Because It Was There

November 4-5, 2010

We headed to the Sinai Desert and Mount Sinai, which contains Mount Catherine, Mount Moses, etc.  Long bus ride (7 hours).  Interesting scenery.  Sheer desolation.  We arrived at night so we couldn’t see the mountains.  We had a quick meal (like every other one we have had – buffet) and went to bed to prepare for our 12:45 am wake-up call.  That’s right.  Forty fine minutes after midnight.  Why?  Well, to hike up Mount Moses and see the sunrise, of course.  Duh.

As you can imagine, 12:45 came very early. We gathered outside, got on the bus and drove a short distance to the monastery at St. Catherine, which is at the base of the mountain.  There, we met our Bedouin guide, named Muhammad interestingly enough.  Off we set for what was billed as a “strenuous” hike followed by a 750 step climb to the summit.  But, don’t worry.  Tthere are camels that you can ride at least part of the way.  For some reason, the idea of riding a camel, one of the world’s ugliest and smelliest animals, on a tiny saddle up a mountain did not appeal to me.  I guess I’m just funny that way.  So, I was determined to hike it. 

The hike started gently enough.  Gently enough to take in the incredible stars spread out across the sky like something from the ceiling of a Las Vegas limo.  I have seen stars in the desert in the desert Southwest in the U.S. and that had made quite an impression, but I have never seen stars like this.  And, the shooting stars.  Too numerous to count.  It was beautiful.  But, soon the trail turned rather rocky and the incline intensified so I spent the next few hours looking mostly at my feet or at least the ground where my next step would land.  Yes, if I had been awake enough to do the math, I would have realized that this was going to be quite a hike, seeing as how we started at about 1:30 and the sun rises at 6.

A few people opted for camels from the get go.  As the hike progressed, the number of camel lovers began to increase, and it wasn’t because they were getting any prettier or less smelly (and they make the most foul noises).  Leave it to the insightful Bedouins.  Somehow they knew the best places – the places where one’s willpower and determination was at a lull -- to hit you up out of the darkness for a camel.  “Mister, good camel.  I take you to the top.  Good camel.  Just twenty dollar.”

I had decided to hang at the back of the pack to make sure that no one got left behind.  Of course, the Bedouins assumed that whoever was at the back of the pack was the weakest person to prey on.  Once they figured out that I could carry on a conversation with them – that I wasn’t winded – they would move up in the line.  This created the very situation that I wanted to avoid:  hiking up a mountain with a smelly, stubborn, obscenely grunting animal who cared very little for my personal space.  I had to get pretty rude a couple of times to get them to leave us alone.

I know what you are thinking.  How do you see to hike at night?  A small flashlight of course.  After all, you only need to know where your next step is going to be.  Sort of like life isn’t it?  We always worry about where we are going instead of just taking the next step.  Anyway, I had my trusty little mini-Maglite.  I was so proud that I had planned ahead and had put new batteries in it before I left.  Well, halfway up the mountain, it went out.  Really?  My trusty mini-Maglite had failed me?  Of course not.  I assumed that it was the bulb.  It was.  Fortunately, it happened just as we neared a little coffee shack on the mountain side.  About the time that we were going to start back up (and I realized that incessantly shaking it wasn’t doing any good), I remembered that there is a spare in the base of it (you forgot too didn’t you?).  Mohamed helped me change it at one of the little coffee houses on the way up (I couldn’t see the darn little wires that had to be threaded through the light base).  A Bedouin guide’s duties are extensive. But, will I remember to replace that spare bulb?

A strenuous hike.  An understatement of biblical proportion.  The slope increased.  The number of uneven rocks and steps increased.  The number of loose rocks increased. The number of people opting for camels increased.  My heart rate increased. And then came the steps.  750 steps.  That’s roughly 75 short stories.  No big deal right?  People did that at the World Trade Center.  But, these weren’t nice even steps with handrails.  They were irregular, uneven, sand-covered, winding stone “steps”.  I thought my heart was going to explode and that my lung capacity had suddenly decreased by half.  My thighs were burning like I was wired to some sort of sick medical experiment.  But, I had to make it to the summit before sunrise and the sky was starting to lighten.  I was no longer at the back of the pack.  “Go on without me”, they said one after another.  “We had to make the summit”, I said to myself in my Sir Edmond Hillary voice. “It was difficult leaving them behind on the mountain.”  Sounds like a dramatic movie.  I lead the charge to the summit.  Not that I was better prepared than everyone else.  I just had momentum.  And make it we did. 

We made it before sunrise.  There is a small church at the summit of Mount Moses.  There were a few landings on the rock there.  There were people from all over the world.  And then, the sun began coming up over the smaller mountains in the distance.  People began to sing and pray in all their different beautiful languages.  What an incredible experience.  To think that we were at the summit of what tradition held to be the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments and there were all these different interpretations and expressions of people’s relationships with God being expressed in the same spot.  I know that there is no proof that this is the same mountain where the law was laid down for Moses, but somehow at that point in time, no one on the mountain top seemed to care.  After all, it wasn’t about Moses.  It was about them and their God and his sunrise.