note: the photographs in this chapter are not from the E-Tih desert but from the Negev in Israel
BARREN GROUND - a trek in the E-Tih desert in western Sinai, the “Desert of Getting Lost”
Not without apprehension, I set out on my very first trek in the Sinai - an eight-day trek through the plateau that takes up the northern two thirds of the Sinai Peninsula, a ominously known in Arabic as E-Tih – the Desert of Getting Lost. Soon enough I learn that the E-Tih is, indeed, the proverbial desert – a barren, monotonous wasteland that drains the mind and dulls the senses.
We cross into Egypt at Taba, just south of Eilat without much difficulty. Since the return of the Sinai as part of the peace agreements with Egypt, Israelis have been able to visit the shores of the Red Sea as well as the High Mountains of the Sinai in the south, without a visa. However, as we are heading for the Western Sinai, we had to apply for one several weeks in advance and indeed, as soon as we leave the coastal road, we are stopped at a checkpoint where our papers are carefully examined.
Around noon of our first day, after driving west on a hot, flat road through a tedious wasteland, we reach the sleepy settlement of Nahl, lying literally “in the middle of nowhere”. It seems to owe its existence solely to being a place of rest on the long road through the desert plains, roughly trailing the ancient pilgrimage route from Egypt to Mecca. It is a place straight out of the movies, a set design for French gendarmes in colonial North Africa, where people just wile away the day in aimless recline, while the mesmerizing ceiling fan turns and turns.
Here we must wait for a photographer who is to join our trek but missed her plane from Tel Aviv to Eilat and is being brought by a special jeep to this god-forsaken movie set. We have lunch in a dark room at a roadside restaurant, with tired plastic tablecloths and walls painted in two colors, the lower, darker section in shiny oil paint that can be wiped clean, when someone chooses to do so. Our Israeli guide tries to stretch out the meal, with coffee and more coffee and tea and soft drinks. The ceaseless buzz of the flies brings on a hypnotic state of not caring about anything – there is no point to drain your energies in the futile effort of waving them away.
Waiting and waiting is what people in this town seem to be doing, passing the time by playing backgammon or fingering their stringed worry-beads. Time here is one long expanse of duration, without any ripples or disturbances, like the endless distances of the hamada, the stony, flat desert plains on which we have been driving.
There seems to be some archeological site nearby, the ruins of a Khan from the Ottoman period, serving the pilgrims on their age-old route to Mecca. But after our lazy lunch, we have succumbed to the reigning lethargy of the place and only a few hikers are able to muster the energy to go outside in the sweltering heat to explore the site.
Late that day, when the photographer arrives, we finally leave the languorous town and after a short stop at the ruins of a castle high above the broad vista of the arid El-Arish streambed, we drive towards the western side of the peninsula. Now we are traveling on bumpy dirt roads that run through a more varied landscape of rugged desert hills, arriving at a dry riverbed where we set up our tents in total darkness.
The next morning, we walk a short distance, past a few Bedouin tents, until we get to Wadi Fukiya, where date-trees line the streambed – a veritable desert paradise blessed with generous pools. Never have I seen so much water in the desert. Eagerly, I plunge into the clear waters in a narrow gorge sunk into the broad, rocky dry streambed, swimming through long, interconnected pools contained by high limestone walls. Instead of hiking through the gorge, we are swimming through it.
The entire day is spent in water, sauntering from one swimming hole to another, with their gorgeous, clear waters at times surrounded by beaches of pure white sand. We do not feel the slightest sense of hurry about getting anywhere. Perhaps there is too much leisure, too much of the good in this garden of indulgence, lulling the body – and the spirit. This is the desert of plenitude that will soon become a vague recollection, totally overshadowed by a vastly different face of the desert.
On the second day of hiking, we leave camp in the early morning mist, going up a ridge, negotiating our way on a narrow path, then down into another streambed, past a flock of impertinent camels that seem almost camouflaged in the beige rocks and sand. The acacia tree we reach at Bir Buriya appears a graying green, as if we are viewing the entire landscape through a filter of dust. A Bedouin woman is collecting its curled pods for her goats that do not have enough shrubbery to feed on in this year of severe drought.
Eran, our Israeli guide, has promised we will find water to fill our plastic soda bottles at the nearby t’mille, a little hole dug in the gravelly ground, where water, retained by an impermeable rock layer below, gradually seeps in from the sides of the hole. But the t’mille at Bir Buriya refills too slowly and the Bedouin woman at the spring asked us not to use up their water supply, and so we go on to the next t’mille, half an hour away, but that one turns out to be contaminated by animal droppings. I start to worry that we will be left without enough drinking water for the long haul up Wadi Marzaba. On the second day of our hike, we already learn that the presence of water in this parched land cannot be counted on, despite its abundance in Wadi Fukiya. Fortunately, the next meager spring is not polluted and after filling our bottles, we begin the difficult ascent.
The thin, pastel mood of the early morning air has turned into an insolent, calculated heat, which greatly magnifies the effort required to push ourselves up the steep incline. There is no room for subtleties here, there is no place left for the spirit. The climb seems endless, the landscape consists of nothing but bare, brown rocks, loose small stones, with other hills blocking the view of the Gulf of Suez, which should have been behind us and could have offered a saving grace, a lifting of the spirits. There is the repeated illusion of approaching the top, only to discover we still have another stretch to go. If I had to choose a setting for the ascent of Sisyphus, it certainly would be this.
We are experiencing the desert at its harshest. My body is yearning to capitulate to the unforgiving heat, to let myself fall, so that the ordeal will end. Surrender, that total immersion of the spirit, the concept developed by my teacher and mentor in college, Kurt H. Wolff, is not possible in a situation like this, when the body intrudes, when it brutally calls attention to itself, when you are overtaken by pain and exhaustion, or by strong physical urges. All you want then is to take care of that disturbance, to return to the state of equilibrium. [1]
A slight breeze brings some relief when at last we reach the saddle, but the landscape is still harsh and unwelcoming. Even from up here we cannot see the Gulf of Suez and on the other side there is not much of a view either. The descent towards Wadi Shalala is slightly less hot, yet the landscape continues to be dry, with few, scraggy trees. There is no sign of water.
When we reach the riverbed of the Shalala, at the bottom of our descent, we seem to be entering a friendlier terrain of ochre and burnt-red sandstone, but I am too tired and hot to really be charmed by those rock formations that in other circumstances would have let my imagination run wild. Suddenly cries of joy burst through the desert air, as the others have reached a small oasis with clusters of date trees providing ample shade. In the riverbed is a spring with shallow pools, encircled by tall grasses. In this newly regained paradise, we drench ourselves in the waters, even if they are somewhat muddy and saturated with algae, then relish our humble lunch and find ourselves wallowing in a drawn-out siesta.
The path above Wadi Shalala is easier, with no more strenuous uphill ventures, but it is still a long and hot walk. Then, in the afternoon, as the wadi begins to widen, we reach a place where the streambed consists of large, silvery planes of rock, like giant landing strips for extra-terrestrials. In the late light of the day something happens here – my body gathers itself again, my exhaustion begins to fade. My spirit gets ready to take off.
Even the harshest desert day brings its moments of softness: in the early morning and again at dusk when the extremes of day and night are tempered by diffused light and comforting temperatures. The desert contains never-ending cycles of soft and harsh states. On cold windy nights and in the unbearable heat of the day, you easily forget the mellowing hours of poetry, the time of reflection, of surrender – when your mundane, bodily needs cease to intrude.
That night we reach camp in total darkness, after clambering up many strata of rock. The desert is already turning cold and windy, the soft hours are gone. Up on the highlands, the jeeps are waiting with our tents and sleeping bags and the expedition’s Bedouin cook welcomes us with a hearty soup.
The following day we set out for a walk in the blaring heat of the sun on the flat plains of the highlands. In these plains of the hamada desert, covered with grayish, angular stones, there are no landmarks, no distinguishing features, nothing in the distance to mark the way.
Here the sense of desolation prevails. When there is no exterior form I can incorporate into my body’s map of the world, when there is nothing to measure myself against, my ability to grasp my surroundings fails to work. When there are no places to rest, to touch, to remember, when there is no richness of color and texture or change of rhythm, I am bound to lose my own distinctive features, my individuality.
It is here that I begin to relapse into a state of apathy. If all directions are the same, then what difference does it make which way I go? In the Desert of Getting Lost, I begin to feel again the temptation to give up, to quit, to fall – not unlike the immense, illicit pleasure of falling asleep, relinquishing all responsibility for myself, for having to be on guard. Perhaps I fear the desert because part of me wants to get lost.
*
To the Bedouin, who know it intimately, the hamada desert is probably not an amorphous space – there are clear directions and goals, there is an intricate web of well-traveled trails crisscrossing the plains, like veins running through the body. There are camel paths, pilgrimage routes, trade routes of caravans carrying spices and turquoise. They follow ways that are laid down by the landscape – from water source to water source, seeking out the milder slopes, bypassing a waterfall, crossing at the lowest place between high peaks - a mountain pass. These desert dwellers seem to be attuned to the large expanses of seeming emptiness, while noticing the wealth of nuances along the way that are invisible to those of us who are not from the desert.
Khader, our Bedouin guide, or dalil, an old, wrinkled man with a glassy eye and a perennial cough, certainly knows where he is taking us, even if it appears to me that we are walking through an unending expanse of nothingness.
After about ten exceedingly long kilometers, he resolutely makes a turn to the left in the middle of nowhere, and we find ourselves descending into a wadi that has not been visible before. It is another hot, dry day and again the body is threatening to defeat the spirit.
We eat our lunch at the foot of a dry waterfall with scant shade at its base, the basins of its large pools empty and uninspiring, then continue on another long, hot walk, when the view suddenly opens up and in the hazy distance lies the broad riverbed of Wadi Abu Gjada, carved deeply into the highland plains. Its dark, rugged banks, silhouetted in the late hours of the day, are finally beginning to lift my spirit, after the oppressive trudging through the brown, fiery landscape. Another hot day is redeemed at the scattered light of dusk.
It is already dark when we are met by the jeeps that will take us to our camp near the tomb of Nas’rallah, a pilgrimage site of all the Bedouin of the region. We enter the thickness of the night on a long ride in the broad streambed, lying in the back of the open vehicles and gazing at a sea of flickering stars. All along the way, tall bodies of vertical rock rise above us in the darkened riverbed, like grand, shadowy sentinels.
Then we start to hear running water and the splashing of the wheels going through puddles that seem to cover huge stretches of the dirt road. We are driving through a dense forest of silhouetted date trees that continue for kilometers on end. This is Ein Higiya, one of those legendary oases that appear straight out of dreams. In the dark, it seems ever so dense and lush. The desert is coming alive again.
*
A desert trek in these isolated regions is a journey from oasis to oasis, from plenitude to plenitude – in between it crosses through the void. As an artist, I know from experience that there is a time when a sojourn in the netherworld is necessary – my greatest fear is to remain stuck, imprisoned, in the emptiness and despair.
It is only in retrospect that all that pain and agony I sometimes go through seem to have a meaning, a meaning that I did not experience in the depths of the depression. If someone had assured me that this change would happen, as it has often happened in the past, I would not have believed it. It would not have made sense. Even though I go through these upheavals again and again – the chaos before creation, the agony and temptation to quit art altogether – knowing, that, at least for me, it is a necessary phase of the creative process, this would be no consolation.
I often ask myself, if the work I created would have the same depth, if I had not been there, in the depths, myself. Perhaps that despair is part of living on the thin membrane on the “face” of the abyss, the Hebrew al penei tehom – where I could go either way. At times, I fall, deep, deep down, and then, miraculously, I resurface with new insight and strength, and fly.
The Jungian psychologist Thomas Moore suggests we should let depression have a worthy place in our lives and not see it as a disease that must be eradicated, an attitude that is fed by our denial of death. Depression, he writes, is a valid state of being that can bring us in touch with such qualities as “the need for isolation, the coagulation of fantasy, the distilling of memory, and accommodation with death” [2]. It is a journey into the dark domain of Thanatos, the way Persephone must cross the river Styx into the netherworld every single year, to return to earth with the new beginnings of spring.
The cycle of desert-oasis-desert-oasis is never-ending, and depression is a period of drought, a rite of passage that I must go through, enabling me to reach greater insight and understanding. To accept the void as part of life while in the midst of a depression, to grasp it as essential, is an art, a painful lucidity I seldom attain.
I imagine that to the Bedouin this cycle is the natural order of things. They seem to be able to walk for hours in the burning heat, through the endless expanses of nothingness, without appearing to lose the essence of their being, without getting lost in despair. They know that in the late afternoon the light is soft and glowing, that at the end of the day there is plenitude and calm.
*
The following morning, we walk again in the hot, monotonous highlands for a long, long time, and then, finally, begin to descend into Wadi Taibe, that Khader proudly proclaims belongs to his own family. From the path we can see a large blue-green pool at the bottom of a waterfall, with a beach of pure, white sand. I already begin to imagine myself in those clearest of waters, swimming to where the pool’s glassy surface is rippled by the drizzling water, near a moss-covered wall. But the deeply religious Khader begs us not to bathe in his pool – perhaps he does not want it desecrated by our half-naked bodies. And so, we are left with nothing but a cruel mirage.
Hot and sweaty, our refreshing swim denied, we follow the dry wadi with water from the spring flowing alongside us firmly encased in a black irrigation hose – the omnipresent remains of Israeli technology in the Sinai. Khader is quick to assert that his family refrains from the temptation of the lucrative, prohibited planting of marijuana and opium poppy and practices a more modest, traditional agriculture in the fields further down the wadi. We pass a donkey’s carcass at the foot of a waterfall and the remnants of a charcoal-burning pit. It is too hot to really appreciate my surroundings, and once again, the body interferes.
At the mouth of the wadi, near Khader’s agricultural plots, we are picked up by the jeeps and taken on long, twisting back roads, returning to the highlands, and finally reach the spring of Ein Yarka. Here the white, hard limestone layers are deeply cut, forming a tall, dry waterfall with a green pool, like a single eye, down at its base. It is a narrow, vulva-shaped formation that widens at the opposite end, gradually tapering down until the rock walls become level with the dry riverbed and the canyon opens to the landscape. At last we have reached the pool we had longed for all day, but it is late in the afternoon and getting chilly, so that only a couple of hikers go in for a dip.
Even though it is an extraordinary place, Ein Yarka does not evoke in me the primal images it would have on other occasions – perhaps because my senses have been drained by the tiring nothingness of E-Tih, or, more likely, because we arrived at Ein Yarka by jeep. Throughout the trek the jeeps would meet us at our camping site, after we had walked for an entire day, bringing our food and sleeping gear, but now they came to pick us up in the early afternoon and took us all the way across the desert to see this spring. If we had walked this stretch, a strenuous uphill climb, Ein Yarka would have crowned the day.
It seems that traveling by jeep undermines the experience of nature, by dropping you down at one “attraction” after another, breaking up the experiential thread that binds extraordinary places, disrupting the gradual unfolding of time. It totally nullifies the element of surprise, of trudging for an entire day in the heat and then suddenly be struck by an incredible discovery, tantalizing the senses and the spirit. By making nature more accessible and accommodating, mass tourism, with its travel by bus and jeep, diminishes its aura. [3]
Illustrating the loss of aura, the naturalist Jack Turner tells the story of his adventurous descent into deep canyons in the remotest parts of a Utah wilderness, where he was suddenly confronted by larger-than-life figures painted on the dark rock walls, “transmuted from mere stone, as if by magic”. [4] When he returned, many years later, the pictographs had been thoroughly photographed and studied, the site had been named and marked and a comfortable trail had been laid. For him, the power of the figures had been gravely eroded. To put it in different words, surrender is no longer likely when everything is predictable and known, when there is no uncertainty and risk and no sense of total immersion.
After a wondrous night of camping in the streambed of the broad Nahal El Arish, the jeeps drive us to the nearby spring of Ein Abu Natigna, a deep, crooked chasm cut into horizontal layers of pale-colored rock, crenellated at the rims like a clamshell of colossal proportions that has been embedded, upright, in the earth. It would have been thrilling to swim through its narrow, winding canal, but the canyon’s interconnected pools, which, our guide had promised throughout the trip, would provide the ultimate swimming experience, perhaps the climax of the expedition, are utterly dry. Again, the harsh drought of the E-Tih wilderness wins out, proving our first day in the abundant Wadi Fukiya to have been a mere fata morgana.
We begin to get ready for our trek to the mountain pass, following Nakeb Rakane, the age-old caravan trail that leads to the ancient turquoise mines and on to the Gulf of Suez. Khader, our dalil, who is to stay on his side of the mountain, points out the old nakeb, where several paths coming from different directions converge, before going up to the pass and here we take leave of him.
It is a long, hot walk up with many deceptive saddles and summits, when you think you are almost there and then realize there is still another slope to climb. Then, suddenly, in one almost painful blow, the view explodes in front of my eyes, revealing a vast landscape of undulating sands, enveloped in a purple haze. Here, at the edge of these cliffs, one thousand meters above sea level, the E-Tih Desert comes to a sudden end. An occasional hill rises like an island above the sandy sea below, containing turquoise and manganese mines of Pharaonic times and the intriguing temple of Sarabit el Khadam to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, where we spend the following day. In the far distance are the glorious High Mountains of the Sinai, that awaken my intense yearning for that trek – which I will do less than six months later.
On top of these cliffs, at the edge of the Desert of Getting Lost, I can finally see clearly and begin to rise above the void – despite the tiredness of the long uphill haul, despite the “interference” of my body. Here I am able to grasp the cycle of depression-creation-depression as a whole, regaining the faith that the fall, however harsh it may be, is bound to be followed by another ascent to the altitudes of clarity. And creation.
* * *
Notes
1. Surrender cannot occur when one “is not gathered, whole (…). (T)he body, instead of integrating itself with the rest of the person, makes claims that interfere with such integration.” Kurt H. Wolff, “Surrender and the Body”, in Kurt H. Wolff, Surrender and Catch, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht Holland, 1976, p. 188
2. Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, Harper Perennial, N.Y. 1994, p 146
3. Jack Turner elaborates on the concept of aura, introduced by Walter Benjamin in the latter’s famous essay, “The work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Benjamin defines this quality of art or landscape, as “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Jack Turner elaborates on the concept in terms of mass tourism: “Photographic reproduction and mass tourism are now commonplace and diminish a family of qualities broader than, though including our experience of art: aura is affected, but so is wildness, spirit, enchantment, the sacred, holiness, magic, and soul.” P. 15 in Turner, The Abstract Wild, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1997.
4. Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1997.
p.8. See the chapter entitled “The Maze and Aura” for this story
[“I had become a tourist to my own experience.” (p.11)]