A Jebeleya Guide on the Night Climb of Jebel Musa — Epoche B1
"The mountain works at night": a Sinai guide on Jebel Musa Saleh, a Jebeleya guide from the town of Saint Catherine in Egypt's South Sinai, has taken visitors up Jebel Musa — Mount Sinai — since he was seventeen. Q: Why do people climb at two in the morning? Saleh: For the sunrise, and because the mountain is kinder in the dark. The summit is 2,285 metres, the climb about three hours, and by day the sun owns the path. You walk under stars and arrive cold. At the top men from the village rent blankets, and the visitor who laughed at the price at midnight is wrapped in two by five. Q: There are two paths? Saleh: The camel path, long and gentle, and the 3,750 steps cut into the rock, the story says by a single monk — the Steps of Repentance. Most people go up the camel path and come down the steps. Either way, your knees will remember them. Q: And at the bottom, the monastery. Saleh: Saint Catherine's. Built on the emperor Justinian's orders in the sixth century, around the place of the burning bush, it has worked without interruption ever since — some fifteen hundred years of monks, prayers and manuscripts behind the same granite walls. Visitors expect a ruin and find a working house. And inside the walls there is a mosque, from the Fatimid period, itself about a thousand years old. The bell tower and the minaret stand a few steps apart. Q: What is your family's connection? Saleh: Our tradition says the emperor sent families to serve and guard it when it was built, and that we Jebeleya are their descendants. Serving it is still our work — gardens, paths, guiding. The monastery has its monks, and its mountain has us. References Hafez. Divan (Collected Works of Hafez). (Various editions, commonly published in Iran). Shiraz University. (Ongoing). Cultural Heritage Studies of Shiraz. (Internal research documents).