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You only live once, I told them. I'm going, and you aren't going to let me go alone, are you? Claire needed me to travel with her to Alexandria, where her father had lived, so she had to humor me or travel through Egypt by herself. Linda was afraid to be left alone at all, so she decided to come along, too. Besides, she was a farm girl from Wyoming and pretty soon she would have to go back to that dull farm. I rushed to gather my things, and Linda and Claire followed more slowly.

The lurch up the camel the first time was a surprise. They are ornery, bony beasts, and the wooden saddle made them no more comfortable, even with our sleeping bags piled on top. We first rode to a military station to register our trip. Linda and Claire were somewhat relieved that some official somebody would know we had taken off into the mountains with these fierce-looking Bedouins.

At the barracks, we were swarmed with polyester-clad military men who wanted their pictures taken on a camel. Iash relented only if he could have his photo taken on a helicopter, smiling broadly. When we finally set out, I asked him about the peacekeeping force, and the changes since the Egyptians took over, and he shrugged. "We Bedouins don't care what they do," he said. "We make no problems. We're not Arabs, we're not Israelis. We're Bedouins. We were here before and we will be here after all of them."

We headed up a wadi that ran through creviced rock, a stream of dust, empty except for an occasional scrub tree. Here and there a black-cloaked woman walked her goats. The sun, the swaying camels and the slowly swirling rocks were hypnotizing. Salim, Iash's younger relative, lit up spliff after spliff of Bedouin tobacco as we wound up the canyon. The camels frothed and brayed and now and then gurgled up a red sac that lolled out of their mouths like a bladder. Soon, saddle-sore, we didn't care if we ever rode a camel again, and were glad to reach the shallow watering hole and sheltering rock where we camped.

We scattered across the canyon to gather twigs for the fire. The stillness was so complete that the crunching of our shoes on the smooth pink rocks was unbearably loud. There was so little alive in the canyon that I was sure the rocks themselves were growing.

We sat on our saddle blankets around the fire. Iash and Salim made balls of bread, patted them into flats and buried them in the ashes. When they pulled them out, they were bubbly and charred; we scraped off the cinders and ate the doughy bread dipped in tomatoes and onions. While we ate, the Bedouins asked us to tell them stories of the world they would never travel.

Linda described man-eating grizzly bears from the mountains in Wyoming. Claire told them about skyscrapers in New York. I compared their land with the Southwestern United States, and described a desert canyon so deep it would take a day by camel to reach the river at the bottom.

Then they wanted American songs. Salim knew one: "We don't need no education," he sang. "Pink Floyd!" he told us, pleased with himself. Iash asked what "education" meant. We told him it meant school, and he flipped his turban disdainfully. "What's the use of school?" he asked. "A man studies, and his brother goes out and lives, and who knows more?"

As it got cold, we pulled the saddle blankets tight around ourselves and waited for the moon to rise. "She comes," said Salim, as the sky dimmed the stars. Sometime during the night, Salim threw his skinny brown leg over Linda's sturdy white one, but she reproached him sternly, Iash listening in. He declared to Allah that it was an accident, and we never had any more problems.

The next day we rode from canyon to canyon, seemingly lost, until we came upon a stand of palm trees and shacks where Iash and Salim's relatives lived. Inside a hut made of burlap and thin wood, we sat around a fire while the women made us tea. This was the only time we interacted with the women, and they seemed shy, avoiding our eyes, one mother intently picking insects from her baby's hair. An older woman entered the hut with eight baby goats trailing behind. She shrieked at Iash for several minutes before nodding to us.

We drank tea, ate some bread and traded our silver jewelry for their beaded bracelets. We gave them Israeli cigarettes, which they puffed through the thin black gauze shrouding their faces. With Iash translating, one woman ventured to ask us how old we were, whether we were married and where our children were. They were shocked to learn that at 22 years old, I was still single. They lined my eyes with black kohl to improve my luck.

The grounds around the settlement were littered with plastic, goat turds, papers and old tin cans. The Bedouin just threw whatever they were finished with around them. Nor did they build bathrooms, or even holes in the ground. At first this seemed like disrespect for the environment, which was odd for a people who say you should never cut down a tree because you are felling an old soul. But after a while I realized they are such a part of the land that surrounds them that they don't separate their trash; it, too, is part of where they live, no different from the shrubs. They have no more sense of "wilderness" than people who have never been outside the inner city.

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