So that the red sands know how to keep the secrets

So that the love of a people does not fade into the night

So that the pink waters invade the being

Here I am… Following in the footsteps of my random destiny that brings me along the long and inextricable Street of Bitterness… Trying to catch up with it, to walk alongside it, but it’s impossible, it’s too fast, it’s many years ahead of me… No matter how much I speed up the rhythm of my life, my mind has already swept with its light, eons before, that ground, and I can only humbly and meekly gather in my hands the harvest that destiny and my mind sowed for me… Nor did this summer escape the ineluctable prophecy….. My mind had sown during many a waking night and many a sleeping day a perfect itinerary, a complete route: a magic circle. If you put a compass on a map, stick the needle in the heart of the Sinai desert, put the other end on the top of the pyramid of Cheops and trace a circle…. That is the magic circle that my mind traced once upon a time and that my body would now have to materialise? A dream that I would have to suffer, feel and live in the flesh.

Already on the plane, my mind tattooed with the pen of doubt on my skin these words: ‘It’s strange that I’m alone? Would I like to travel with someone? I don’t know… I know that I am accompanied by many things: the good wishes of so many who love me and whom I have left behind and my other world. In both I find the strength to stay alert and awake. For now I know that no trials await me nearby, but I believe that crossing the desert will test my body and its endurance. I have to strengthen it to serve as a vehicle for me.”

I. The Ochre Stone Seas

It all began as the plane descended slowly over Cairo. It was night and the city was a beautiful and variegated amalgam of lights and colours. Everything was dots in the night. Dots and beyond them, nothingness, an infinite, pitch black darkness.

At the airport I felt an immense joy being reborn inside me… If there is any language on this planet whose mere cooing makes me vibrate… it is Arabic…

However, my ecstasy was short-lived. As soon as I stepped out of the doors of the building, I found myself enveloped by a crowd of human beings flowing like small drops in a violent waterspout. I felt small … and lost. There were people looking for others and in their eyes you could read the anguish of the search, others trying to sell you the services of their taxis at exorbitant prices, shouting to attract attention, struggling to be the first to fall on the tender prey, on the unsuspecting tourists. I closed my eyes and moved forward. I made it through the crowd without attracting the attention of any captor of the unwary. I breathed. Then a man came up to me and said, ‘Taxi? “Bikam? “Jamsin. “La. Talatin au la shai. ‘Mashi’ or in other words: ‘Taxi? How much?’. Fifty. Thirty or nothing. Okay.” And off we went… The poor old car must have had so many wounds that it couldn’t help but let out a pitiful groan when we got in…. His insides creaked.

It took me barely half an hour to perceive with total clarity the essence of Al Kahira (Cairo). An essence that can be summed up in dust, trees, police and honking horns…. Every building, every vehicle and every place is covered with that sandy desert dust that gives it its indescribable touch… The city, believe it or not, is full of huge and beautiful trees on the islands of the Nile and in many streets and alleys… There are police everywhere, either the white traffic police or the brown and green police at checkpoints or the blue police guarding buildings and embassies… And the honking of horns is heard by the thousands at all times and from all vehicles, as they use it to alleviate the effects of that laziness that stiffens their fingers and prevents them from touching the indicator controls. In Cairo, the horn acts as a pilot light, an indicator, a brake light. Like God, it is everywhere.

The first marvel I saw in Cairo the next day was the Museum, not very well kept, with the pieces badly displayed… but great, ineffably beautiful, with such treasures within its walls that you could well believe you were in another time and another place. Navigating its halls was like sailing on the Boat of Life through the Realms of Beyond. It was a voyage to the heart of beauty through the magical and rich Hermetic symbology…

In its halls, the entire history of Ancient Egypt was depicted, divided according to the periodification made around 300 Before the Common Era (BCE) by the Egyptian historian Manetho, in which the thirty-one dynasties are grouped into four periods (Protodynastic, Ancient, Middle and New Empire).

Although I personally dare to doubt the veracity of this periodification, as Manaton states that before the beginning of the dynasties there was a reign of the gods that lasted 13,900 years, followed by a period of 11,000 years ruled by the demi-gods. It never ceases to amaze me that modern historians once so attached to verifying scientism can accept and perpetuate an Egyptian epic as the basis of history and take Manaton’s classification of the dynasties as the basis for their historical theories and accounts. And since they do so, why not consider who were the gods and demi-gods who ruled before and try to explain to us what became of them?

From the Proto-Dynastic period, which covers the first two dynasties and goes back almost seventeen thousand years, the pride and deference with which various statues presented Menes, also known as Narmer, the unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt, stood out. From his body, which according to the rules of sculpture applicable to pharaohs was to have perfect forms, emanated complete harmony: with what dignity the first pharaoh in the history of Great Egypt wore the crown of both kingdoms!

If at any time in the history of Egypt it might be thought that the rulers were not men, but possessed superior knowledge, it was at the dawn of the Ancient Empire. From Thoser, the first king of the third dynasty to Mikerinos, the fifth king of the fourth dynasty, in the short span of two hundred years, monuments had been erected so perfectly aimed and thought out that they would be unrepeatable for the rest of human history. The grandeur and perfection of the pyramids erected at that time, from the first pyramid, still in the stepped form of the pharaoh Thoser at Sakkara, to the three jewels of Giza, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the pyramid of his son Chephren and that of his grandson Mikerinos, could never again be emulated.

The four triads of Mikerinos are preserved in the Museum from the Ancient Empire up to the 11th Dynasty. They depict the pharaoh Mikerinos in a diorite bas-relief and, next to him, to his right, Athor, the goddess of beauty, love and joy, represented by a serene, smiling woman whose head bears two horns that meekly embrace a solar disc. The third in discord of the triad appears to the left of Mikerinos and personifies in each sculpture a different region of the various regions of the Empire. It is incredible to think that this beautiful green stone, of a hardness comparable to granite, could be sculpted with such mastery and precision at such remote moments in history, and that only in these ancient dynasties was the secret of its carving known, an art that mysteriously would also soon fall into the uncertain Nebula of Oblivion.

Another green diorite statue that enthralls and captivates the beholder is the statue of Chephren, a pharaoh whose name means ‘God of Dawn’. In this sculpture, Chephren embodies Osiris; on his hieratic, serene and impassive face rests the falcon of Horus; his body rests on a throne whose back is the wings of Isis and whose pedestal is the lion goddess Sehmet.

Not a second has passed and already the mind escapes in the pursuit of fantasy into the realm of eternity in an attempt to recall the infallible bonds that unite the gods of Egyptian cosmogony. The mind blurs in space scenes in which Osiris, God of Eternity and Sovereign of Gods and Men, marries Isis, the Supreme Goddess and Divine Mother, giving birth to both forces of Good, Horus, the falcon, the God of the Sun, and Anubis, the jackal, the Ultimate Judge. But the balance of Good is never eternal and there is always Evil striking back. Hence Seth, brother of Osiris, killed Osiris, tore his body to pieces and scattered the pieces all over Egypt. Isis searched through the waters of the Nile and the vast deserts trying to put Osiris’ body back together again, and it was with great love and patience that she succeeded in breathing life back into the body of her beloved husband. From that moment on Osiris was for human beings an example and hope for immortality. Even if Evil exists, it is always possible to overcome it, and death exists only for those beings who accept it and do not fight with the invincible weapons of love and patience to overcome it.

If you squint your eyes, as you turn on your heels, you see before you three other wonders, representations this time of the common people. On one side, the sycamore wood statue of the mayor of the village (Shij Albalad), a work of primitive assemblage, with precious stones for eyes that pierce you and chase you around the room. In the middle, the same searching eyes of the seated scribe. On the other side, a plaster work of a married couple in which he, Rajotek, appears with a sun-tanned complexion sporting the first ever representation of a moustache, while she, Nefret, shows a fair, immaculate complexion, a direct consequence of her home life. How unfair that we women have always been relegated to such a small enclosure as a home, when the world is so big and so beautiful, there are so many things to see and discover and so many little grains that we as women can still contribute to this battered planet! If only someone had listened to us before!

If there are hardly any traces of greatness left from the Intermediate Empire, the New Empire is bursting forth again with strength and magnificence. This New Empire was a parenthesis of splendour, from the eighteenth to the twentieth dynasty, after which the inexorable decline began.

Speaking of women, it was in the Eighteenth Dynasty that Hatsepsut reigned, ruling with the powers of a pharaoh. But this great woman, whose magnificent sculptures are displayed in the Museum, had to adopt male attributes and even always use the masculine pronoun ‘f’ to be taken seriously. At her death, such was the accumulated hatred for her by her nephew and stepson Thutmose III, perhaps because of the baseness of her predecessor having been someone of the ‘infamous sex’, that he erased her from all the inscriptions, which according to Egyptian beliefs was equivalent to closing the gates of eternity. Even the few who reigned did not pass into posterity! What a future!

With the next room comes another isolated chapter in Egyptian history. It is the room dedicated to Amenophis IV. Who was he? Let’s see, another clue, he was also known by the name of Akhenaten. Yes, exactly, he was that marvellous pharaoh who reformed the religion of Egypt, adopting the cult of the Aten as the only God and who Mika Waltari presented in his delightful book ‘Sinué the Egyptian’. A man who broke with the existing social structures, in which the priestly caste as intermediary between gods and men had a preponderant role and said that there were no intermediaries. Only he and his example lead to God. The example of a life in which Truth is the watchword, his symbol being the pen of truth. Truth which in art is expressed in a painstaking realism, where even the physical defects of a pharaoh can be depicted as long as they correspond to reality. In his representations there is a certain aura that unites Akhenaten with his beloved Nefertiti, emanating from their union the Ankh or Key of Life. One interpretation would be, perhaps, that the one true God, the one who confers Eternal Life, can only be reached, incarnated, through a unique and true Love.

If the Museum has two floors, imagine how large the treasure of a small pharaoh who reigned for only two decades must be to occupy almost the entire top floor. This is the treasure found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The apparent contradiction between his insignificance as a pharaoh and the greatness of the wonders found is explained, as always with these things, by a random twist of fate. It turns out that Ramses II, the great pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty who succeeded in subduing the Hittites, was also buried in the Valley of the Kings, so fortunately that his exultant tomb was placed above an older tomb of a lesser and insignificant pharaoh, namely Tutankhamun.

Of all the tombs in that Valley, history and time were showing their implacability and theft was leaving reliable evidence of how deeply rooted it has been in human beings since the beginning of time. By the time this century came around, all the tombs had been looted and were in a very clean state. In 1922, when the British archaeologist Howard Carter was cleaning one of the sides of the great tomb of Ramses II, he discovered a step ‘by chance’. What was underneath that step was enough to astound the whole world.

The tomb looked like a jigsaw puzzle. First of all, there were four wooden chapels covered with gold, inserted one inside the other. Inside the smaller one were four sarcophagi, the smallest of which contained the embalmed body of the pharaoh. Next to it were the four canopic vases in the form of mini sarcophagi with various inscriptions, in which the liver, lungs, stomach and intestines of the deceased were preserved.

Around the chapel you can still see in a daguerreotype of the time how hundreds of objects were piled up, from chariots to clothes, beds, chairs, jars and other kitchen utensils, spice racks, seeds, which still sprout today, 365 statues to serve one each day to the king, icons of the deities, among them a precious Anubis, and thousands of jewels. In short, everything that his contemporaries considered necessary for the deceased pharaoh to cross the Sea of Judgement to the shore of Eternal Life. If so much marvel was for a small king, it is hardly conceivable what would be prepared for a great Pharaoh; where has gone the labour of so many craftsmen who lovingly moulded such wonders with their hands? Sweat lost in vain, where have these treasures gone? Sad enigma of the past.

Near the exit there was still a room. There was a separate entrance fee, but as I was told it was worth it, I went in. Damn the time I did! In that room were the mummified corpses of eleven pharaohs and two queens. The expressions on their faces are like pitiful grimaces of pain with which they curse the world for the desecration to which they have been subjected. How low man has fallen when, instead of venerating his glorious ancestors, he displays their most sacred remains as if they were a second-hand market!….

Thank heavens this last bitter aftertaste quickly vanished as we reached the exit door, took a last breath of the magical atmosphere and returned to caress the most precious jewels with a quick eye flutter. Leaving the Museum at midday under the scorching North African sun was like travelling back in time at the speed of light. All those pharaohs I had recreated with my mind and whose opulence I had let caress my senses suddenly became translucent phantoms, rising swiftly above my head to return to the darkness and protection of those halls. They would leave me with a wink of complicity with which they wanted to tell me not to worry, that they would return to me in the darkness of my nights, would inhabit my dreams, and would show me, now that we knew each other, secretly and with great care, the true dimension of their mysteries.

That same afternoon I found myself before a mystery even greater than that of the sculptures I had seen that morning. A mystery that the good Anubis unveils in my nights with his usual gentleness. I am referring, of course, to the pyramids of Giza.

To reach them from the Museum, which is right in the centre on the banks of the Nile, you have to cross the Nile to the west and head southeast, crossing the concrete jungle that is Cairo, leaving behind you whole neighbourhoods of multiform houses, all of them with old dust as a common denominator, passing thousands of cars loaded to the brim with human beings… until you reach a point where the city ends abruptly and half a metre away the majestic desert begins.

A desert whose guardian is a very special being: the Father of Fear (Abu Alhul), the name given by the Arabs to the Sphinx of Giza. This sphinx looks like something out of a fairy tale, standing there in the middle of an immense sea of golden sand, comfortably reclining on its gigantic lion’s body. It wears a mask that reproduces the head of King Chephren, behind which, if one looks closely and lets one’s intuition scan, are hidden two watchful eyes that scan day and night the infinite in search of dangers that might lurk in the treasures that this good custodian guards, namely the Pyramids. The Pyramids are spread out behind the stele of the Sphinx, in a diagonal line from largest to smallest. First Cheops, then Chephren, then Mikerinos. It seems as if the pharaohs thought that no evil could come from the desert and erected their pyramids inland, knowing that any threat from the river would be wisely deflected by Abu Alhul.

Although there are several pyramids in Egypt and elsewhere in the world, none can emulate the magnificence of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Standing at its feet one feels tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, like a grain of sand next to a great sun; for indeed Cheops looks like a sun. Not only because of its impressive height, but also because of its enormous size.

Legend has it that the pyramid was built by raising successive platforms of sand and rolling the monolithic blocks weighing tons across them on logs. They did not stop to think that as the Pyramid is next to the mouth of the Nile, to build the north side it would have been necessary to build part of the platform in the middle of the sea! It is also overwhelming to imagine how they transported these blocks of stone, cut with such precision that they fit perfectly one on top of the other, from the quarries thousands of kilometres up the Nile. It is certainly hard to believe that this was erected by beings still living in the Bronze Age.

Venturing inside the pyramid is an ordeal. The ascent begins in a corridor barely a metre high and with an enormous inclination, with almost no light or ventilation, and through which you have to go at full speed (according to the guide it is better). Although I don’t think the corridor is more than fifty metres long, I swear that it becomes the most oppressive fifty metres of one’s life. The corridor leads to the large gallery, just as steep and dark, but with an infinitely high ceiling (either you can’t reach it, or you go too high). At the end of the gallery, which measures another fifty metres, is the king’s chamber, and in it… Nothing. An empty stone sarcophagus and nothingness. It was one of these pyramids that the kleptomaniacs of the past took it upon themselves to visit.

Returning from Giza, I crossed the Nile again. How beautiful it is! It is more like a miniature sea than a river. In the middle of the river there are two islands like small bastions that would like to stop the flow of the waters so that the Cairenes could, sitting on their banks, enjoy the sight of such a beautiful spectacle. Although the fact that there are two of them might be remotely reminiscent of the Parisian islands on the Seine, here the Sculptor of the World decided to push the boat out, to explore to his heart’s content and to forget pre-established concepts. He created a river so big that from one bank you can’t see the other, and two islands so enormous that walking along them you could believe you were on the most solid ground.

Walking, walking, walking, now on good solid ground, my feet took me to ‘Jan el Jalili’, the urban centre of the Islamic period, which today is a popular neighbourhood. First, I strolled through the narrow streets, set up for tourist shopping, and sat down in one of those charming open-air cafés. How to describe the people! The piercing stares of the men; the mute accusations of the veiled women towards those who dare to go uncovered… and, worse still, who dare to dye their hair blonde; children peddling everything that can be sold (paper handkerchiefs, Koranic suras…); a woman who collects by the streets the goods that can be sold; a woman who collects the peanuts left by others on the tables; a grandfather with his harmonica and a battered box selling matches; the shisha, that singing water pipe, which only a man can smoke and, in a certain way, with each puff, reinforces his arrogant role. All of this is seasoned with the magic of the incense that comes from swinging itinerant burners, the jasmine that is sold as fragrant necklaces, the mangoes that overflow all the stalls and the sweet aroma of fresh mint (naana) that is added to the tea.

I decided to go in search of the part of the ancient walls that I knew were still standing. There were still two huge city gates with their stone towers connected by a piece of wall. What impressed me, however, was not so much the walls, but the area I had to walk through to get there. Outside the tidy part of the neighbourhood, the streets looked like a filigree balancing act of opposites; next to beautiful facades of medieval mansions with meticulously crafted wooden lattices there were dilapidated shanty towns and, next to them, ancient mosques or Koranic schools with their proud and beautiful minarets. And what poverty I saw! Barefoot children, mutilated children, people on the verge of misery…. But how many wonderful smiles they sent me! How much joy and how much will to live!… In places like this one realises that happiness comes from within, from deep inside, and that no matter how full of hardship their lives may be or how dirty their streets may be, they still have the ability to make that happiness flow through their beings until it takes the shape of a smile…

 

II. The seas of red rock

Now imagine that the pulse goes numb and the compass turns. One is being transported (in my case by public bus) over the waters that form the immense estuary of the Nile, beyond the Suez Canal into the heart of the Sinai desert. To give you an idea of what this desert looks like, think of it as a two-coloured rectangle, the north-western half of which is yellow earth dunes and the other half of which is huge red earth mountains. I think the most impressive thing about this desert is its contrasts. From driving along a road with a blue-green mass of peaceful, reverberating water on one side and an ochre mass of lonely sand on the other, you suddenly pass between the foothills of towering red limestone mountains that rise violently out of nowhere and strive to reach for the sky. And it is one of those moments when the beauty of the surroundings silences the mind and frees the heart from its bonds.

In the sixth century, Greek Orthodox monks decided to build a monastery at the foot of historic Mount Sinai, which they called St. Katerina. Over the centuries the monks patiently dug out of the rock the three thousand eight hundred steps leading to the top. Even today, the thirty or so monks who still inhabit this fortified monastery represent the only sign of human life for miles around.

I left my heavy backpack at the monastery and began the ascent. There are two options: either you climb up the stairs, which is more direct, but at the same time more strenuous, or you take a small path that skirts the mountain and zigzags up its eastern slope, which is longer, but more accessible. What did I do? The latter, of course. I had been told that the climb took about four hours and as I wanted to see the sunset from the top, I decided, despite the hot midday sun, to start the climb after lunch.

There you see me, climbing, suffocated by the dense air that filled the valley and by the scorching sun that played at reflecting off the rocks. I was a tiny, solitary dot amidst the majesty of the surrounding mountains; a moving speck in the midst of that static sea of red stone. As I left the nooks and crannies of the road behind me and climbed higher, I could feel the air getting lighter and lighter, fresher and fresher. My soul felt more and more filled with an ineffable feeling of freedom. A nameless joy had taken possession of my racing heart. Each beat seemed to want to encourage me not to falter and a shrill ‘Almost there, almost there, almost there’ was ringing inside my forehead. Either I was almost arriving there or I was almost gone, so the pounding was absolutely right.

The path came to a point where it crossed a narrow gorge, passed to the north side of the mountain and joined the stairs, and there were only seven hundred more to climb! However, there is a long way to go from words to deeds and, although it seems like a trifle, it took me a lot of effort to climb the almost one thousand steps. I didn’t think I’d make it, but I finally made it, phew! I arrived and I think it didn’t take me even a thousandth of a second to forget all my ills, because of the beauty of the landscape around me. Wherever one looked, the view was lost above endless chains of mountains that in the evening light slowly took on a crimson tinge.

I was still in time to rest before watching the sun go down… There were four of us cats upstairs, so we introduced ourselves and sat in a circle. I brought a melon (you have to be optimistic to climb a two thousand eight hundred metre mountain with a melon), some Germans brought bread, salty cheese and cucumbers, and a Frenchman brought biscuits, so we all shared and it was a perfect dinner.

Watching the sunset was a beautiful sight. The sepulchral silence provided the soul with enough peace to be able to put all its energy into bidding farewell to the sun that was leaving us. A sun that with its last rays was tenderly caressing the peaks of the mountains and like a magic wand was turning them blue, and then slowly turning to a dark violet that little by little was blurring the contours until blurring them in the black of the night.

Sleeping was another matter. A Bedouin who had a little tea shop near the top left me some blankets. I persuaded my dinner companions to act as my side shields and there we lay down on the hard rocks. With a Frenchman on one side and two Germans on the other, well protected by the cream of the European Union, I looked up at the sky. Since I didn’t think I would be able to sleep because of the cold, as indeed I did, I decided to enjoy the view. The sky was so clear that you could see into the bowels of the universe. For the first time in my life I could see the Milky Way clearly… like a beautiful cloud. Every now and then the stars would get the sirocco and seem to go crazy, then they would start to fall and I didn’t have time to make wishes at the speed with which my eyes were catching them.

At about four o’clock in the morning people started to arrive. You could see the little lights of the lanterns zigzagging in the black night air, and you could hear all kinds of languages… there was even a group of Koreans who were singing, praying and doing collective penance for quite a while. With this ‘angelic awakening’ I set out to watch the sun rise. What a shock it was when I looked around and saw the crowd of people surrounding me. It looked as if the cats of the night before had given birth. In these conditions, having to fight for a little piece of rock on which to rest my bum, as beautiful as the sunrise was, it didn’t have the magic of the previous sunset. It was funny, hundreds of fingers resting on the camera shutter to capture an instant that happens every day, but which we usually ignore.

This time I went down the short cut. ‘Short’, but intense. After that, I still spent half a day with my legs shaking from all the stairs. After visiting the inside of the monastery, I took a shared taxi with other tourists to the Gulf of Aqaba. I sat in the front and talked the whole way with Sayed, the driver, a Bedouin boy with beautiful features, whose complexion, heavily tanned by the harsh desert sun, had the glow of ripe dates. We drove through the valley left by the high Sinai mountains, with their fascinating shapes and sizes: garnet stones preceded by a sea of sand; huge blocks of ochre limestone eroded by the wind. We drove along a stretch surrounded by wild palm trees, many of them with five and six branches… until, suddenly, you came out of a bend and you could see the sea.

 

III. Around the Sea of Aqaba

The Gulf of Aqaba with its crystal clear waters has a special magic. Imagine two towering mountain ranges in the shape of an open eye. Both the upper and lower eyelids are huge red mountains. Above half with a Saudi and half with a Jordanian flag, below all Egyptian. Between them is a beautiful pool of tears. A pool whose colour changes throughout the day: from greyish blue at dawn to greenish blue at midday and pinkish blue at dusk.

It is precisely at twilight that the spirits that give the mountains their colouring come down to bathe in the sea and invade it in such a way that one seems to find oneself in front of an immense Red Sea; and it is precisely towards this sea that the calm waters of Aqaba flow out of the corner of one’s eye.

The legacy of this Sea of Aqaba is Eilat, the three kilometres of coastline that should belong to Palestine and which have been in Israeli hands since the Six Day War.

It’s funny, at first, the idea with which I left Spain was to go directly from Cairo to Nueiba and take the ferry. However, along the way I had met many lonely travellers like me who told me about their experiences and adventures, and they all agreed on the incomparable beauty of the beaches of the Red Sea and the treasures hidden in the depths of that sea. So I decided to slow down my journey and try to corroborate these stories with my own experience.

On the way to Nueiba, when I had become more confident with Sayed, I told him about my idea and mentioned the names of the beaches that had been recommended to me. He looked at me furtively as he continued his fast driving and told me that those beaches I had been told were for tourists and offered to show me another place. As I had nothing to lose, I accepted.

The taxi arrived in Nueiba, the Egyptian port city from which ferries leave for the Jordanian port of Aqaba. The name ‘city’ is an understatement, for it is no more than a collection of little houses and shacks once whitewashed in white, but which over time have become soaked in the grease of their surroundings. After leaving the three Frenchmen who had accompanied us, I continued my journey, now alone again.

Sayed took me to Naguema, a tiny enclave with a few little huts made of cane and palm leaves and a paradisiacal beach. Some Israeli girls who had rented one of the huts lent me a pair of diving goggles and off we went! A few metres from the shore I could already see coral formations. I had never seen them up close before. In the translucent underwater atmosphere the corals looked like fictional saplings. They were enveloped in a soft blue layer that gave their colours a special touch of unreality. Some of them, of a strong red, seemed to occupy a privileged place, while those pink or whitish gave the impression of being weaker, more susceptible to being hurt. And all together they formed a vast forest charged with a mute balance.

That afternoon, when my limbs had been recharged by the revitalising force of the sea, I decided to continue on my way. There were rumours in Naguema that it was now possible to cross from Eilat to Aqaba, that the new border crossing had been opened. Although I tried to check the veracity of these comments, no one could deny them or affirm them, so I decided to check for myself.

I went out to the road to look for a means of locomotion and by chance Sayed appeared with the car again loaded with tourists. He told me he was taking them to Taba. I asked him if he would mind giving me a lift too and got back into the rickety, rickety taxi.

The road runs alongside the sea, skirting it. The water is blue, crystal-clear, transparent, with huge mountains on both sides. Every time the road bends between mountains and we head back towards the sea, it seems to me as if we were going to get lost in its waves.

We arrived in Taba. Speaking of Taba and to give you a sense of place, do you remember that I told you before, not without a certain irony, that the Gulf of Aqaba ends in an Israeli rheum which is the city of Eilat? Well, its two guardian bastions are Taba in Egypt and Aqaba in Jordan. Within ten kilometres of coastline lie three cities belonging to three different countries between which coexistence over the years has been far from easy.

In Taba, which has no more than two dozen houses, a couple of hotels and a few more under construction, Sayed took me straight to the border. I asked the Egyptian policemen if it was possible to cross from Israel into Jordan, but they couldn’t tell me, so I asked them to let me go through to the Israeli post without stamping my passport and that I would be right back. They looked at me somewhat confused, but I pleaded with such a plaintive tone that they let me pass.

Fifty metres away was the Israeli border post. I had to change register: no more Arabic, now English. The soldier on duty was about to take my passport from my hands to stamp it, when I said no, ‘I just came to ask you a question’. He raised his head and looked at me puzzled. ‘If I go through here into Israel, can I then go on to Jordan?’ ‘No.’ “And I can’t even walk the three kilometres to Aqaba and get in. This time the little man looked rather irritated. ‘You can’t.’ “Well, don’t be angry. Thank you. Goodbye”. And I left the way I had come, to the amazed gaze of  the soldier. It wasn’t until a few days later, when I was already in Amman, that they opened the famous Aqaba-Eilat border crossing. I arrived five days too early.

It was getting dark. I was in Taba. In order to get to Jordan, I had no choice but to retrace my steps and go back to Nueiba to catch the ferry. But there was only one ferry a day and it left in the middle of the afternoon. I was no longer in time to catch it. What to do? I went to where Sayed had left me and to my delight he was still there. I explained my situation to him and he offered me to spend the night next to a palm grove, next to the beach, where he and some friends apparently used to stay whenever they had to spend the night near Taba. Since it’s better to the devil you know than the one you don’t know…

On the way to the palm grove I persuaded him to stop next to a place that had caught my attention when we had passed it the other time. It was a beautiful island in the middle of the sea, all walled in, with natural lakes inside the walls, and on the top of which stood the majestic fortress of Salah al Din (Saladin), built in the 11th century as a bastion against the Crusaders. In the blue-pink light of the sunset, it looked like a prince’s castle from a fairy tale.

Sayed left me on the beach by the palm grove. He told me he was going to fill up with petrol, buy some food and that he would be right back, ‘Don’t move from here’. And off he went. I sat down on the sand by the sea and I started to watch how the spirits of the sunset played at painting the waters. Time went by, it was getting dark, and Sayed didn’t come back. Then I realised that he had left my backpack in his car. As I had no idea where I was, the sensible thing to do was to wait. So I did. I tried to relax and push out of my mind all those thoughts of fear and worry that were fighting to conquer my inner castle. I called out to the sea for help and calmed down.

Suddenly I saw that in the distance by the shore someone was moving in my direction. I would have loved it if at that moment the angels had come down from heaven and pulled me out, or if the earth had opened up and swallowed me. The human figure was approaching. Slowly. Very slowly. Little by little I could make out his features. It was a middle-aged man, and from his appearance I would say Bedouin. I think the poor guy was even more surprised than I was to see a lost tourist in the middle of nowhere.

He approached me very kindly and gave me a smile on his face as if to break the ice of a first encounter. More than seeing her smile, I sensed it, as it was getting darker and darker. “Ahlín”. “Ahlan”. His hello and my hello. He introduced himself: he was a Bedouin and a fisherman, and he was on the shore fishing with some friends. I told him who I was and said I was waiting for the taxi driver who had gone to put petrol in. “Arab or Bedouin?” I said Bedouin. ‘Then he will come back’. Anyway he told me that if I wanted, I could go there and sit with them as they had tea and food. I thanked him and agreed that if Sayed didn’t come, I would go over. When he was leaving, he told me, as if it were a coincidence, that the taxi driver had not taken the direction of the petrol station, but the opposite one. Suspicious! After a while I decided to approach him and drank a delicious tea by his campfire.

When Sayed arrived a while later, it took me a while to get back – now let him wait! He asked me where I had been and I told him I was with some fishermen. “And you?”. “I went to get petrol and food”. Silence. Better to be quiet and not rummage around, so I sat down on the blanket he had spread out by the sea and we had dinner. After dinner we lay there and talked for a long time. He told me that he was afraid of women and that’s why he preferred to sleep in the car. 2Don’t worry, I will sleep tajta annuyum” (which means: under the stars).

Then, I don’t know how our hands touched and it was a very sweet sensation, but very strange. “Why did I do it?” “Would you live in the desert?” -my conscience asked me. “No”, I said. “Then don’t play” – it scolded me. But sometimes it’s hard not to get carried away. After all, all our hands were doing was conversing with their caresses.

Little by little sleep came. Lulled by the sound of the waves of the sea, by the gentle breeze, by the glitter of the shooting stars that my tired eyes managed to perceive when after a supreme effort I managed to open them, by the caresses of a man of the desert… Lulled by the night, I fell asleep.

I was awakened by my inner voice before the sun rose from behind the Saudi mountains… And I sat on the shore in yogi posture waiting for the sun… Just before it rose, Sayed came from behind and covered my eyes…. He sat next to me. We had some mangoes for breakfast and off we went! I had to wear a kufia (a veil) for several kilometres, as there were police posts and foreigners were not allowed to sleep on the beach. With a veil and at the speed of the car, I looked the part.

Once in Nueiba, I searched fruitlessly for the small booth where they sold tickets. Every indication I was given led me to a different place. In the end I found it thanks to a Scotsman, but they had just closed. I sat down to wait in one of those battered little bars in the shade of a palm tree roof that sheltered me from the sun. After being battened down with the ticket, which I had to pay in dollars, I walked back through the little town to the port compound. All the poor Arabs were queuing inhumanly, and the foreigners, like ministers, were passing through without queuing. I found out that the ferry would leave late. If there is one thing you need in the Arab world, it is patience.

I inquired as to the final fate of the poor Arabs who were dressed in rags and treated with utter contempt by the guards. They were humble Egyptians going to Saudi Arabia as cheap labour. When I asked why they did not take a direct ferry to Arabia, but went via Jordan, I was told that the ferry to Arabia took fifty hours. Poor people!

Once on the ferry, I made the whole journey up on deck, which is forbidden for women, so I was the only one in a crowd of men. I was leaning against the western rail and watching the sun go down behind the Egyptian mountains. Blue in the twilight. Jordi, a charming underwater archaeologist from Girona whom I had just met, was with me. At the same time as he played the role of invisible protector to the curious and disapproving looks of the Egyptians, he revealed to me the secrets he had discovered in his many underwater adventures in this beautiful sea. Apparently there are a lot of sharks! It’s a good thing I didn’t find out earlier, otherwise I wouldn’t have swam.

During the trip we met Muhamed, one of the ship’s senior sailors, who invited us to stay at his house if we went to Amman. Thanks to him, we had a privileged view of the mooring, including the pilot’s manoeuvres.

At the port we paid the visa fee. Curiously, it varies from country to country, while the Germans pay a symbolic minimum, the English have to pay a lot. The Spaniards are in the middle, neither one extreme nor the other. Then at the port gate there was a very long line of guys being loaded onto trucks, like cattle, the same ones they were sending to Saudi Arabia.

As it was already dark, we decided to spend the night in Aqaba, in a small hotel in the centre. We decided to go for a walk, until, wandering through the night, our steps led us to the beach. There were a lot of people sitting around, whole families, groups of young people. As we passed by some kids they greeted us and we sat down with them. They were mostly students from the north of Jordan. I found them to be wonderful people, very sensitive and interested in the world, with a lot of human dignity. Although they shared a language with the Egyptians, they still differed. While many Egyptians I met were unable to speak classical Arabic correctly, the Jordanians were perfectly capable of doing so. They were simply a pleasure to converse with.

At one o’clock in the morning the police came to tell us very politely that it was forbidden to be on the beach after that time and we left. When we were halfway there, the police caught up with us again and apologised…. That we could go wherever we wanted and they would accompany us so that no one would bother us. We were grateful for their diligence. We had to insist that we were really tired and wanted to go to sleep, so that they would rest easy and their pangs of conscience would go away. I fell into a sweet sleep, rocked by the thought of how beautiful Jordan was! The most beautiful language…  The most beautiful men… and the most cultured people. And I had yet to discover all the marvellous secret enclaves of this new country.

 

IV. Petra

The next morning we left for Petra. A busload of five people: Jordi, three Frenchmen and me. The landscape was more muted than that of the Sinai. On both sides there were mountains of a reddish-white and ochre colour, not very steep, more stony and with some scattered scrub. The houses in the villages we passed looked rather like those in Tunisia, square, either stone or concrete, and generally painted white.

We arrived in Wadi Musa and looked straight for a hotel. Bargaining, I managed to get a great price; the four boys in one room and me in another room on my own. We left our backpacks and were taken by minibus from the hotel to the entrance of the ruins of the city of Petra.

We started walking. At the starting point there was a huge open space full of horses and donkeys…. It looked as if thousands of tourists were coming (which fortunately was not the case… or maybe it was, but it is so big that you never get the feeling of overcrowding).

After passing the open field, you entered through the mouth of the gorge. I had always wanted to go to Petra, but I had never imagined it to be as beautiful as it really was… That grandiose, imposing gorge, narrower and narrower as it closed in on me, with the fig trees growing magically between the rocks, rocks with an incredible colourful versatility, with tones ranging from black to white, passing through greys, blues, greens, pinks, reds and yellows.

Especially on the left side of the road, from time to time, small square temples carved in the stone appeared, generally with two small columns and a simple lintel joining them. As I found out later, these were the houses that the Nabataeans built for their gods. Each small temple was home to a god.

The beautiful gorge led to the Khazneh, the temple of the four colours: light pink at dawn, ochre at noon, orange in the afternoon and bright pink at sunset…. The changing colours of the stones are fascinating! It seems as if the air is disguised as a kaleidoscope and plays at combining mirrors and objects to enrapture the senses of the beholder. This temple had been entirely sculpted, chiselled out of the rock, columns, capitals, lintels, architraves, friezes, acroteries, tympanums, everything, absolutely everything, carved out of the rock, without a single addition. The most amazing thing of all was to think that the Nabataeans, that great Semitic civilisation that inhabited this land several centuries before Christ, could possess the technique to carve such wonders out of the rocks. And what ceilings! The rock has made in them natural mosaics of an impressive richness of colour…

The city begun at Khazneh. The gorge gradually widened until it became a wide street, where one’s eyes could not take it all in, for on the right and left there were beautiful temples, fascinating tombs, houses and so on. All carved out of the slopes of these mountains. I spent the whole time picking up coloured pebbles from the ground, as if I had fallen prey to a spell.

The road led to the Roman amphitheatre from the second century Common Era (CE) when Trajan subdued the Nabataean people. After the amphitheatre came another series of ruins of Roman temples and markets. To be honest, I must admit that I was not impressed: how can we explain that hardly more than a few isolated walls remain of the Roman temples and that the much earlier Nabataean temples are perfectly preserved? And being so, how can I avoid being blinded by the splendour of the Nabataean monuments to such an extent that I am unable to appreciate any other example of art fairly?

The hardest part was yet to come. An uphill climb with some very steep trails for several kilometres. They said that at the end of the path, up there, was the Monastery, the grandest of all Nabataean constructions. If that was the case, we had to go on. Finally, we arrived: ‘Ualhamdulilah’ (in Christian: thank God). The monastery was marvellous. Of impressive dimensions, it had the particularity that you could climb up to its cornice by climbing up the side of the rock. What a feeling of fullness and freedom! What a joy to be able to rest on such an enormous work! From the top you could see all the temples of Petra in the distance, small as little red boxes.

On the way down we wanted to see the ruins that remained… and we got lost… we walked for about ten kilometres until we reached a huge Berber tent where they offered us tea… How nice! The poor lady was a widow with six children. Berber women are intriguing; many of them have several teeth missing and others are made of solid gold; they also have their faces completely tattooed with signs that in theory are intended to beautify them. I say in theory, because in practice it is shocking.

We tried to ask if we were going well and were told that we should have taken a left turn a long time ago. In the end, after a lot of begging, I managed to convince the eldest son to accompany us until we found our way back, because, although he explained it to me three times, I didn’t quite understand it…. It’s a good thing he came, otherwise I’d see us on those little roads until Judgement Day. The eldest son was actually seventeen years old and was going to get married the following year. It’s amazing how young people get married here. I’m starting to look old to them… and when I say that in Spain people get married when they are twenty-eight or thirty, they look horrified.

Back on the rigth path, we passed the Roman Triclinium. After that the ascent began again. On one of the landings was the famous Lion Fountain, which was nothing more (and nothing less) than a huge lion sculpted in the rock,  with water coming in through a pipe in its tail and coming out of its mouth… in its day. Now it was dry.

At the top of the ascent was a huge platform, the Rock of Sacrifice, on which the Nabataean priests offered animals in sacrifice to their gods. Today there is no more blood, but there is a splendid view of all the mountains surrounding Petra. From here began a huge descent with thousands of stairs and very steep.

That night my body was so full and my soul so replete that I plunged into one of the sweetest dreams of my life.

Sometimes I think that when a human being desires something with great vehemence and occupies his or her mind and senses repeatedly with that desire, he or she gradually weaves an invisible web between him or herself and the object of his or her desire. Perhaps that is what Petra and I were playing at.

The next morning I wanted to set off again towards Amman. Jordi and I were in a taxi…. [Now that I think about it, don’t think that I had a fortune and that’s why I could always afford to go by taxi, it’s the cheapest way to travel in these latitudes; it’s only a little more expensive than the bus and much more comfortable]…. Anyway, as we were being driven to Maan, to take a bus to Amman, the taxi driver, a guy of my age, asked me what I had seen in Petra. ‘Petra.’ “Alone?” “Well, yes… What else is there worth seeing?”. And he rattled off a string of names. “Ah, no, I don’t know any of them”. We went on talking about other things. He suggested that I stay, that he would show me theplaces and I could sleep in his house with his family.

I woke up the sleepy Jordi, for whom Arabic must have sounded like celestial music, because he was always sleeping, and I asked him what he was doing. “I have to be in Syria in a couple of days. I can’t stay”. Although it’s good to have travelling companions, who make one’s journey more pleasant, like everything else in life, they are also passengers. Although all farewells are sad, because the heart quickly becomes attached to people who are especially dear to us, they are also necessary. In this way we can nourish in our souls the dream of a reunion. Goodbye Girona. Fins a la propera!

There I went again, alone in the face of danger, travelling the roads of the Middle East. Said took me to Shobak, which together with Kerak were the two main Christian forts during the Crusades. Although less touristy than Kerak, the fortress of Shobak is of great beauty. Of the five floors it had in 1115 when the French built it, only two remain, as an earthquake destroyed the remaining floors in the 13th century. Even so, it was full of surprises. There are everything from wine pressing rooms to churches and fifty-metre tunnels that led down inside the mountain.

From there he took me to Abdalía, an area full of trees, which I’m not sure if they were holm oaks or oaks, but what I am sure of is that they yielded acorns. Although it may seem silly, it is surprising and pleasing to the eye to find a forest in the middle of these arid mountains. On our way back to Petra we passed through Baida, the White. The same type of houses and temples that were in Petra carved into the rock, but this time the rock was white, an intense white, sometimes with greenish and ochre veins. Also impressive and beautiful.

We went to his house. His wife, Ibitisam or translated Smile, twenty years old, already had two daughters. I found it shocking that one girl could be a mother to others. We sat down to eat and I was given a tasty rice with spices…. And we talked until late into the night….

Slowly her words became a lullaby in the background until they blended into the murmur of the desert wind…. That gale of sand had trapped me in its malleable arms and was pulling me out. I was being forcibly removed from a place too beautiful for me to have left of my own accord…

 

V. Around the Dead Sea

Gently drop your eyelids and relax your mind. Activate your subconscious. Reminisce about those times in the past when mankind was a few tribes. Remember by what sea we played…. It was very salty and bathing in it was a real pleasure because you floated?

Now, following my journey, I have returned to caress its waters. This ‘Bajar Almait’ or Dead Sea is different from any other sea I have ever seen in my life. The enormous salinity of its waters makes any trace of animal or plant life in its depths impossible.

It is so dense that when you throw a stone from a small cliff with all the strength of your being to make it go as far as possible…. Something strange happens. As soon as the stone comes into contact with the water, you lose all sense of reality. The water doesn’t immediately start vibrating and throwing concentric circles into the sky, but takes its time. First it swallows the stone, I suppose it weighs it, caresses it, has its experts measure it and analyse its chemical composition, and then slowly decides. Decides which reaction to take.

Meanwhile, sitting on the edge of the cliff, wrapped in a blanket of anxiety, one waits to see when the water will dance… Until a little while later, and very slowly, the water begins to rise around the point where it swallowed the stone… And after the crest, comes the fall, followed by a new rise. Little by little the specular surface turns into small caked hills that remain, that remain indelible, architects of a complicated equilibrium, for eternal instants. A surface converted into stony folds that do not seem to want to leave.

Very close to the Dead Sea, inland, huge spouts of hot water gush out of the rocks and fall in the form of immense waterfalls until they touch the ground. To stand under these crystalline columns is to endure heavy avalanches. Mother Nature rewards you with the gift of natural saunas embedded in the rock, where you can rest and regenerate your crippled limbs. From this paradisiacal place called Hamamat Main, boiling masses of water flow in the direction of the Dead Sea that awaits you some ten kilometres away. Avid lovers in search of the salty waters.

And when they reach the sea, nature has prepared for them small pools carved out of the rock, where they can rest and take their last breath before flowing into the great salt pool. Both these waters, because of their high temperature, and the Dead Sea, because of its high salinity, might seem to be messengers of death, and yet it is a feeling of gentle fullness that overflows from one’s soul when you allow yourself to be rocked in its mantle.

The place I describe to you, where the two currents meet, I was able to find thanks to a boy. I had assaulted him one midday in Amman, begging him to take me to the Israeli border. He took me, but by the time we got there it was closed.

Earlier that day I had been queuing patiently at the Jordanian Foreign Ministry in a shack they had erected in their gardens, which served as ‘Palestinian representation’ and where one was supposed to get a visa to visit the Occupied Territories. I think the stifling atmosphere in that queue is a subliminal attempt to discourage you from going. However, my eagerness to see historic Palestine was so great that no obstacle would be enough to dissuade me.

While queuing I had heard rumours that the border crossing was closed at twelve, one, three, five, eight o’clock. As always in these parts, no one ever knows exactly what time it is. A subconscious phobia of the passing of time.

When, after pushing myself through the masses, I managed to get my little piece of paper around midday, I ran down to the centre, to the bus station. There was nothing left and I assaulted a young taxi driver. With the sharp weapons of a woman it was a piece of cake to convince him to give me a lift. It was only an hour and a half’s drive. We arrived at three o’clock. As I approached the border post, the two policemen looked at me in a strange way, as if thinking “What is she doing here?”. They had closed at one o’clock. Impossible to convince them.

And now what to do? There was not a single hotel in the whole area. The nearest was in Amman… o… “at the Dead Sea… It would be a sin for you to leave here, without bathing in the waters of this beautiful sea”. “What are you going to do, Muna? You have to wait until tomorrow. You can’t pass today”. “Is the Dead Sea very far away from here?”. “No, it’s very close”. “Could you bring me closer and I’ll stay there?”.

We were passing through orchards of crops along the banks of the Jordan River… Until, in the distance, a thick cloud of condensed air rose before our eyes. “There is the sea. After a short while we were stopped by the police. Either we paid the amount they said or we couldn’t go on…”. If the road surface had been good, you could console yourself with the thought ‘nothing, just like the tolls in my country’, but the road was very uneven; the poor car kept jumping towards infinity because of the many potholes in the road surface. I wanted to pay and he wouldn’t let me. He did.

We began to skirt the sea along a narrow road, between the mountains and the small cliff that was going to fall into the sea. Majestic waters wrapped in a cloud of cotton wool. Unreal. Beautiful. “Where are we going?” “I want to show you my favourite place”. And there he took me. As chance would have it, I had spent the day before at those hot waterfalls I was telling you about, without having the faintest idea that fate would show me the next day precisely that spot in the Dead Sea where those waters would flow into.

We were being massaged by both waters: we would swim in the sea of salt, and then go to sit in those pools of rocks and fire to desalinate and relax.

When the sun was on its way to the Palestinian mountains, there, on the other side of this sea, we decided to climb up to a small cliff to see it off. It was there that, as he threw his stones into the sea, I marvelled at the majestic stillness with which the water responded to him.

He raised his arm for the umpteenth time, the stone groaned in his stiffened hand, swung back and threw it. He thought for a few tenths of a second and said, “What are you going to do now?”. Good question.  “I’m going to stay over here and sleep”. “It’s forbidden; you have to leave the beaches before the sun goes down. You could only stay in that hotel we passed a few miles back”. Although my experience with hotels is not great, it was enough for me to count the five little stars as I passed, to infer that with what was left of my budget I could hardly afford it. “Not the hotel”. Silence. He squatted down and his gaze was lost in the horizon. I did the same and let myself be carried away by the beauty of the setting sun. Between perceptions my pondering mind asked for help and then fell silent. I saw one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life.

He stood up, raised his arm again and, as he threw the stone, his thoughts flowed to me in the form of words. “If you want to go back to Amman, stay at my place, and tomorrow I’ll take you back to the border”. I looked at him and smiled.

I went into his house. They didn’t know who I was, or where I came from, but it didn’t seem to be important. The main thing was that a guest had entered their house and she had to be entertained. I sat on some cushions in the courtyard. Around me, in a circle, her family: parents, brothers, brothers-in-law, and many, many children.

Immediately a small low table was placed before me, laden with those delicious Arab delicacies. This is a vegetarian’s paradise. Freshly made hummus, that chickpea paste with a texture somewhere between cream and pâté, which is coated in olive oil and eaten by craftily turning a piece of bread into a spoon with your hands and dipping it in. Mutabbal and ful, similar to the above, but made of aubergines and beans respectively. Falafel, small balls made of chickpeas and parsley, breaded and fried; halfway between croquettes and meatballs, but with a very particular taste. Exquisite courgettes and aubergines stuffed with rice. Little plates with olives and all kinds of spices that are eaten by first dipping the bread in oil and then in the corresponding little plate. Heavy for those late hours of the day, but delicious.

His family was charming. They are all Palestinians who have lived here since the ‘67 war. Her father looked like a great patriarch, the father of six sons and seven daughters, a real ‘jadsh’. ‘Jadsh’ is the highest socio-religious title that a Muslim can receive and which he or she obtains after a pilgrimage to Mecca. Ibrahim’s father had already made two pilgrimages to Mecca, which equated him with a devout saint. The mother, who was probably no more than fifty-five years old, looked about seventy or seventy-five. It is the sad fate of Muslim women of that generation, to have as many children as possible and to work so hard that their bodies fall prey to deformity.

Only when I had finished eating did they dare to taste the leftovers. Thank goodness I didn’t follow the Spanish saying “in a poor man’s house, to burst and not to leave left overs“, otherwise poor people. I had insisted that they eat with me and as only the mother had eaten something, I thought the rest would have already eaten. I was not aware of the Arab custom whereby only the guest and the most senior people in the household are entitled to eat first. The rest have to wait for the leftovers, if there are any left.

I slept in the girls’ room. It’s a practical system. The same mats they use to sit on during the day are their sleeping mats at night. They only need to take the blankets out from behind the door and spread them on the mattresses and in a flash you have made fifteen beds.

In the morning when we were about to go out, his little niece came up to me and put a little bag in my hands. The colour combination was a bit garish, with pinks, yellows and golds, but the happy face and the affection with which she gave it to me softened my heart. I picked her up in my arms and gave her a powerful cuddle.

This time the border crossing was not a wasteland like the day before, but was filled to overflowing with huge lines of cars.  We parked his car and walked on. “Although there are still two kilometres to the border, we’ll get there sooner if we walk”. And after him I went, with my beautiful backpack on my shoulder. We overtook the whole line of dying cars, which by the look of them you would have thought were queuing outside a scrapyard. Ibrahim spoke to the policeman who was holding up the queue and gestured for me to follow him. After three hundred metres of walking alone, the first car that passed stopped us and gently took us to the border.

The border was a bus station where you bought your ticket, got your passport stamped, got on a bus and waited. I said goodbye to Ibrahim and got ready to wait. Just as the bus was about to start, I saw him run back. “What was the matter, did I forget something?”. I asked the driver to open up for me for a second and got off. “This is for you; I forgot to give it to you”. And, just like in the morning, he planted a pink and gold hair clip between my hands. To tell you the truth, I never thought people here would be so sweet. I said ‘Alf shokran’ (thank you very much) and got back on the bus.

This was the border crossing of the famous King Hussein Bridge for the Jordanians and Allen-by for the Israelis. My theatrical mind had always imagined it as a movie bridge, big, wide, with policemen on both sides and under which the waters of the legendary Jordan River flowed majestically. But no. You got on the bus, it drove along little roads, including a rickety little bridge over a tiny stream, and a short while later it landed at another bus station and you were in Israel – well, no, actually, you arrived at another bus station in Israeli-occupied Palestine, not Israel.

 

VI. The holy sea

Do you remember how many beings of light, both Arab and Jewish, inhabited these Semitic lands in the mists of time? When the world was still living in caves, in these Semitic lands (and I mean these Semitic lands in a broad sense… from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean) the light shone splendidly. Sometimes I play at remembering how we used to live. Life was more relaxed than now, more harmonious, but there were still hard times. Although Ibrahim, our great patriarch Abraham, was undoubtedly a being of light, I remember that I cried a lot when he drove his wife Hagar and their son Ishmael into the desert. I feared they would not survive. Thank goodness they came out of it and Hagar was able to become the grandmother of the Arab people.

Another memory that tingles in my mind is of those later times when we were part of the Essenes. I met a wonderful man by the name of Aisa, our revered Jesus, who immediately stood out for the immense purity of his aura. Another being of light.

It felt strange to be here again, after so many centuries of visiting these regions only with my memories. So much has changed! From the sky you can no longer see Bedouin tents everywhere, but patches of coloured cloth. Some white and blue, others white, black, red and green. The first seem to be Israeli flags, the second Palestinian flags.

Indeed, it was only after leaving the Israeli border crossing-bus station that a string of police checkpoints began, with their multicoloured insignia, all in the middle of deserted roads bordered by nothingness. First an Israeli checkpoint, followed by a Palestinian one. After a short while we passed through a small village filled to the brim with Palestinian flags and palm trees. This was beginning to annoy me and I asked: “Where are we?”. “In Arija”. “Arija, Arija… mmmm…. Ah, of course, Jericho. We are passing through the capital of the territory recently declared under Palestinian jurisprudence”. I communicated my discovery to the tourists who were travelling with me, as they had the same expression of confusion and hallucination on their faces as I had a few moments before, and they were very happy. After a short while, another Palestinian stall and after it another Israeli one. Now I didn’t even ask, I just explained to the people that we were entering Israel again. “Farewell, Jericho, little piece of my Palestinian land!

In the blink of an eye we were in Quds, the Holy City, Jerusalem. It is a city I had never fantasised about before and perhaps that is why it impressed me so much. Let’s try to reconstruct my experience. Take me by the hand and let yourself go. You have just left Jericho and you are stumbling along in your car through a crowd of people in narrow streets through which hardly a carriage passes… full of Arabs selling, buying, sitting on the pavements, talking at the door of the shops… the women in their long dresses and the men in their djellabas… all covered up to the teeth in the middle of summer… “Where am I?”. “In Quds, in Jerusalem”, they answer. Your mind wanders whether this is not the same city that the Israelis claim as their capital. “Jews? But it’s the most Arab city I’ve ever seen. It can’t be. I must be dreaming”. “You’re not dreaming. Wait, you haven’t seen the best yet”.

Suddenly green gardens full of flowers and palm trees stretch out before you and beyond them white walls. You can already look to the right or left, the walls touch infinity. They exude an ineffable harmony. Their stones compete in pictorial richness with the clouds in the sky. They seem to form part of a complicated balance of perfect rectangles… Suspended from the air by fine threads, each one seems to have a pre-established place in this concert of symmetries. And you can walk along their skirts and you won’t find a single patch, nor a single pucker. Satin of constant shine, interrupted only by the majestic incision of seven gates. The seven entrances to the sacred city.

The most splendid of them all, if among equally beautiful things one could choose a winner, is the Bab Alamut or Damascus Gate. “When you pass under it, squeezed between human beings, and enter the city with its narrow streets lined with shops and stalls on both sides, with its low, whitewashed houses… do you not feel as if you have entered a playland? So much hustle and bustle, so much colourful fruit, vegetables, sweets and other goods absorbs you… and absorbed as you are, it’s easy to trip over a step and stumble, so be careful. In this City of Stepping Stones there are no cars and no modernity. Time does not run… The soul, however, flies”.

Living here can be a paradise or a hell, depending on who you are. Let me tell you about it. Within these medieval walls, many different religions and races coexist. To begin with, the city is divided, much as Berlin, the capital of Germany, was during the period between World War II and the fall of communism, into two parts, as Quds is divided into four parts: one Christian, one Muslim, one Armenian and one Jewish. To continue, strolling through its streets you notice where it smells of money and where it smells of poverty. Often houses in the Muslim area are blown up as if by magic and the next day there is a Jew at the door wanting to buy the house – a despicable way to buy back the city, don’t you think? I wish I could be more fair-minded and say wonderful things about the Jews, but… unfortunately I spent three days walking around this beautiful city and talking to its people… and for many Arabs it has slowly become a living hell.

And to think that they are two peoples so similar, whose languages come from a common mother and yet they feel such a mutual hatred that it creeps into your body with every breath of air! It is sad that both peoples have within them the same predisposition to hatred.

Even praying at the same wall has not brought them closer together. If, when we pray, we shoot arrows from our hearts into the sky and aim them at the deities, who are theoretically love, then the trails left by the arrows should be vibrant trails of love. And yet, although they pray at the same wall to the same God (for the Jewish Yahweh is the same God as the Muslim Allah and the Christian God), their arrows seem like heavy stones that avoid each other, that struggle not to cross each other, that…. Why do they do so? Because in this beautiful Land, that of historic Palestine, History, History with a capital letter, has been twisted to deprive it of its justice… Hopefully, if historical justice is restored first, the same God of all these sister religions will at last succeed in uniting them, and not be another cause of discord between them.

Some, the Jews, claim that the wall before which they pray, or as it seems, before which they mourn (for they stand by it, swaying back and forth, while banging their heads against it as a sign of penitence) is the last remnant of what the Jews claim was King Solomon’s temple.

But, on the one hand, this poor city has been razed to the ground twice since then – by the Syrian Tiglathphalasar and the Roman Titus – and besieged and mortally wounded on countless other occasions. How can we believe that this piece of wall is the original one! Why defend it to the death? Are a group of stones worth more than the lives of human beings? But… and, on the other hand, nothing (in terms of archaeological excavations) and nobody has been able to prove, with irrefutable evidence in hand, that Solomon really lived there… I personally give more credibility to the thesis that Solomon lived (and the Old Testament took place) in Asir, today’s Saudi Arabia.

The others, the Muslims, control the Rock Mosque, with its beautiful golden dome, surrounded by gardens, half the size of ancient Jerusalem, and walled in. One of these walls leans against the Wailing Wall, yet it seems as if their wailing is dodging each other, never to meet. Muslims claim that this beautiful mosque built by Abu al-Malik in 691 stands on the stone from which Muhammad rose to the heavens. Hence, after Mecca and Medina, this is the third Holy Place of Islam.

But, mind you, Muhammad died in what is now Saudi Arabia in 632… A long way from Quds. And how do you explain that he came all this way to ascend to heaven? A bit of a detour, isn’t it? I don’t know who gets the upper hand when it comes to inventiveness, the Jews or the Muslims!

But wait, I haven’t told you the best part yet. In the Christian part of the city, all in the same style of beautiful low, one- or two-storey, white-painted houses, is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is yet another testimony to what the human imagination can create, not only because of the mixture of religions, each claiming its own superiority, from Greek Orthodox, to Armenians, to Syrian Orthodox, to Catholics, to Franciscan Fathers, each with their different habits and cassocks, marking their special touch of distinction… but also because of its unique architecture.

As you enter on the right there are stairs leading to the first floor, which is said to be built on the Mount of Calvary. You can even put your hand through a hole and touch a vein of the original rock.

If you go down again, return to the entrance and from there turn left, you come to a large circular room, in the middle of which is a tomb. The location of this tomb is said to coincide with the place where Jesus was buried. If you remember what it says in the Bible, they took him down from the cross on the mountain and put him in a sepulchre-cave at the foot of the next hill. Conclusion: they have built the Church on both hills, polishing the mountains when they were in the way and leaving them when it was interesting for the trustworthy memory of posterity.

Other questions that I find astonishing: How do we know which mountains they were and where they were? Why load them and build in their place such an artificial temple, where each cult sells its beliefs as the true and only ones? Was it not Jesus who, it is said, drove the merchants out of the temple, saying that in his father’s house there was no trade?

I do not doubt that Solomon, Mohammed or Jesus were beings of light, marvellous beings, anointed by the divine light of God, but my heart bursts when I see that men are incapable of considering themselves as children of the same God and fight to death to defend their own slice of reality. As if their vision of the world were the only true one… When in the end only the whole of humanity can perceive the totality of divinity… Your little piece of divinity, plus mine, plus that of the other, plus that of the one beyond, be it Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist or agnostic (like me); only the sum of all these little pieces can show us the true face of God.

Relax your limbs… take a deep breath… imagine a blue smoke coming in through the soles of your feet and with each breath of air it gradually rises up through your body, cleansing it and removing any tension that might be there… When you have cleansed your whole body, try to keep that feeling of being enveloped in a blue bubble…

Now concentrate… Concentration is the only instrument we have at our disposal to relax the mind… Anchor the boat of your thoughts to your heart… Listen and feel the beat of your heart until you merge with it… Keep your mind anchored there, don’t let it drift away; if it should be shipwrecked, pull it back afloat….

Once we have freed our being from the tensions of our body and the wanderings of our mind, and both are at rest, we can try to let our soul leave the body in search of the Infinite…. Let us meditate, then…

Did you come to join God in your meditation? And that he whispered tenderly in your ear that it is possible to unite with him wherever you are on the face of this earth. God, the Sacred, the Divine, Mother Earth or Pachamama, the Ineffable, are not only in that Church or by that Wall, they are first and foremost in the soul of every human being and it is there that we must learn to seek their presence.

Come, give me your hand again, let us fly. Now that we are rising above the rooftops of Quds you can clearly see its beautiful monochrome buildings…. White is the king of this city. Do you notice how the walls of this city form an almost perfect circle? There to the north is the gate through which we entered, the Bab Alamut. Turning clockwise, at the foot of the eastern walls are the slopes of the Mount of Olives.

Although it’s quite a climb, we’re almost there. Isn’t the view from here beautiful, with the exultant golden dome of the Mosque of the Rock in the foreground and behind it the rest of the city… a myriad of white dots… Have you seen how many olive trees there are? They say that Jesus spent his last hours before being executed next to this one.

This is better, from up here the view is much cooler. Do you see that huge road that runs along the western part of the wall and goes straight ahead until it gets lost in the horizon? That’s the so-called Green Line, the line that, like the Berlin Wall I mentioned earlier, separated the good guys from the bad guys. On the right, the Palestinian side; on the left, the Israeli side. Since Israel declared Jerusalem the capital of its state in 1980 and annexed Quds, East Jerusalem (an annexation that contravened and continues to contravene international law), this physical separation is no longer the case.

Nevertheless, they still seem worlds apart. Although all the signs are now written in Hebrew, even in the Muslim part, the whole of East Jerusalem, all those narrow streets that we pass through as we enter the city and that surround the walled compound, are unmistakably Arab. West Jerusalem, the Israeli side, although itself a sea of contrasts, especially at nightfall, always retains the unmistakable touch of Jewish sobriety.

With the first dark rays of night, East Jerusalem dies; its streets become seas of blackness, while West Jerusalem begins to revive. In the centre, all the shopping streets are lit up. Next to the centre, in the Russian Compound, the city’s nightlife district, huge crowds of young people gather. Just like in any other party area in the West, only dressed so outlandishly that you’d think you were at carnival.

In another part of the city, also very close to the centre, is Mea Sharim, the orthodox Jewish quarter. It’s quite a spectacle to walk through its streets at dusk. They are full of men, all dressed in black, with their black basin-shaped hats and those two ringlets of hair that hang down covering both ears… And their women, completely covered up… They must even be wearing stockings in the middle of summer… It is impressive… They look like ghosts in the night.

How difficult it is to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable worlds, especially when there are so many vested interests in the West that these two worlds will never be reconciled… and how easy it would be to reconcile them with love in the heart and international legality and historical justice in the mind!

The West Bank is called in Arabic Daffa algarbia: the West Bank. This land on the west bank of the Jordan River stretches out in a high plateau until it reaches about forty kilometres from the sea where it gently slopes downwards. Quds/Jerusalem looks like a drop penetrating this plateau.

One morning I decided to visit Bethlehem, in Arabic, Baitallahem, a name that means the House of Bread, a small and beautiful Palestinian town situated on the top and slope of a mountain a few kilometres south of Quds/Jerusalem and part of the Occupied West Bank. A charming little town with its whitewashed houses and large church towering above all the rooftops. On the way back to Quds/Jerusalem, police checkpoint on the road. Ineluctable inspection of every vehicle and every person.

That afternoon I headed north, back to the West Bank. As soon as I left Jerusalem, the climb begins. At every bend in the road the view becomes more spectacular…. At the foot a precious stone that fades in the colours of the afternoon until it becomes a tiny dot in the infinite. The road snaked along the West Bank plateau until it reached Ramallah, another beautiful Palestinian city, all whitewashed in white.

I wonder why it is called Ramallah, or what is the same: God bowed down. Perhaps it is because it is situated on the edge of the plateau and before it the earth prostrates itself, bends and leans towards the sea. On clear evenings, if you look west from its hills, you can see patches of sea through the mist.

Ramallah is the Palestinian political and academic centre, and is home to many well-established Palestinian families, as well as to many who live abroad and use it only as a summer residence. In this small lost West Bank city I saw the most luxurious mansions I have ever seen in my life and met a Palestinian couple, in whose house I stayed, who are some of the most delightful people this land has given me. How tenderly she treated me! We seemed to have become soul sisters in a matter of hours.

 

VII. The flowers of the Mediterranean

If we leap into the void from the hills of Ramallah with a rubber pole towards the sea, we land on the shores of the Sea in a sea of contrasts. I am referring to Tel Aviv and Jaffa, set side by side on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Tel Aviv, the only capital of Israel recognized to this day by almost the entire international community, a modern city, with its multi-storey buildings, its shopping centers, its good restaurants, marches parallel to a long beach. Jaffa, the ancient Palestinian port city, with its low whitewashed houses on a hill above the harbour, looks like a silver hook that juts out into the sea.

The area of Jaffa facing Israel has become a sought-after bohemian quarter where the crème de la crème of Jewish artists have sought refuge for inspiration. The view is so beautiful that they are sure to find it. But then again… How many Palestinian families have you met who were expelled from here and relegated to refugee camps and for whom this view will forever remain that rusty hook with which they will prick themselves every time they dare to open their boot of memories!

To get to Gaza I had to return to Jerusalem and from there I went in the official car of the Spanish embassy, with flags and all, and with the police cars opening the way for us. The consul was a friend of mine and, taking advantage of the fact that he had to visit Arafat, he took me there. But since we are in Jaffa by the sea, so as not to make you take a detour, imagine that we sit on a wave and the waters carry us down to the sea until we are carefully deposited on the immaculate sand of the beautiful beaches of Gaza.

You know I’ve seen the world, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beautiful beaches. Between the fact that due to their traditions (and in Gaza they are extremely attached to their traditions) they don’t bathe and that because of the Intifada they haven’t been able to set foot on the beach for years, their sand is pure gold – they even grow flowers in the middle of the sand!

The Gaza Strip, Kitaa Gazza, is a tiny territory about forty kilometers long and twelve kilometers wide, as green and flowery as Alicante’s Vega Baja. Its three cities, all three bordering the sea, are from north to south: the capital Gaza, Khan Younis and Rafah, which borders the Egyptian Sinai (the circle is gradually closing), although the Strip itself is divided into five governorates (North Gaza, Gaza, Deir el-Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah).

It is curious that, in principle, it is one of the most densely populated places on the planet (close to 2,000 inhabitants per square kilometer), and yet when you walk along its roads your eyes perceive only irrigated fields, orchards and greenhouses. “And the human beings, where are they?”.

Crowded into refugee camps. North of the capital Gaza there are two: Shati, Coastal, by the sea, and Jabalia, Mountainous, inland; in Khan Younis another huge, immense one; and Rafah was from the beginning, since it was created in 1949 to take care of the 41,000 refugees from the first Arab-Israeli war, a refugee camp.

In Khan Younis I spent some time living with Ismail Elfaqawi, a dear friend whom I met in 1992 while I was a fifth year economics student and he was doing a Masters in English literature, all in Edinburgh, Scotland. And that year that Ismail was away from home, his feisty wife, Um Wisam, looked after the eight offspring of this wonderful family: Hanan, the eldest, who was almost my age; Wisam; Afaf; Meisoon; Mahmoud; Sharaf; Muhammed; and little Rajaa.

It is hard to see how almost all families with eight, ten and twelve children live in small houses with two rooms, living room and kitchen. The Western luxury of a room for each son or daughter is unthinkable here. The Intifada built a giant wall of cement and silences around Gaza. Seven years of isolation have served to force the people who live there to look for the nails, however hot they may be, to cling to in order to survive. And what refuge is there for human beings when life is suffocating but God! The sad thing is that these poor beings who in their desperate search for God have been manipulated by the religious establishment. Islamic law has returned to Gaza and with it fanaticism in its most virulent form. Whereas eight years ago women could dress as they wished, today it is back to hell. Even though I wore a veil and an ankle-length skirt, I was verbally stoned to the point of bewilderment just for wearing my elbow-length shirt.

But that didn’t stop me from being tremendously happy the time I spent with the big Elfaqawi family. We even went to the beach with Hanan and I was teaching her yoga… What an intense feeling of complete happiness when you combine the wellbeing of the body through yoga with the wellbeing of the soul through a beautiful friendship and beautiful landscapes!

I, in spite of all the pains and despite the fact that the West has invested billions in nipping democratic Arab movements in the bud and has nurtured both Islamist extremism and regimes, both monarchic and republican, corrupt and very undemocratic, I, strictly speaking, continue to tell the world that the Arab people have light in their soul….

I have met so many wonderful people, capable of giving so much, of sharing their last crust of bread without asking for anything in return, of opening the doors of their homes and the shutters of their souls to you with complete sincerity, ready to give their all for a stranger, and to give everything for you when you are already their friend, a friendship that advances quickly and with firm foundations. Likewise, and contrary to general opinion, I have met many educated people, endowed with an infinite mental lucidity and capable of exposing the evils of their society and their causes with complete objectivity… I have felt my soul vibrate with boundless happiness…. And, although I wanted to leave you my smiles, my thoughts full of love and enormous affection, I believe that I have brought with me much more than what I gave you.

As I told you, the circle is closing. After convincing the border guards at Raffah, who didn’t want to let me pass into Egypt because I didn’t have a visa, I went along the sea, with its fantastic palm groves, until I crossed the Suez Canal by ferry and arrived at Alkahira. The prophecy was fulfilled.

…

The plane was slowly rising over Cairo. The midday sun was shining brightly in the sky. At first only the concrete of the city was visible. Gradually the green orchard of the Nile estuary, the final stretch of that thin strip of greenery that accompanies the river all along its course, came into view. Everything was patches of colour; the blue patches of the sea, the green patches of the orchards and beyond them, nothingness, an infinite, ochre nothingness.

…