The year of climbing mountains

By Jenny Jobbins
For reasons I needn't explain here I have spent many of the last 18 New Year holidays in Sinai. I've now wandered there nearly half as long as Moses, but that's as far as the Biblical connections go. While the Israelites wanted a way out, I'm always looking for an excuse to get back in.
It was the Bible that gave Sinai such a bad name. "Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt," the children of Israel complained to Moses, "for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill the whole assembly with hunger." The adventurer Henri de Montfried agreed, furthering this negative view in his entertaining book Hashish: Smuggling Under Sail in the Red Sea (1935). "Really, when one looks at these lofty mountains, so arid and rocky," he writes, "one can't help wondering what possessed Moses to bring his people here and make his laws in such a place."
But the answer is clear: security. Moses knew that no pursuing Pharaonic troops would be foolhardy enough to search very hard for them. True, the Pharaohs had their turquoise mines in Sinai, but these were managed by engineers on what was then considered a remote posting. The ancient Egyptians preferred the lush shady evergreen of the Nile valley, thank you very much.
Much of the coast bordering the Red Sea is shielded by these red mountains -- mountains "so bare," de Montfried says, "they look like skeletons of mountains." But as well as giving the sea its name, the mountains keep the inland secret, and it is this hidden quality that carries so much appeal. In his book Three Deserts, former British governor and Sinai-phile Major C S Jarvis wrote that "Sinai is like a Savile Row tailor, it does not display its goods in the shop window for all to see."
The children of Israel survived as best they could, and when I first went to Sinai in 1982, conditions were little better than those they had encountered. We had to carry everything we needed, even our washing water. Now the towns strung round the coast in the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba -- Al-Tor, Sharm Al-Sheikh, Na'ama Bay, Dahab, Nuweiba, Taba -- supply anything one might fancy, from designer sunglasses to ATM machines. We spent our first Sinai camping trip on a beach, where we all fell sick with dysentery after making tea with the local water and were only saved by a chance encounter with some paramedics from the American Military Force and Observers base. Now local residents who run the hotels and dive centres in Na'ama Bay throw parties for each other and dine on locally grown vegetables, bread baked at the local Hilton, and provisions flown in from Cairo.
Many of us who shared that first trip still gather at year's end in Sinai now and again. We still reminisce, as we breakfast on fresh croissants and nibble treats prepared by one of the hotel "chocolatiers," about the old days. But we always spend at least one night in the desert, and that is how I and a few other ushered in the new millennium.
Another camp, another wadi (dry water course); this one was a couple of hours through the mountain barrier from Sharm Al-Sheikh. A few weeks before, our scouts had climbed the two or three hundred feet above one wadi bed and found pools of fresh rain water trapped in the rock, so we all brought swimming things.
We drove in a convoy of seven or eight GPS-guided jeeps and landrovers laden with adults, children, babies, dogs, camping gear, water and food. The rocky hills rose on either side, sometimes distanced by a field of sand. We passed camels grazing on saiel trees and an occasional black Bedouin tent, and once we disturbed a buzzard. Vegetation in this desert depends on what rain has fallen: small yellow flowers were strewn about, and a herb which, when crushed, leaves a heady scent on the fingers.
Night falls quickly in the desert, and with the onset of darkness one's surroundings can change beyond recognition. One moment the lengthening shadows add depth and space to the landscape; the next rocks are enveloped in a cold, black blanket. Unless the stars are particularly bright, one can become totally lost. I wanted to space myself away from the tents, and spent one of the last hours of daylight looking for a sheltered mini-wadi with a patch of soft sand for my sleeping bag: I found such a place, then snuck back to join the group, who had pitched their tents and built a fire with wood brought from Cairo (so as not to use up sparse desert resources). A pan of spaghetti sauce was coming to the bubble on a bed of hot stones.
They discovered my camping place before dark, and hauled me back to a spare tent, but any regret I felt at the loss of my contemplative solitude disappeared when the terrifying desert night descended. We illuminated the wadi with candles tucked into sawn-off plastic water bottles half-filled with sand, and settled on rugs round the camp fire. We opened the gin and found we all thought someone else was bringing the tonic, and it was about then too that we realised we still had six and a half drinking hours to midnight.
We welcomed the New Year with an approximation of what our watches told us and a toast to absent family and friends, none of whom could be, that night, as fortunate as we. The flickering candles around us climbed up the rocks to meet the stars. It would have been hard to imagine a place or an evening more enchanted.
The sensible ones slept around the fire. I wish I had. I went to bed in: jeans and jersey, extra jersey, extra socks, jacket, a rug and a sleeping bag below and a blanket and another sleeping bag on top, and I was still cold. I didn't sleep: I lay awake and watched the stars through the clear roof of the tent, but I was too tired and cold to meditate.
Early the next morning, my friend Katrina suggested we climb the mountain -- she meant climbing up to the rock pools (the children had already discovered they had dried up).
It was a difficult climb. We hauled each other up, rolling up and over enormous red granite boulders, picking our way up loose rocky steps, examining herbs, glimpsing lizards, telling life stories, as one does. The sky was a brilliant cobalt blue, the rocks gleamed pink and gold in the strong sunlight. The tents and vehicles below us were soon small dots, then were hidden altogether. We were alone, the two of us, and the odd bird. It's a magical thing, to be almost alone in the desert.
It wasn't until we reached the crest of the ridge that we looked down and saw the empty pools way below us. We had climbed twice as far as we needed, but we were serene in our achievement. The descent was even more difficult. On the way down, we stepped on the cracked dry bed of the pools where a few days before our friends had swum. A black scarab beetle scurried over the parched mud. We posed and took pictures of each other.
Our hands were scratched and sore as we made our final descent. Down below they were breaking camp. "There you are!" they cried. "Where did you go?"
We smiled, "We climbed the mountain."
I looked up at our nameless peak. I could still feel the touch of the thin breeze. There's more than one way of climbing a mountain. From now on, I decided, I shall climb a mountain every day.
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