SINAI
On Thursday, the alarm went off at four. I dressed and packed a bag with the few things I would need plus two blankets and a battery-powered torch. I knew that people climb Mount Sinai, known locally as Mount Moses, before dawn to see the sunrise. At two thousand two hundred meters altitude in the middle of winter, I imagined the blankets might come in useful.
At five sharp, I entered the hotel and in a few minutes, Corina emerged from an elevator. She saw me waiting and smiled, came to me and we exchanged a sociable embrace. She looked pretty that morning. I was getting used to her looks. The short hair had vastly improved her appearance. She was sportily dressed with a pair of tight fitting dark blue slacks and flat gym shoes, a beige woolen pullover and a dark blue duffel coat on top. Her flat shoes made her height less daunting and the tight trousers defined a well-shaped leg. The face was now familiar yet I knew nothing about her. Vaguely that she was married but nothing else. Perhaps, it was enough that one felt comfortable with the other. A measure of trust had developed and the companionship was relaxed and agreeable. Hopefully, we would share two full days in good fellowship.
We drove towards Heliopolis to take the road to Ismailia and from there on to Firdan, which had one of the bridges that crossed the Suez Canal. It was still dark and would remain this way for at least another hour. All our driving would be in the desert. We were lucky that the day promised to be fine. There was no sign of the slightest wind. I had never been to the Sinai before and had only my father's sketchy verbal directions to follow. In those days, no reliable route maps existed and the network of Egyptian highways was limited to a few principal routes.
I asked Corina if she had been in touch with her home since she came to Cairo. I expected calling from a big hotel like the Hilton to be simpler than the hassle one went through for an international call from a private phone in the early sixties.
'No, I called no one. I have nobody to call.'
'What about your husband?'
'We are divorced. We divorced soon after our trip to Egypt.'
'Oh dear. I'm sorry.'
'These things happen. The misfortunes of life. From one day to the next, you find yourself alone. But let's not talk about it. It depresses me. Let's talk of St. Catherine.'
'To tell you the truth, I expected at some point to have to answer a question or two and I did a little last-minute homework yesterday so you did not catch me unprepared.'
'Good for you Michael. You must have been a boy scout.'
'No, why?'
'Well their motto is: Be Prepared.'
I laughed and started my recitation. 'The Sinai has been described as a monument to the antiquity of life on earth. The history of the world is written in its stones and fossils. We have the fossilized reef animals of Ras Mohammed, the mines of El Maghara whose copper fuelled the Bronze Age. At Serabit El-Khadim where the pharaohs extracted turquoise, there is the temple of Hathor. There, archaeologists discovered carvings that record the earliest emergence of a phonetic alphabet as opposed to the hieroglyphs. Near Dahab, we have the Rock of Inscriptions where visitors recorded their passage in stone. At about 1300 BC, Moses, at the instigation of God who appeared to him in the guise of a burning bush that was not consumed by the fire, guided the Jewish people out of Egypt. They wandered for forty years in this God forsaken Sinai in search of the Promised Land of Canaan. The book of Exodus, which describes these wanderings, is the first great live reporting of mankind. In that wilderness, in the middle of nowhere, Man, in the person of the prophet Moses made direct contact with God on top of a mountain and brought to us the Ten Commandments. The first ethical, monotheistic code of history was born here. A moral and mental awakening which holds sway to our day over three millenniums later.'
'Excellent, Michael. So far A plus.'
'Don't interrupt Corina, please. Let me continue while the facts are still fresh in my mind. I was reading them less than eight hours ago. The desire to be near God and away from the persecution of the Romans brought to the Sinai many of the early Christians who were looking for peace and quiet, isolation and saintliness. From the third century AD, small monastic communities arose around Mount Horeef, the site of the burning bush, at Faran and other saintly places in South Sinai. These first monks and hermits led a life of privation and want, living in caves and barely existing for a life of prayer. They used to gather every Sunday at the site of the burning bush for prayers, the Holy Communion and to hear the sermon of their Bishop. In the year 313 AD, Constantine the Great allowed the worship of the Christian religion and the monks of the Sinai asked the Empress Helen, his mother, to protect them. As a result, some years later, she built a small church on the site of the burning bush for the devotion of the Virgin Mary as well as a tower for the protection of the monks.
'A new era for monasticism in the Sinai started in the sixth century AD, when the emperor Justinian ordered the construction of a formidable fortification to fence St. Helen's buildings together with a new church and cells for the monks. Justinian also made provision for the defense of the monastery by bringing two hundred families of slaves from Alexandria and Eastern Europe. And provision for the supply of cereals from Egypt.'
'My God, Michael, did you learn this stuff by heart? Now let me tell you a few things as well. After all, I am supposed to be the archaeologist. This is not, by the way, my special field but, as you can imagine, it interests me enormously.'
'What is your special field?'
'Well, I have done quite a lot of work on the early, cave-dwelling man in Europe, fieldwork in the south and west of France and Spain and wrote many articles on the cave drawings I have studied. Prehistoric art, but art nonetheless. Some of this prehistoric art is breathtaking. In a way, these studies defined my life but I may tell you about this later. Now we are on the subject of St. Catherine and it's so exciting to think we are going to see all those important religious and historical structures. St. Helen's church, built in the sixth century and lying directly on the site of the burning bush, the main church with the original wooden beams and wooden door with carvings dating from Justinian's time. Inside the church, there is the oldest and one of the finest mosaics of the Eastern Church called the mosaic of the Metamorphosis. But apart from the buildings, there are collections of priceless works of art. The monastery has a gallery where it exhibits a small number of icons out of its two-thousand-icon collection. Every single one of these icons is of inestimable historic and artistic value. Some of them date from the sixth century and are painted on wax. These are of the early Byzantine period and are of Hellenistic, Georgian, Russian, Syrian and Coptic style and technique. A large part of the collection dates from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. The monastery has also a collection of Western oil paintings, fine sacerdotal ornaments, marbles, enamels, chalices, reliquaries, including one donated by Czar Alexander II in the nineteenth century, and another by the Empress Catherine of Russia in the seventeenth.'
'What about the monastery's library? You haven't said a word about it.'
'Did you think I would forget the most significant treasure of the monastery? It is supposed to be second in importance only to that of the Vatican, in both the numbers and the importance of its manuscripts. The collection consists of some three thousand manuscripts of which two thirds are Greek and the rest are Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Slavic, Syriac, Georgian and in other languages. Most are of Christian content but there are documents of historical importance originating from emperors, patriarchs, prelates, rulers and sultans. Today, the most important treasure of the library is the Codex Syriacus written roughly in 400 AD. In the past, the monastery possessed the Codex Sinaiticus, the manuscript containing the Greek text of the Holy Bible, the Old and the New Testament, dated around the middle of the fourth century. It is the most valuable manuscript in the world. In 1865, a German scholar by the name of Thissendorf borrowed it on behalf of the Russian Emperor and never returned it to the monastery. In 1913, the British Museum bought it for a hundred thousand pounds and it is still in its possession. The most ancient Greek bible in the library now dates from 717 AD.'
'Very good, Corina.'
'To be quite frank, I too had a booklet on St. Catherine's that I looked at last night. I bought it from the hotel's newsstand.'
We had been traveling for about an hour and the first light of dawn was breaking. I drove at a leisurely pace in order to spare some brain capacity for all the talking about St. Catherine's.
'Corina, don't you find the human impulse to mysticism and asceticism strange? The isolation and privation of everything that makes life worth living: creature comforts, family life, food, entertainment and the human sexual drives, for the rewards of the afterlife. In some ways, the pious and ascetic remind me of misers. They deprive themselves now, in order to amass a bounty for later. The misers for this life, the pious for the afterlife. The one is not better than the other and both are deluded and even contemptible. Both are inhuman, hard and unforgiving. More often than not, petty and base. Little do they know that they are heading, like the rest of us, for the big sleep. Without dreams.'
'Am I to understand that you are not a believer?'
'Some things are very difficult to grasp. What about you?'
'As you can imagine, anyone who studies the evolution of any part of this earth would find it very hard to be a believer. Especially an archaeologist who studies the evolution of the hominids and of pithecanthropus erectus to prehistoric man.'
'Yes, even a layman like I am who is simply interested in our tiny planet earth and its relation to the universe cannot on one side believe in God the Creator of Man and on the other absorb the absolutely mind-numbing numbers of astronomy. The millions of galaxies, billions of stars, the distances in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of light years, the big bang, the black holes from which even light cannot escape; the expanding universe. Where does God, the Father figure, the personal God, come in? It just takes a little courage to submit to logic and shake off the fantasy. And nothing changes except that one feels a little more on his own with no illusive supernatural help to support him in time of need.'
Nearly two hours had gone by. The sun had risen and promised us a good sunny day. We reached Ismailia, a small but one of the cleaner and neater towns of Egypt. It was perhaps so because it housed part of the administration of the Suez Canal. The wide well kept streets with the green lawns and presentable houses were the remnants of the luxury provided by the old International Suez Canal Company to its foreign employees. There are sporting clubs on the canal, which belonged to the company and were an indispensable amenity to the life of foreigners in Egypt. Usually only very few and important Egyptians saw the insides of these clubs.
In Ismailia, we found a rest house, had some refreshments and sandwiches and visited the toilets. We also made some provision of water and food for the rest of the trip. We then took the road to Firdan, going north alongside the canal and for Corina it was an unexpected pleasure to see both the Suez Canal and the ships traveling on it.
'We are obviously going north,' said Corina, 'I suppose after Firdan one goes to Port Said.'
'Yes. Port Said is another clean, neat and proper town. It is Egypt's third largest city and together with Alexandria, it was considerably Europeanized with a sizeable foreign community, which consisted mainly of Frenchmen, Greeks and Italians. The main administrative machinery of the Suez Canal is based there.'
'Can you tell me something of the Egyptian ethics that is not immediately apparent to a foreigner?'
'Well, let me try. It is not obvious but there is a contradiction, a paradox in the ethical makeup of the average Egyptian. I think it stems principally from the Moslem religion and the unthinking adherence of the faithful to it. The Koran itself is contradictory in its appraisal of the status of women. While it says that women are equal to men and have the same privileges, it undermines this by saying that the woman is like a field where man sows his seed. It gives man the right to marry up to four women and in the fourth sura, or chapter, it officially permits husbands to punish their wives by beating. It prescribes, however, the stick to be used. It must be thin and light so as not to cause serious or permanent injury.'
'How very thoughtful,' said Corina and laughed. 'I bet the ruling was strictly adhered to through the ages.'
'The woman inherits only a small fraction of what a man would, in similar circumstances. The ease by which a husband can divorce his wife is another factor. It is enough for a man to say to his wife three times, I divorce thee. Whereas the woman cannot rightly divorce her husband. Sexual relations are absolutely forbidden outside marriage.'
'So much so,' piped in Corina indignantly, 'that even when a woman is raped, she is the guilty one by definition. She is the instigator, the inciter and is condemned, stoned and killed because she was raped! I have read of some cases, which occurred even in our days. I doubt the cave dwelling pithecanthropus I studied ever attained such a degree of bestiality.'
'Take it easy Corina, let me go on. So given these facts and not forgetting that the Koran prescribes in startling detail the minutiae of daily life you get the following: a very religious and conservative population in which the sheikh, the Moslem priest, has considerable sway over the community and it is not unusual for people in a moral dilemma to seek his advice. Also a puritanical attitude towards sex, where any sort of public display of affection will offend the bystanders. There is strict censorship by the government of films and books and there is a section of the police, which watches over public morals. On the other hand, there is a laxity of family ties, which would not seem to conform to this conservatism. People marry and divorce with the greatest of ease and insouciance. Where a European, more often than not, will view a divorce as a failure in his life that will distress him deeply, to a Moslem it is a minor rearrangement in his family status.'
'That's very interesting and to the western mind, it sounds very strange.' Finally, we reached Firdan, something between a large village and a tiny town.
Dowdy and sleepy. The swing bridge operates only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, it swings open to let the ships travel in the canal. Although I did not know the time schedule, we were lucky to find it open for vehicle traffic and we crossed into the Sinai Peninsula.
'So Corina we're in the Sinai. It is a first for me too. Sinai, the holy land. A vast expanse traversed time and again by prophets, saints, pilgrims and warriors. Do you feel the thrill?'
'Of course I do. I wanted so much to come here.'
'Shall I recite another little bit of the homework I did last night? Although you probably know more than I do.'
'Please go ahead.'
'The Sinai is a triangular shaped peninsula and is the meeting point of two continents and the separation point of two seas. It has been described as fifty six thousand square kilometers of nothing. A desert land, which rises to rugged granite mountain ranges in the south and makes a steep descent into the sea in the southeast, to the Gulf of Aqaba. In the north, the elevation drops to a plain, which extends to southern Israel. There is a thin coastline along the western shore on which we shall be traveling with a few villages and sandy beaches. I do not know why the Red Sea with its clear waters was so named. It is a sea teeming with a truly wondrous variety of sea life, brilliant coral reefs, colored tropical fish and a frenzy of marine activity. The Sinai has no permanent watercourse and very little rainfall especially in the south. Life is very difficult and even the Bedouin population is gradually disappearing.'
We started heading south again. The road was not in good shape and I drove slowly. I had hoped we would be traveling in close proximity to the sea but for most of the way the road was well inland and we only got glimpses of it now and then. All through our journey, I had to answer questions. Hundreds of questions. Corina was an avid interrogator. She wanted to know all about Egypt. At times, I did not have the answers and felt embarrassed that I was ignorant about important matters. Nevertheless, I talked to her about the Copts. It was St. Mark, the Gospel writer, who introduced Christianity in Egypt. By 200 AD, Christianity was strong especially in Alexandria and a century later it had spread throughout Egypt.
Nowadays the Christians constitute about a tenth of the total population. I told her how even to the present day the Moslems discriminated them at all levels of government employment and the army. They could never hope to advance to the higher echelons of power. How as a result they had become the merchant and professional class of Egypt. They were just as fanatical as the Moslems where their religion was concerned. Officially, the cracks were papered over and the leaders of each community referred to the others as brothers. In fact, both Moslems and Copts are brothers of the same stock. Both are descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The Arab invasion was numerically unimportant to influence the original race. Most Moslems are descendants of Christian Egyptians who converted to Islam after the Arab invasion about 640 AD when Islam became the official religion.
The road remained in poor shape for the rest of the journey and our progress was slow, from one tiny Bedouin village to the next. These housed Bedouins who had renounced the traditional tents and the nomadic way of life. About ten thousand in all, very few of these continued to traverse the desert on camelback. We traveled the land through which the Israelites wandered for forty years. Darkness had fallen by the time we arrived at St. Catherine's village, a handful of houses and the mosque. We were again lucky to have a full moon. The sun in the morning and the moon at night. Three kilometers down the road was the monastery at the end of a narrow valley, dwarfed on all sides by bare, rocky mountains. We were exhausted. We parked the car at the side of the road took our bags, crossed a garden with cypresses and walked to the entrance at the side of the fortification. The monastery is at an altitude of about one thousand five hundred meters and the atmosphere was clear but the cold was bitter. It was a little after eight and we had been traveling for nearly fifteen hours.