Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
The Valley of FIre
Outside the old city walls of Jerusalem begins the Wadi Nar - the Valley of Fire - a fault in the limestone that winds down towards the Dead Sea, cutting through the exposed rock and shale of the desert. To the east of here almost no rain falls, and the olive groves and terraced fields of the highlands give way to a landscape of stone, sky, and silence. There can be no life here.
And yet, as our track turns into the lower reaches of the canyon, we see the tents of the Bedouin away to our right, and hear the familiar cry: T'fadalu! Tishrab Chai! Ahlan! 'Come. Drink tea with us. You are welcome here.'
As we scramble up towards the tents we are welcomed by Umm Ali, the matriarch of this family. She is sixty-five years old, and has been bringing her goats to graze in the valley each spring since she was a child. She pours tea, and shouts to her grandchildren to bring cushions for the guests. All the while she is feeding a new-born goat milk from a baby's plastic bottle. "This kid's mother died, so we'll raise her by hand" she tells us, by way of explanation.
This time, we are able to reciprocate the hospitality, unpacking our own lunch and adding our supplies to the paper-thin shrak bread and bitter olives that are spread on a tin tray on the ground before us. And so we eat, all together, and listen to the stories of a family who live at the margins of this society - grazing their goats in the desert, harvesting a few olive trees at the edge of the rain shadow, taking temporary work on construction sites to buy what cannot be grown and to send the children to school. There can be no surplus in such a life, no storing up of wealth against misfortune - and yet Umm Ali and her children seem so steady, so generous with their tea and their laughter, that it is hard for us to fathom the precariousness of their existence.
After an hour we leave them, and walk on towards the destination of today's walk: the desert monastery of Mar Saba. The first Christian hermits sought out the isolation of this wadi more than fifteen centuries ago, and we can still see their caves high up in the walls of the canyon. From the simplicity of these beginnings, the monks built the spectacular complex of churches, dormitories, halls, and storerooms that cling to the side of the valley today. The monastery was founded, it is said, by Saint Sabas of Cappadocia in 483, and from that time to this no woman has been allowed to set foot inside its walls.
Today, however, the door is closed to men and women alike. And so we sit on the rocks in the silence, looking down onto the cascade of stone walls, lime-plaster roofs and copper domes. Far below, the stream curls and glints on the valley floor. After a while two black-robed monks appear, and ring the bells that summon the community to prayer. The sound falls away into the canyon, but there is no one to hear.
Tomorrow we will leave the desert and climb again to the highlands around Bethlehem, walking back into the Mediterranean world of planted fields and settled villages. As we go west, we will also cross into the twenty-first century, returning to a time of cars and wifi and cell phones. But here, in the quiet of the desert, it is easy to imagine that nothing has changed. The remaining monks of Mar Saba follow a rhythm of life first set down by Saint Basil in the fourth century. The way of the Bedouin is older still.
Today's entry guest written by Daniel
- comments