special forces officer from the Israeli army came one night and announced he was going to climb the mountain. “Don’t go now,” the bedouin told him. “You won’t have enough time.” Being from the special forces, he went anyway. “I went home,” Avner said. “Put the kids to bed, and one of the bedouin came running. ‘Somebody’s stuck on the mountain!’ ” The man had gone up the front of the mountain, reached a dead end, turned around to come down, and become trapped. “Then it became quite cold,” Avner said, “and he tried to shout, and nobody heard him.” He needed to signal, but had no equipment, so he took his checkbook, ripped out check after check, and set them on fire. “I climbed up the regular trail but couldn’t reach him. I had to fly in a helicopter to bring him down. His legs were already quite frozen, and we had to soak him in hot water.”

Despite the mountain’s ferociousness, it can be hospitable. Jebel Musa is actually made up of a number of small peaks that cover an area of about two square miles, topped by a conelike summit. The lower peaks contain a series of protected plateaus, hidden caves, and isolated nooks that serve to keep out the elements, making the mountain quite friendly to habitation by those seeking to get closer to God. On Ras Safsaafa, the most extensive of the peaks, the granite ridges are filled with man-made remains—dikes, wells, cisterns. There is even an orchard of pear and almond trees. In the early Christian era, monks perfected means of storing water and actually lived for months at a time on the mountain. In one hollow, Avner pointed out a whitewashed structure that monks claim is the Sinai’s oldest monastery, built by a nun and her husband (!) during the Roman persecutions of the third century
C.E.

This juxtaposition of the barren mountain and pockets of fertility only heightens the sense of otherworldliness that envelops Jebel Musa. It also mirrors one of the tensions in the biblical story of the Ten Commandments:
A mountain that seems so terrorizing to the Israelites proves to be so welcoming to Moses; a mountain untouchable to humans succors an eighty-year-old prophet for weeks at a time.

The story of Moses and God on Mount Sinai is one of the most celebrated in the Bible, but also one of the most confusing, with a series of ups and downs that are almost impossible to keep track of. In the third month after the Exodus, the Israelites arrive at the wilderness of Sinai and set up camp at the base of the mountain where Moses first encountered God in the burning bush. The Lord calls Moses from the mountain and asks him to tell the people that God bore them “on eagles’ wings” from Egypt and that if they obey him, they will become “my treasured possession.” The people agree, saying, “All that the Lord has spoken, we will do!” The Lord then orders the people to stay pure for two days, and wash their clothes, for on the third day he will come down in a cloud on Mount Sinai, in sight of the whole community. The people are not to touch the mountain, and whoever does shall be put to death. On the third day, as morning dawns, thunder and lightning fill the area and a dense cloud envelops the mountain. A shofar sounds. Moses leads the people to the foot of the mountain, which trembles violently. The Lord calls Moses to the top of the mountain, then sends him back down to get Aaron. The two then ascend again, and God reveals his laws.

The Ten Commandments, which the Greeks called the decalogue, or ten words, and the Hebrew text calls the “decade of words,” turn out not to be limited to commandments, and not to be confined to ten. The laws, which theologian J. Ryder Smith called “the universal alphabet of religion for all mankind,” actually comprise thirteen verses in Exodus 20, which has led to enormous debate over precisely what constitutes the code. The first verse, for example, is not a commandment at all, but a preamble, in the manner of other Near Eastern laws from that time: “I the Lord am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.” Jewish tradition lists this as the first commandment. Most Protestant denominations believe the first commandment also includes the subsequent verse “You shall have no other gods beside Me.” Jewish, Catholic, and Lutheran traditions make that
verse part of the second commandment, along with the next few verses, which command against making “sculptured images” of God. For everyone, the subsequent six laws command, in order: (3) You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord; (4) Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy; (5) Honor your father and mother; (6) You shall not murder; (7) You shall not commit adultery; and (8) You shall not steal. The last two laws are also apportioned differently in different religions, but command: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, and you shall not covet your neighbor’s house, wife, slave, ox, or ass.