I'll add some illustrations when I get around to learning html.
One hazy afternoon in January of 1991 I was lounging outside a Cairo teahouse, reading an English newspaper and smoking English cigarettes. A pallid, pasty young Englishman who was choking on a shish (a traditional water pipe the size of a fire hydrant) mistook me for a fellow national and tried to strike up a conversation about English football. Nigel and I quickly became friends. He worked for an English tour operator, and we had humorous anecdotes to exchange about tourist situations. It turned out that not only were we staying in the same hotel, we were in adjacent rooms. He tried to persuade me to come along with him on a three day safari in the Sinai Peninsula. I was hesitant until I met the organizer -let us call him Hassan the Liar. It was immediately obvious that he was a colorful if depraved character, and that we were in for an adventure.
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We took an overnight bus to Dahab, an idyllic Bedouin village on the Red Sea. We were treated to loud Egyptian musical videos until 3:00 AM. After a rest stop they turned on the radio. Some time later after I had finally fallen asleep, they woke us to recheck our tickets, although no passengers had boarded or left since Cairo. Before dawn we reached the first of several military check points, where we had to show our passports.
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As we had breakfast under palm trees on the beach, I became acquainted with the other participants: a dour, lanky American woman married to a Cairo Egyptian, who did some free-lance journalism, and an insufferably dense American couple who had just finished a three year stint as school teachers in Swaziland. Nigel and I went snorkeling in a coral reef as Hassan gathered provisions for the trip. I gave Hassan a shopping list to put together a first-aid kit. He agreed to do so, but it turned out that there was no pharmacy, anywhere in the South Sinai.
It was a relatively cold winter day, about 60 F, and windy. The water was warmer than the air. We noted that the wind was blowing off the desert. This was reassuring, as we had just discovered that there was a large oil terminal and refinery about 30 km. across the strait in Saudi Arabia. This I hadn't considered -- I had reasoned that way out here there was nothing of strategic or symbolic importance to Saddam. I learned the next week, as Saddam was shelling Israel and Saudi Arabia, that we were out of range of his scud missiles. I spotted what I first took to be a goat carcass in the refuse underwater. It turned out that there was an epidemic killing baby camels in the village. As a nomadic people, the Bedouin had never worried about hygienic waste disposal. No one bothered to warn us about the sea-urchins, fire coral and lethally poisonous fish. But then, no one warned us specifically about travelling to a remote part of the Middle East a few days before a war was expected to break out. What the hell, every step you take in life -- crossing the street in Harvard Square -- involves a calculated risk. It emerged that all eight of us: Hassan, the driver, our Bedouin guide, the five tourists, and all our gear -- were to drive to remote areas offroad in a front-wheel drive jeep. I vehemently protested until Hassan hired a pickup truck to carry our gear. [fig. 1]
We stopped briefly at a Bedouin camp, where Hassan negotiated to hire [an insufficient number of] blankets, and buy reefer. Gold and silver jewelry too, we later learned. We tourists went shutter-happy with our cameras -- primitive nomads! Camels! [fig. 2] Leaving the camp, we discovered that the jeep had no starter; we would push-start the jeep in the sand about 25 times over the next two days.
As Hassan lit up the first joint, I asked if we might pass any more military checkpoints. He looked alarmed, and said that if we did, we should let him do the talking (as if we would volunteer) and not reveal where we were going (as if we knew). The Egyptian military checks had nothing to do with the imminent war. Absurd geo-political games prevailed after the Israelis had withdrawn from the Sinai. A multinational force of military observers was still there, purportedly to keep the Egyptians and Israelis from bothering each other. Foreigners were supposed to get permission from the Interior Ministry to venture off the beaten track. A great irony is that while Israeli soldiers were supposed to be strictly forbidden from this area, they account for a plurality of the tourists. But Israelis didn't need a visa to visit this corner of Egypt. Most Israelis between 18 and 21, both male and female, are in the army [fig. ]. So the young soldiers have a high hedonistic time there, spending in one day what a sandwich costs in Tel-Aviv. And the Bedouin Arabs were more favorably disposed to them than to the Cairo Egyptians. Poor Hassan was questioned by folks at the Interior Ministry after the American woman's story about our safari appeared in an Egyptian English-language newspaper.
We left the road and skidded a half mile through the sand to a huge rocky outcrop shaped very much like the sphinx [fig. 3]. It's easy to see what might have inspired the pharaonic Egyptians. The base was carved with inscriptions in Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek (the liturgical language of Egypt's contemporary Christian community). Although Hassan and the Bedouin insisted that the inscriptions were ancient, I was skeptical. It wasn't hard to imagine how graffiti in these languages might have dated from the past 20 years. I later read about the experience of an American who owned a hotel in Taba, just across the border from Eilat, the Israeli Red Sea port. Thanks to Saddam, the tourist season was a total washout. So this guy, who had taken an interest in ancient history, had lots of time on his hands. He explored the area and discovered awesome archaeological relics. Elated, he presented his maps and photos to a professor of archeology in Israel. The professor just laughed and laughed. It turned out that during the 15 years or so of Israel occupation, cartographers, geologists, petrologists, marine biologists and archeologists had thoroughly explored and mapped the peninsula. The archeologists put up signs: directions to and explanations of the major points of interest. After the Sinai had been returned to Egypt, the signs were torn down. Not by the Bedouin, I surmise, but by the Egyptians. There were awesome rock formations nearby shaped like other animals. >From there we walked to a mysterious settlement of cylindrical stone houses [fig. 5]. Our Bedouin guide Musa (= Moses in Arabic) asserted that the buildings were 7000 years old, but as they were made of erosive stone I guessed that they were not so old. Hassan lit up more smoke, and tried to engage us in a game of hide and seek [fig. 4]. We spent far longer than the attraction merited. The sun was low, and we had a long hike back to the road. I was getting annoyed, and demanded to know what Hassan had planned for the night -- he was vague about everything.
They brought us to a splendid campsite in the crotch of a small canyon, where sandstone hills rose abruptly from the desert plain [fig. 6]. Swaelem parked the jeep on a steep incline so that he could coast-start it the next day, because Faraj, the driver of the new Isuzu pick-up, refused to push-start the jeep, fearing that he would scratch the chrome on the bumper. Musa and I set off to gather firewood, leaving Hassan to his own {de}vices.
While Musa effortlessly plucked dead wood, I busted ass, twisting and pulling at the desiccated shrubbery [fig. 7]. He indicated that the wood I had picked was green, and wouldn't burn. Everything looked dead to me. Showing me what to do, he praised my energy, rather than scorn my prowess as an outdoorsman. What the hell, it was my first night in this country -he had camped out here the first 45 of his 50 years. It was dawning on me that I understood his Arabic better than the Cairo dialect. He seemed to find humor in everything I said; I think it was not just my bad Arabic. 'You are from America?', he chuckled, 'that's a long way from here. I have a son in Egypt, in Cairo.' He seemed to regard Egypt as a foreign country, nearly as alien as America. All of his children were born as nomads. His eldest son, of the first of his two wives, studied law in Cairo and made a small fortune in real estate. His brilliant 10 year old son, who I came to know well, was nearly fluent in English and Hebrew, and managed the family's bungalow camp in Dahab. Musa had made the pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca, so formally speaking, he was Hajj Musa. The Bedouin don't have family names.
It was twilight, and we were famished, when we settled down for our first meal in the desert: canned foul (bean paste) with tomatoes, onions and no seasoning. After dinner, more smoke was passed around. With Hassan interpreting, the bedouin told us something about how their way of life had changed in the past five years, and how they were coping with the threat of war. Although Arabs idealize the Bedouin way of life, for two hundred years, emirs, sultans and governors had tried to settle them. Most of Dahab's 5,000 or so residents had been nomads and chose to settle only recently, after the Egyptian government embarked upon an illconceived development of a holiday village. The Bedouin built their own village a few kilometers away, which became a resort in its own right, popular with impecunious young western and Israeli tourist. The few tourists in Dahab at the time had come via Israel; some had been expelled by the government. Almost all flights to and from the Middle East had been cancelled in anticipation of the war, so most of the travellers in the region, even in Cairo and Israel, really were stranded. Most of Dahab's residents had fled for the hills. They were somewhat evasive about the matter, but with hindsight, I think they fled because 1) there was no business; 2) they were sick of 'civilization'; and 3) they were afraid of harassment by the Egyptian authorities in connection with the war. The dull American couple had a tent and warm sleeping bags. The rest of us slept under the stars, under blankets. It was below freezing that night, and there weren't enough blankets to go around. I awoke at 2:30, shivering violently from the cold, and couldn't get back to sleep for two hours.
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| I awoke again before dawn and found Musa squatting in front of a small fire. The others were asleep. I did some exercises, gathered more firewood, and bolted up a nearby hill to warm up. When I returned after sunrise the others were just beginning to stir [fig. 8]. I was going to propose to Musa a practical joke on Hassan the Liar. But he called out from the cab of the Isuzu: 'The war, it's the war!' I wrested control of the radio and tuned to the BBC world service. The Allied offensive in the Gulf war had started. The others seemed more interested in breakfast. And what a breakfast it was: foul with tomatoes, onions and no seasoning; after which Hassan lit up some smoke. |
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| Copyright © - "Nathan Lipson" |
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