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The Bedouin, tribes of desert nomads, have inhabited the Sinai for centuries, living lightly on the land, grazing sheep and goats, picking up and moving from water hole to oasis with the weather. Except for a few schools and places where tourists can have tea and buy trinkets, the Bedouin live the way they probably lived a millennium ago, careless that the rest of the world around them is accelerating fast.

The Sinai looked untouched by time, exactly as it had looked when I was first in Egypt 15 years ago. This time I was on a bus, enclosed, watching the landscape roll by like a video. Then I'd been out in the open, exploring freely, taking a risk that might not be possible today, not in an era when tourists have been gunned down in Egypt and even the gentle Bedouin have become less friendly to passersby, more aggressive for baksheesh. Fifteen years ago I took off on a whim with a pair of Bedouin men and two other American women into the empty, rugged mountains for four days, days that stand in my memory like red rocks against the sky.

I had been living on a kibbutz in Israel for three months, working mainly as a fisherman, when I decided to visit the Sinai with two fellow kibbutz volunteers. It was 1983, and the peninsula had just been ceded to Egypt from Israel; it was still virgin territory, except to the Bedouin, who had lived there forever. The bus dropped us off in a village, Nueva, on the coast. It looked like a medieval settlement, with haphazard stone structures, blanket-sided huts and a creaky well in the center. Men were out fishing in rickety boats. A woman was wading in the water in long, wet skirts; she caught an octopus with her bare hands and twisted its head off.

We approached the settlement tentatively, then saw other travelers camped there. We spoke to them and before long, a couple of Bedouin men in long, cotton jellabayas came over to build a fire and offer us tea. Iash, a lanky, bristly mustached man, poured the tea and gave me a cup.

I drank some and passed it along to my friend. No, he instructed me, it is the Bedouin custom that each has his own cup of tea, then the cup is swished with water, then the other has his. "Slowly, slowly."

As primitive and impoverished as their huts of cardboard and spike ferns seemed to me, theirs was a culture with a highly refined sense of etiquette. We sat by the campfire, quietly, and watched the moon rise orange over the Red Sea.

After nightfall, one of the men brought out a guitar, playing a vibrating, metallic melody, while the others laughed and sang. We moved inside a big abandoned Israeli army bus lined with red blankets and sat cross-legged in a circle. The Bedouins passed around cans of grapefruit juice, big spliffs and a booklet of photos of the Egyptian president. A Swiss woman who had married a Bedouin man joined us; unveiled, she seemed accepted as an honorary man. One man played music, the rest clapped and another got up, tied his headdress around his waist and mimicked a belly dancer, shaking the whole bus. A German man asked where the Bedouin women were.

"The men here, the women there," said the ersatz belly dancer, pointing off toward the huts. "Each in his place." The men mixed with tourists, spoke a little English, drove pickup trucks and more or less lived in the late 20th century. The women, hidden in the huts or out grazing goats, were from a more ancient time.

The next morning, rolling up my sleeping bag on the beach, I asked Iash if I could ride a camel. I had in mind climbing aboard and being led around in a circle for a few minutes before getting back down. He seemed quite happy to let me ride, and then disappeared for a long time. Slowly, slowly, I thought. After about three hours, he reappeared with three camels, fully loaded with blankets and woven, tasseled bags, and a younger friend, Salim.

"What's this?" I asked, and he told me the camels were ready for the ride. Where? He pointed to the mountains rising out of the desert. I glanced at my two companions, and asked him how long. "Four, five days, maybe a week," he said, smiling. "Ten dollars a day, meals included."

I suppose I might have thought twice before going off on a camel into unpopulated desert mountains for several days, completely at the mercy of a Bedouin man I hardly knew. But I immediately said yes for all of us.

Next page | Tea in a desert hut, tales of the wide world