I visited St Katherine, Sinai, in March 2016, staying at Bedouin Camp. There are few visitors these days and those that do arrive are more welcome than ever.
The view from the summit of Jebel Musa (Mount Sinai) at sunset on a clear evening is unforgettable. This is one of the high peaks of the Sinai region (7497 ft), but not the highest. Jebel Katherina to the west is about 1200 ft higher.
“Nothing can exceed the grandeur of the view from the summit of Mount Sinai. The infinite complication of jagged peaks and varied ridges, and their prevalent intensely red and greenish tints …” (Edward Hull 1885)
The picture postcard view captures the spectacular stony wilderness. To the left of the big u-shaped valley is Jebel el Ojar. You can trek all these peaks and valleys with Bedouin guides.
My first ascent, with guide Sami and a Polish visitor Lukas, took a longer route from the town of St Katherine by Wadi El Arbain and reached the summit of Jebel Musa from the south. We arrived for sunset but the sky was cloudy that day. There are stores of blankets here but visitors are not allowed to sleep out on the summit any more.
A later ascent from St Katherine’s Monastery took place on a clear afternoon to catch the sunset. Sunrise and sunset are equally popular times to be at the summit to take photographs of the view, and of each other basking in the achievement.
Palestinian family, who had made the journey by car, and camel.
A chapel of some sort has existed on Jebel Musa since the 4th century. The Church of the Holy Trinity here is recent but stands on the site of the larger 6th-century chapel, which was destroyed in the 11th century. It adjoins the cleft in the rock (guarded by a rail) where Moses hid.
Next to the church is a small mosque with a polite notice on the door. The mosque is always open, unlike the church which is kept locked. Curiously, the Bedouin guides prefer to pray in the tea shops below the summit.
Elijah’s Gate on the Stairway of Repentance. There are nearly 4000 granite steps leading from the monastery of St Katherine up to the top of Jebel Musa. On the way Elijah’s Gate still bears a faint inscription referring to John the Abbot of the 6th century. Below the gate hundreds of small cairns punctuating the ascent are more recent symbols of common endeavour.
I met fifteen camels on the trail as I headed down at sunset. It seemed at lot, but before the 2011 uprising in Egypt thousands of visitors headed for the summit of Jebel Musa every afternoon. Sometimes there were caravans of over a hundred camels.
The dark basalt hill with the small white chapel is Jebel el-Muneija, or Jethro’s Mountain, and is confusingly also called ‘Seena’. It can be mistaken for Mount Sinai from below.
There are any number of chapels dotted around the jagged peaks in impossible locations. This is truely a sacred landscape and one of the stoniest on the planet. Up on the hillside in Wadi Tlah is the Chapel of St John Klimakos, a Syrian ascetic who lived here in the 6th/7th centuries. He wrote a best-seller called Ladder of Divine Ascent.
A monastery garden in Wadi Tlah designed like a rockery. The Jebeleya Bedouin are employed by St Katherine’s monastery building garden walls, which are high and bonded with cement. Most of the trees are almonds and have just finished flowering. The harvest is in September. My guide, Mahmoud, said the monks eat all they produce and don’t sell any of it. Further along the wadi we visited the home of renowned herbalist Dr Ahmed Mansour. His herbal school had been closed for a while now due to a shortage of visitors.
Sami at a wayside shelter at Deir el Arbain – Monastery of the Forty Martyrs – in Wadi el Arbain. There are ovens and water containers. Small groups of Bedouin come here from time to time, kill a goat, and have a feast. It doesn’t seem to require any religious festival or special occasion.
My guide Eid at a spring in Wadi Tubug. The upper basin is for people, the lower one for camels. The wadis are dotted with springs issuing from bare walls of rock – a hyrological characteristic that verges on the miraculous in this driest of lands.
A Bedouin garden in Wadi Zawateen. Eid is drawing water from a depth of 15 feet, which is the highest the water-table gets, dropping over the course of the rest of the year. The gardens are enclosed by dry-stone walls, sometimes topped with barbed wire to keep out camels and (more rarely) gazelles. They grow fruit such as almonds, apricots, olives and pomegranates, and sometimes mulberries. There was also an apple tree in flower here. The climate here is normally too cold for dates. At harvest time the Bedouin stay in the gardens for several days.
A leopard trap on Abu Jeefa pass. The Jebeleya used to tie a kid inside to the main support of the stone trap, so when a leopard entered and the kid tried to run, it pulled the structure down on both of them. The technology seems to have involved quite a precise calculation of forces and masses. Leopards are now extinct in Sinai, although there are some in the Negev. The Jebeleya now sometimes trap partridges by putting food under a rock supported by a tied stick. They wait, and when the partridge enters the trap they pull the stick away. Altogether less artful and more tedious than the leopard trap.
The new visitor centre near St Katherine. The modest buildings are made of red granite and black basalt. They house modern exhibitions of the history, natural history and life in the St Katherine Protectorate.
I sought clues as to why St Katherine become a sacred landscape. In my notebook I see I copied … ‘Between 3500 and 2500 BC the region was home to Timnian miners, who discovered copper ore and turquoise’ … and … ‘Today, almost the entire world population of white storks pass over Sinai as they migrate between Africa and central Europe, being unable to cross an expanse of open water as wide as the Mediterranean.’
Back in Bedouin Camp, St Katherine, a local musician playing the oud entertained us for the evening.
The songs were Bedouin ones about love and loss, some from Saudi Arabia, although the visiting Cairenes appeared to know a few of them – or perhaps picked up the catchy choruses.
Most visitors and pilgrims flock to the Monastery of St Katherine at the foot of Mount Sinai, which is the oldest Christian monastery still in existence. However, entry is very restricted now. The treasure-laden interior of the Church of the Transfiguration can only be viewed from just inside the doorway, leaving icons and frescos largely out of view, and the famous 6th-century mosaic of the Transfiguration almost invisible behind a giant crucifix. The small chapel of St Helena (Burning Bush Chapel), whose construction was ordered by the mother of the Emperor Constantine in AD 330, is out of bounds; as is the modern descendent of the bush itself, viewable only from a distance as it recovers from the attentions of tourists.
The only view you now have of the bramble, Rubus sanctus, said to be a cutting of the original burning bush seen by Moses and planted next to the Chapel of St Helena. It flowers in April and has small, white, pearl-like fruit that turn red. The plant is not very common in Sinai. Despite being the reason for the existence of the monastery it is not especially sought after by herbalists and does not seem to have any particular use. The monks have never sought to sell cuttings to visitors.