Walking the Bible (44 page)

What did he like about it?

“First is the sun, which is always here and always reaches the ground. There is no pollution. Second is the wind. Third is the environment, the mountains, the trees.”

“What about water?”

“Water is not a problem. Now we get water from a government cistern.”

“So can someone like me, who grew up in the city, learn to love the desert?”

“Everybody has a spirit, a dream, of being calm and quiet, at peace with himself,” Ramadan said. He was seated at this point on the edge of his room, with the rest of us gathered in a small circle. In the middle was a ceramic stove, an electric campfire, on which he was boiling a kettle of tea as beat-up as the one from the previous night. The intensity I had noticed earlier only grew as he spoke in slow sentences, running his fingers over his lips as if drawing out every word.

“People coming to the desert discover that they are drinking from truth,” he continued. “And people become at peace with themselves because of this truth, this quiet. It’s something that’s built into the spirit of people, and it’s waiting to be discovered, sometimes maybe without their knowing it. The nature around here, it’s not me who built it, or you. It’s God, the all-knowing. This is the greatness of God, and it infects everyone who comes here. It’s like me and Avner, we can sit one next to the other, sometimes without even talking, and it brings joy in common to both of us. It’s the same with the desert. It finds a way to bring out peace.”

He began to tell a story.

“There was this American lady,” he said, “a dancer. She lost her husband to cancer. People told her, ‘Your husband will come back as another star, but he won’t come here. You should go someplace open, where you can see the sky.’ She went to Turkey and Greece, but she didn’t find the other star. Then she came to Egypt. She stayed in Cairo for three days, she went to Luxor and Aswan. She went to Saint Catherine’s, then she came here. She stayed across the street, under the trees in the oasis. She told me her story, and she said, ‘Here I am, and my husband
is not coming.’ And every time she would see a falcon, or a dove, or another bird, she followed it. ‘Maybe there’s a message coming from the other star,’ she said. But nothing happened.

“I started to talk with her and tell her that the way to see that other star was not to wait for something to happen, but to build up her home in this area. And she would start to be at peace with herself, and find something inside her, and that would be her other star.

“And she did this. But soon she discovered that life here is not so easy, not like dancing and singing as she was doing at home. Life is hard here. You have to work hard to collect food, to gather wood for the fire, to plant tomatoes or potatoes to get something to eat. But she did this work. She thought that she would physically find her way to the other star. And she was right. She used to write letters home, but once she reached here she stopped writing. She found a new life, a quiet space in the corner, and this was the other star.

“And then something happened that made us know,” Ramadan said. “Her family didn’t know what happened to her. She had disappeared. So they came to Cairo and searched for her. They asked about her, and nobody knew. Finally they published a note, with her picture, in a newspaper. The paper arrived here. Immediately we understood what happened, and we called the reporter in Cairo. The day after, her parents came to see her. ‘Come back home,’ they said. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m staying.’ ”

Ramadan paused even longer than normal, before adding, “That’s my answer for the first question you asked about the spiritual meaning of the desert.”

“So what happened?” I said. “Is she still here?”

“She stayed for a half a year,” he said, “and now she’s in Cairo for two months. It’s too cold to stay in the shade, and she didn’t want to stay in a room. She’s left, but she’s coming back.”

“But why?” I said. “Why did she do it?”

“Because when she came here, she felt as if she was coming into her own home. That’s because since the early times, the Sinai is a place that all the prophets, and all the spiritual people, are linked to. Everyone is home here.”

“And why is that?”

“Because everyone can find their other star here.”

“Is that star out there?” I said, pointing to the air. “Or in here?” I pointed to my chest.

He thought for a second. “There are some things I don’t know,” he said. “There are some things we might never know.”

2. And the Earth Opened Its Mouth

F
or as long as we were in the Sinai, we talked about food. We talked about the food we were eating. We talked about the food we wanted to eat. And mostly we talked about how we couldn’t complain about the food we were eating because that would make us too much like the Israelites. Misspeak and we’d be eating manna for forty years.

With that in mind, early on in our trip, I made a rogue prediction: Before leaving the Sinai we’d have an experience involving quail. It became something of a running joke. Everywhere we went—with the farmer in the Oasis of the Tamarisks, with the monks in Saint Catherine’s, with Ramadan—I asked if any of them had ever eaten quail in the Sinai, ever seen one fall from the sky, ever gone out into the desert one morning and seen them stacked knee-high, one on top of the other, as on a Thanksgiving table. None had. Quail were as elusive in the modern Sinai as archaeological evidence of the Exodus. “Don’t worry,” I said, mockingly by now. “God will provide.”

By our last morning, when we left Ramadan’s house and drove northeast along the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba toward the border with Israel, where we planned to pick up the Israelites’ wandering by spending a few days in the southern Negev, my taunt had lost a bit of its swagger and Avner was polite enough not to rub it in. In midmorning, we stopped in one of the beach towns where intrepid Germans and hippie Israelis seek refuge in grass huts to smoke dope and scuba dive.
Yusuf went to get gas, and Avner and I walked across the street to the first market we had seen in the Sinai. Suddenly we were boys in an arcade, as we ran around the aisles grabbing anything that wasn’t bread, cheese, tuna, or honey. In a matter of seconds we had the least-balanced food basket I’d ever assembled: fig bars, Cadbury chocolate milk, guava juice, raspberry juice (which Avner called “burning bush” juice), peanuts, butter cookies, and two dozen miniature bananas, still green, but we didn’t care.

After twenty frantic minutes, I stood staring at one of the refrigerated bins trying to decipher the fruit drawings on the yogurt canisters, when suddenly I noticed in the corner of the bin a plastic container crammed with about eighteen eggs. Only these weren’t normal-sized eggs, they were tiny and speckled with brown. They couldn’t be chicken eggs, I thought. What could they be? Maybe quail eggs. That’s it:
quail eggs!
I called Avner over and he started giggling uncontrollably. He checked with the store clerk, who verified the ornithology. An hour later we sat on a deserted beachfront of the eastern Sinai, made a small fire out of wormwood, and ate the most pleasing meal of our trip: chocolate milk, unripe bananas, two kinds of cookies, and hard-boiled quail eggs, which once we peeled away the shell were roughly the size of globules of manna.

“As you often say,” I said to Avner, raising a toast of burning bush juice, “how can you spend any time in the desert and not believe in miracles?”

Miracles aside, arriving in Israel from the Sinai is like arriving in Disney World from the Middle Ages. The sudden concentration of prosperity that hits one immediately upon crossing the border into Eilat is as disconcerting as it is relieving. Legend holds that after Creation, when the angels were painting the earth, they got tired and spilled their paints: The blue became the waters of Eilat, and the other colors its fish and corals. Some of those colors must have been saved for the topless bikinis and umbrella-festooned drinks that adorn the beaches today. In a way it seems only fitting that Eilat, one of those strategically placed Middle
Eastern locations that was occupied by a different power every two generations, has now been taken over by the twelve tribes of modern Israel: Ramada, Radisson, Sheraton, Holiday Inn, Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Ambassador, Princess, Neptune, King Solomon’s Palace, Aqua Sports International, even Club Med. The only milk and honey here are served in fake crystal goblets in dining halls of brass and glass overlooking the most crowded beaches between Cannes and Kuwait. In essence, Eilat is a Vegas-style, mirrored disco ball at the union of three deserts—the Sinai, the Negev, and the Arabian. Shake this plastic city and it won’t be covered by snow but by sand.

Having just sated ourselves across the border, we decided to pass through “the Riviera of the Middle East” as quickly as possible and head into the Negev, which the Bible calls “the land that devours its people.” Our plan for the next few days was to finish working our way through the rebellions that fill the bulk of Numbers and further press the question of what these repeated challenges to Moses’ authority meant to the Israelites in the desert.

For this trip, we were joined by Avner’s son, Ido, a tall, hawk-eyed twenty-five-year-old with a ponytail and surfer glasses. He had broad shoulders, like his mother, and the gentle demeanor and wry humor of his father. He could have been a California beach dude—except who needs the waves:The sand is enough. Early in our drive, when we veered off the highway and onto an off-road that Ido, a desert tour guide, preferred, I asked him the difference between driving on the highway and in the desert. “First, you don’t need seat belts,” he said. “Second, there are no police, so you can drive as fast as you can. Third, well, the view.”

And what a view it is. The Negev, which means “dry south country,” is the Siberia of Israel, a region of vast emptiness and barren beauty that has both fascinated and repelled observers since the days of the Bible. Shaped like an arrowhead pointing south, the Negev is bordered by Jordan to the east, the Sinai to the west, and the vast developed center of Israel to the north. Today its four thousand square miles represent 60 percent of the landmass of the State of Israel but hold only 6 percent of the population. Far from isolated, though, the Negev is actually part of a broad belt of deserts, including the Sahara, the Sinai, and the Arabian,
that girds much of the world. How much of the world? I asked Avner.

“Most of the subtropical area,” he said.

“Does this belt have a name?”

“The Subtropic Desert Belt.”

“
The Original Bible Belt.
Now there’s a name.”

Avner was actually apologetic about the Negev. “I wish you had seen it before the Sinai,” he said. But the Negev has its own dramas. Within minutes of leaving the blacktop, Ido was driving two-handed and two-footed over some of the rockiest terrain I’d ever crossed in a vehicle, using some of the most acrobatic driving I’d ever experienced. His technique involved a combination of leaning forward, rolling down the window, standing to peer over the hood, opening the door to pop out onto the running board, stopping temporarily to stack a few rocks into a pothole, then returning to spin his wheels, back up, lunge forward, and sprint into the open. At one point I realized that I was holding on to the handle above me with two hands, as if on an amusement ride. That was jolting enough, but when Ido reached over during one vertical lurch and grabbed the same handle, I knew we were at our most perilous. The whole experience reminded me of my first flight in a single-engine plane when I was twelve and the pilot reached under his seat during one particularly brutal patch of turbulence and strapped on his parachute, unconcerned that those of us in the back didn’t have that option. Ido’s rules notwithstanding, you do need seat belts in the desert just to stay in your seat.

After several hours, the road began to smooth a bit and we pulled into a clearing. Ido parked the jeep and we eagerly sprung free. In my haste I hadn’t noticed that we’d arrived at the edge of an astounding geological site. The Ramon Crater is a giant pockmark on the face of the Negev, a heart-shaped hole twenty-five miles long, six miles wide, and a quarter mile deep that looks like an oversized sand trap. Part of a geological phenomenon unknown outside Israel and the Sinai, the Ramon is the largest of three such gorges in the Negev that are commonly referred to by the Hebrew word
maktesh,
meaning mortar, as in mortar and pestle. Unlike the Grand Canyon, say, which is ten times
longer and four times deeper, and was formed by a river eroding the earth, the Ramon Crater was formed by collapsing earth following the creation of the Rift Valley hundreds of millions of years ago. The rift, by generating such a huge valley along the eastern border of today’s Israel, caused rivers that had drained to the west to shift to the east. This drainage slowly ate away the sandstone hill that once stood here. The hill actually consisted of a sandstone core underneath a limestone crust, and when the sandstone was depleted, the limestone collapsed like a soufflé, creating the crater.

“Don’t tell me, this is the largest such crater in the world,” I said to Avner.

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

With its layered walls and smooth sand floor, the crater is like a book that lay unread for generations. British aerial surveillance overlooked the formation, and not until 1948 did most people realize the crater existed. The Romans knew, of course; the crater floor is marked with milestones where an ancient road dissected the site. The effect of all this untouched grandeur is captivating. “This is the most beautiful place I’ve been in Israel,” I said.

“That’s quite a statement,” Avner said.

“Can you think of one more beautiful?”

“It reminds me of a poem by Abraham Shlonsky. ‘There may be a more beautiful place than this. There is no place more beautiful like this.’ ”

This being Israel, though, beauty is rarely enough; it comes with a potent buffet of politics, religion, and, inevitably, the Bible. In the nature reserve overlooking the crater, we ran into a pal of Avner’s who had worked at the site for sixteen years. Dafna was born in the north of Israel but now couldn’t imagine living in its grassy hills. She’d become a disciple of the desert, and, by dint of her job, a passionate defender of geology. The video the center plays for tourists to describe the crater, she explained, says the earth was created four billion years ago, a relatively safe statement in the scientific community. Over the years, however, some Orthodox Jewish visitors have emerged from viewing the video and spit on her. “The world was created 5,700 years ago,” they
insist, using the traditional calendar that dates the start of the world from the Creation story in Genesis.