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COPYRIGHT 2002 Smithsonian Institution
"Sinai," wrote T. E. Lawrence--better known as Lawrence of Arabia--to a friend in England in 1926, is a "jolly desert." It seems an odd choice of words to describe anything in this war-torn region. Although violence holds sway for Israelis and Palestinians, only a day's drive away, this desert seems removed from the terror. The arid landscape is punctuated only by the occasional anemic acacia tree or red-stone formation rising from the sand. Despite the desolation, my grizzled driver, piloting a hired Mercedes up the potholed road that winds unforgivingly from the Gulf of Suez to the Mountain of the Lord, insists, "In truth, it is beautiful here."
This might well be a landscape of ten million years ago. Today, the only signs of human habitation are the road itself, high-tension wires strung alongside it, and the Egyptian checkpoints, manned by peacekeeping-force soldiers. From time to time, the Mercedes passes a black goat's-wool Bedouin tent with a camel beside it or, rarely, a Toyota pickup.
No wonder that for thousands of years, only the hardiest of nomads chose to live here among these roseate granite mountains slashed by black volcanic dikes, and ravines gouged by intermittent floods. This forbidding terrain, straddling Africa and Asia, endured as an eternal no-man's-land, swept over by invading armies from the time of Pharaoh Ramses II and Alexander the Great to Napoleon Bonaparte and Moshe Dayan. But no one ever settled here.
The Hebrews, who, according to the Bible, spent 40 years wandering this wasteland--some scholars believe in the 13th century B.C.--regarded Sinai as a "great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought." Once they crossed into their promised land, flowing with milk and honey, they never expressed the slightest desire to return. On a stony peak somewhere in this region, according to biblical accounts, God spoke to Moses "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" and handed down the Ten Commandments on two tablets...
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