Dahab, The End of Egypt

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We take a five-minute ride to the ocean past the gray skeletons of half-finished hotels. Hero's establishment is run down but cheap at 35 pounds, about $6 USD per night—a sensible choice because I'm almost out of money. Room number one contains a blue-tiled shower and a salt-crusted faucet and drains, but a surprisingly modern air conditioner. The sheets might have been washed sometime in the last month, but I'm far too tired to care. The room's most endearing quality is a computer-printed sign on the back of the door announcing the travel services available through the hotel and Hero's mysterious offer of assistance at the bottom: "I can be your Hero in Dahab if you don't mind."

The town of Dahab seems almost deserted by the time I venture out of my hotel. Everyone seems to be hiding from the harsh noontime heat, but it only takes one, short walk down the main street to understand Dahab's growing tourist appeal—after the hassles of Cairo and Luxor, the town's tranquil charms offer a welcome escape.

The sharpest contrast: not one salesperson attempts to hone his sticky salesmanship on my increasingly thick skin. At a nearby restaurant, I order a massive vegetarian pizza and freshly squeezed orange juice. Time seems to move at half its normal place here because all of the intrusions of the modern world—the collective roar of car engines, the ringing of cellphones, and, most importantly, the homogenous assault of cookie-cutter, boy band pop music—are missing. The only exception to the silence is the mumble of a television from the corner of the room. I crack the spine of Naguib Mahfouz's novel “Adrift on the Nile” and attempt to read, but news stories about the miserable American invasion of Iraq creep into my life from the world outside.

On the screen is a familiar sight: a Japanese man kneels in front of three armed, masked men pleading for his life while they stand as stiff as soldiers, cradling their American-bought machine guns and rocket launchers. Then, the smirking, contemptuous face of George Bush returns to the screen. Bush unconvincingly mouths some disingenuous words written by someone else, and the Arab world rolls its eyes or shakes its fists at the screen as the utterly futile cycle of violence in Iraq takes another creaky- and costly-turn.

Incidentally, if I want to get close to a group of Egyptians, it's usually over a glass of tea and a blunt-edged political exchange. After a couple minutes of small talk, I'll set my glass down, look them all in the eye and apologize: "Sorry about George Bush." They usually laugh heartily even though they know I'm not personally responsible for this menace, with his simplistic view of the world, inflicted on the Middle-Eastern world.

I return to my hotel and pay for a nighttime excursion to St. Catherine's Monastery. Then, I head back to my room, turn the air conditioner to a meat locker-like 19 degrees Celsius and pretend I'm a piece of preserved beef for 3 hours. I wake in an early evening stupor with just enough time to explore Dahab's quaint beachfront boardwalk before my 11-p.m. departure. As the sun sets, people lounge on pillows beneath large wooden umbrellas strung with multicolored lights or sit at tables with solitary candles shielded from the seaside breeze by the lower halves of plastic water bottles. It's a romantic place ideal for honeymooners, dope-smoking backpackers and anyone easily bewitched by the spell of the ocean. Across the deep blue water, I see coastal lights and the brown mountains of Saudi Arabia.

At 11 p.m., I take a bumpy, two-hour ride over half-finished roads from Dahab to the interior of the Sinai Peninsula. A French man and his Danish wife are stuffed in the front seat with the driver of our white minivan. Eight Japanese 20-somethings converse or try to get a little sleep in the dusty, late-night darkness. I catch isolated words from their conversation but not enough to meaningfully participate. Our goals are the same—a 2,300-meter climb to the summit of a mountain to watch the sunrise.

Once we arrive at the base of the mountain, we receive the simplest of instructions from our driver: "Follow the path to the left and be back for the bus ride to Dahab at 10 a.m."

I thought our driver was going to double as a guide, but the 50 pounds I paid is for transportation only. We exit the van in front of a stone building with men sipping tea on plastic chairs under a solitary florescent light. The married couple immediately sets off, and the Japanese 20-somethings have no intention of welcoming me to their group, so I set off alone.

For the first 20 minutes, I hear nothing but the scraping of feet shuffling over loose gravel and stones, watching flashlight beams bouncing over the path with the movement of arms. The path is wide and flat as my anonymous companions—who have dodged sleep in search of a unique experience—and I move past the imposing bulk of St. Catherine's Monastery. It's the rumored site of the biblical burning bush, and it's also believed that Moses ascended into these same mountains to receive the Ten Commandments from the Christian God.

I catch up to a group of three girls carrying a flashlight and ask: "Is it okay if I follow your light?" "Of course," they answer in perfect English.

They're Americans, ex-Peace Corps members from Nepal, traveling through the Middle East before returning to the States via Amman, Jordan. What do you reveal about yourself to people with whom you'll share no more than five or six hours of your life? I usually start with what brought me to this particular place and time—making it sound far more thoughtfully planned than it really is, much like my life thus far. A few minutes of questions make us old friends.

The road narrows to a rock-strewn trail and begins to climb into the mountains. We continue our power-walk for another 30 minutes then stop for a water break, taking time to look at the top of the mountain silhouetted against the milky stars of the pre-dawn sky.

Around a corner a few minutes later, a group of Bedouins appears just beyond the glow of our shared flashlight. Dressed in white robes, they wait patiently and silently with a herd of camels. I have a pleasant sensation of being transported back to a time before cars, before flashlights, but the image is fleeting. These men are guides, offering camel rides to the summit for the right price.

Once we leave the Bedouins behind, I have the chance to measure our progress with an unusual site on the path below. A train of flashlights like a giant centipede wrapped in Christmas lights trudges slowly up the path. The centipede is actually a herd of camels carrying tourists whose flashlights bob with the animals' undulating movements, but I'm too far away to confirm my observation, and, for once, it's comforting to not know for sure.

We've managed to get far ahead of the others, and I'm positively giddy in the silence. Suddenly, a thought flashes in my mind, like a match struck in the middle of the night. It's the beginning of an answer to the question I asked of myself last week, “Why do I feel so much join in open spaces devoid of people?”

"I'm beginning to realize," my friend David wrote recently, "that people are generally not too bright in their relationships with sound."

At least I've observed that many people are far less discerning with sound than they are with the people they choose for their company. Everyday sounds are another type of companion—and one that often resists interaction.

Each day, we are oppressed by an unceasing barrage of them, mostly car engines and traffic noises. These sounds envelop us and push away our own thoughts. In restaurants and cafes, DJs shape our psyches with a few poorly chosen songs that some record label bribed them to play. We put up with the situation because we think we have to. The same insipid “hits,'” devoid of feeling but calculated to earn millions, are repeated unceasingly until we begin to hum them absent-mindedly or against our will. It's a kind of drug that shuts down expansive thinking instead of stimulating it.

I recall many moments when some rather awful melodies have entered my head and pushed away the traces of an interesting thought, reminding me that the ideas that are most useful to our lives are often those we most easily forget. The more resistant and self-aware people learn to tune out unwanted sounds until the collective cacophony of them becomes its own silence. But do the walls we build in our heads to distance ourselves from unwanted sound affect our relationships with other human beings? How disturbing that we rarely notice the harmful effects of sound until we find ourselves without it.

When I'm in a silent place, I feel lighter, I breathe more easily. Is this imaginary? Most importantly, does sound have weight and, if so, are we each carrying around immeasurable burdens of which we're not aware?

Everyday sounds are also a reminder that human beings are everywhere. When those sounds are removed, I have a chance to hear what the world sounds like when human beings sleep and a take a momentary break from the perpetual, and often purposeless, scrambling over it. We take up so much space and pollute and refashion the world to satisfy our short-term needs and seem to think very little about the uninhabitable place we're leaving behind.

I recall an observation I made from a train window last March on my way from Casablanca to Tanger: "My god, human beings have made a mess of the earth, criss-crossed the globe with our ugly buildings, powerlines, black-topped roads and garbage. We multiply like weeds, choking off every other lifeform and so easily turning on each other. And there are 6.5 billion of us—a vast majority who don't have the things they need for basic survival. Sometimes, I feel the deepest sense of shame for taking up the space I do for producing the piles of garbage that I do, and for how little I think about the lives of others."

On an almost empty mountain in the Sinai Peninsula, I am reminded that there are still a few places human beings have neglected, or forgotten, to destroy.

I can't satisfactorily articulate the other components of this feeling, but standing on the mountain at 3 a.m. produced the same excitement I used to feel periodically on my morning paper route as a child, watching the orange sun break over the horizon and change the color of the air. I have felt this same joy while running on the beach as the sun rises over the elegant Hassan II mosque in Casablanca. I feel privileged and lucky to see something few people get to see.

The last few hundred meters to the summit is as steep as climbing the stone steps of a Mayan temple. Our group is silenced by the effort. With heavy legs and bodies slick with sweat, we finally reach our destination shortly after 4 a.m. We stumble past the rocks of a tiny stone church into a circular outcrop of stone that looks like an open-air turret. One look at the myriad clusters of stars above is a reminder that I've forgotten what they look like.

The girls are in short-sleeved shirts and tank tops, underdressed in the chilly mountain air. They huddle and shiver under a thin blanket. I offer them some strawberry bars, and they hand me an orange and a bag of seedless grapes in return. I hand my long-sleeve shirt to one of them and lay out a blue sleeping bag Hero was kind enough to lend to me. I shrug off a persistent man who chants his two-sentence mantra—"Do you want a blanket? 10 pounds."—with a solitary “la shukran,” which means no, thank you. I can't find a comfortable place on the uneven ground but manage to sleep for an hour or so before the groups behind us arrive and trip over our sleeping forms.

Despite my initial irritation, I'm grateful to have been woken up just in time to watch the sky cycle through its own endless palette of colors. The orange light reveals brown mountains in every direction as far as I can see.

The people wait expectantly as though a parade is about to roll by. Finally, the round ball of sun begins to slice through some black clouds in a place I didn't think it would be. The sight momentarily silences the assembled crowd. In less than a minute it's over and conversations resume just as they do whenever the credits roll at the end of a film. It passes quickly, but I feel a moment of communion with the unknown people around me who have accepted this challenging climb to the top of a mountain for a minute of silent entertainment from nature. They seem to appreciate the same thrill from a rare and privileged view.

As I begin the descent back to the monastery and the waiting van, sleeping bag on my right shoulder to shield me from the morning sun, I'm completely at peace. A brief exchange I had with a pushy vendor in Luxor returns to my head, an apt description of my mood at that moment.

"You don't need anything," a vendor sarcastically remarked after my series of "no, thank you’s" began to wear on him.

"Yes," I replied with an edgy defiance in my voice that was entirely absent in Dahab. "I don't need anything. What a wonderful place to be."

Joel Hanson is a teacher, traveler, writer, and musician. Writing is the principle means by which he compensates for the human potential in himself and others that is squandered on a daily basis.

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