When we left off, we were settling down to sleep on Monday night, near the edge of the Jebel El-Tih plateau we’d been hiking for a few days. Well, Monday night was… interesting. It was very, very windy, all night. And cold. Cold and windy. And cold. Anna and I huddled under blankets, behind a windbreak made of our bags. It worked more or less OK, in that we were only moderately cold and winded. Luke and Lars weren’t so lucky and didn’t have windbreaks, and each only had one blanket. They didn’t quiet freeze to death, though Lars woke and announced that he had moved from a “burrito” blanket technique to a “malformed croissant” technique, which announcement cast further doubt on the toll the sun was taking.
After more or less warming up, we headed down the south side of Jebel El-Tih, and much to our surprise, our guide Fraij pointed out a bunch of fossils as we descended. Not just any fossils, either: we’re talking clams, sea urchins, and various other shells that are clear signs of sea life. Apparently that part of the Sinai was once a sea floor. We walked slowly and collected entirely too many shells, eventually deciding that clams in particular were too common to be worth bothering with.
For lunch, we stopped at the lone tree in the valley south of Jebel El-Tih. Two unfortunate things here: the tree seemed to be located in the local graveyard, which is a bit creepy, and the tree provided approximately very little shade. We roasted. Conversation was limited to short phrases like “hot” and “too hot,” a welcome break from the previous night’s “cold” and “too cold.”
We did eventually move on from the tree, hiking about 40 minutes completely exposed to the Sinai sun around 2pm. That was be far the hottest bit of hiking so far, but it was pretty much necessary since the tree was turning out to be useless as shade (and shades from the graveyard were both unpresent and unwelcome anyway).
Once we settled in near the Bedouin camp we’d spend the night at, we rested a bit and then headed off on a side hike in the nearby sandstone. We saw a local well, which Luke bravely used to fill his water bottle (with chlorine tablets, of course), and generally had some fun bouldering around the sandstone. And then we found… a slot canyon!
The canyon varied between maybe 2 and 8 feet wide, with walls ranging between 10 and 25 feet. It was a bit of a trick getting into the thing, with Lars and Anna opting for the more or less guaranteed choice of going to the bottom and walking up, Luke walking towards the head until he found a spot to descend, and me splitting the difference and down climbing a side canyon.
We all met up and headed as deep into the canyon as we could go without, as Anna put it, “getting down on the sand on your stomach and wriggling forward like a snake, with arms at your sides, under a gigantic boulder towards what looks like light.” Oddly, that didn’t sound all that appealing. And we did explore quite a bit of the canyon.
The day ended with an exclamation point: as we were all bedded down, and after Luke and I had turned off our lights, Lars and Anna were still reading. As I drifted toward sleep, I (and probably a good deal of the Sinai desert) was woken by Lars’ shriek of “holy shit!” That’ll wake you up. “There’s a giant scorpion like three inches from my head!”
To his credit, and ameliorating the somewhat girlish pitch of the original shriek, Lars was already going at the thing with a shoe by the time the rest of us processed what was going on. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! (or something like that) and he’d killed the evil thing.
Now, you might think that that was the end of it. Foul creature appears, a high pitched exclamation, and foul creature dispatched. Well, sure, for that particular foul creature. But put yourself in our place: do you just roll over and go to sleep? Was that the only scorpion in the area?
At least, that’s what I was thinking, and I have to assume that everyone else was doing the same. For my part, I was exhausted, Lars was presumably nearer to the scorpion nest, and Anna was still up reading and (I figured) might never sleep again. So I rolled over and went to sleep. With blankets tightly wrapped around me, and maybe the tiniest of trepidation.