Passage to India! Lo, soul, for thee, of tableaux twain, I see, in one, the Suez canal initiated, open’d, I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie’s leading the van; I mark, from on deck, the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance; I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d; the gigantic dredging machines.
-Passage to India, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.
-Mandalay, Rudyard Kipling
In the summer of 1979 I planned to go to India, but first I wanted to see one last corner of Egypt. If you went east of Suez in those days, you had to go via Israel- which occupied Egypt’s Sinai coast on the Gulf of Aqaba. The Camp David Agreement was supposed to give it all back but the Israelis were already dragging their feet.
The beach’s level sand at Dahab with sun-tanned hippies’ one pieces already shed and Mt. Sinai- Jebel Musa as Arabs call that strange landscape- with sun-reddened Christians’ Jerusalem hungers still unsated were too good to miss no matter whose flag flew. Picturesque groups both, with or without their clothes.
So I went that spring not as beach bum or religious pilgrim, but simply as curious idler- the kind I always hoped to meet when on the road myself. Bedouins rented beds in seafront huts and monks at St. Catherine’s Monastery rented beds at the trail up the mountain. Sin and skin below, sky and spirit above, the best like the worst as they ever are.
And very few of either bum or pilgrim, Egypt and Israel then being still in a state of war- official peace was to take effect the next year- despite the vigorous three-way handshake I had watched on television from a raucous Cairene coffeehouse just a few weeks earlier. When Sadat kissed Rosalynn Carter the place went beserk, which just proved how hard it would be for Egyptians to make peace between the sexes- forget about Jews and Arabs.
