A different kind of silence

The Sinai was not the desert I had imagined. It was rocky, mountainous and immense, with wide valleys opening between sandstone and granite. Much of what I remember comes from a five-day trek through the peninsula with our guide, Shaked, and members of Kibbutz Zakim, moving on foot through country that seemed to change shape with every bend.

The Coloured Canyon

One section of the trek took us through the Coloured Canyon near Nuweiba, north of Dahab — a narrow labyrinth of rock nearly 800 metres long, with walls in places rising to around forty metres. The route twisted between sandstone faces that closed in, opened out and shifted with the light. In the photograph I am standing on a ledge partway through the canyon, dwarfed by the scale of the walls around me. It was the kind of landscape that made distance difficult to judge and kept the next turn hidden until you reached it.

Tea with the Bedouins

We sat beneath a simple shelter with Tarabin Bedouins while tea boiled over the coals. Conversation moved slowly, helped by gestures, curiosity and hospitality. The village behind them seemed almost to merge with the rock and dust.

A different kind of silence

After dark the temperature dropped quickly. The Milky Way stood out with a clarity I had never seen before. I lay awake for a long time, watching the stars and listening to almost nothing.

There was also the silence, both literal and metaphorical.

The Sinai remains one of those places I can return to almost physically — not because anything dramatic happened there, but because for a brief period there was enough distance from ordinary life to notice what was already changing in me.