Scenes from Israel #5: The Negev

We are up at 4:30 in the morning. The sky is just beginning to consider alternatives to darkness -- the horizon has raised its eastern eyebrow at the thought -- as we pile into the bus.

Fifteen minutes later, the crunch of the desert underfoot and a few hushed conversations are all you can hear.

And fifteen minutes after that, we enter a gully that runs down toward the Dead Sea, to the east.

The sky changes color in layers, and the desert does, too: the strata of geological sediment advance toward the sky in bands of ochre and cream, and the sky moves to meet it in black and wine-purple and a whole array of orange, until they meet in the middle, at a color that has no name and that exists, it seems, only here, only at this one moment. When you try to look directly at it, it's not there. Only when you look away -- when the curtain of darkness rises enough for you to see the mountains of Jordan on the other side of the Dead Sea -- does each color reveal itself to you. Soon, every band rises and disperses: all the colors are different. Soon after that, they are gone, as a trumpet-blast of white light begins to build behind the mountain ridge.

Then, it's morning. There are crickets on the shattered rocks and ibex on improbable perches above you and weird flying things that are very interested in your nostrils and your ears, and it's hot, and you're thirsty.

Many took pictures; I didn't (you can always find pictures of the Negev). I didn't want anything between my eyeball and the world.

Soon after that, it was time to come home.

--T.A.

Comments

[Mom]

Having just finished reading T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I find an eerie correspondence between your description of dawn in the Negev and Lawrence's. He, too, is captivated by the way this area creeps up on the senses and really overwhelms them. That is a classic, but you probably wouldn't have time to read it, with all its descriptions of military maneuvers. But the prose is exquisite, and insights into the Muslim--and Western-- temperaments astonishing.