EOGHAN MCGRATH - TRAVERSE OF THE GODS

 Eoghan McGrath is a writer and poet from Dublin, Ireland. His fiction has previously appeared in The Scum Gentry online magazine and his poetry appeared in the Ogham Stone magazine (2019) and online at the Galway Review in April 2020. twitter: @OgOfTheBog

Traverse of the Gods
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​Everybody knew the boy was dead, long before his tiny body hit the ground. I remember it too well, that odd arching spiralling in absolute silence, no scream. Brains scrambled with the force of the turning, over and over. In that little hilltop village where I spent one day of my trip, so meticulously planned, to take in the holy capitals of the ancient world, I watched with the villagers as he dented the earth with his withered, burned form. The screaming had begun then, and the curses. The odd, scraggy-bearded, red-skinned Irishman who turned up just as the sun disappeared, to ask for water in blind arrogance, speaking a language that was not theirs, and not even his own.
My trip began with a train-ride from Rennes, where I enjoy a comfortable existence as an English teacher, gourmand, and village drunk, to Lyon via Paris. I had explored Brittany and the Norman coast enough in the previous years to have any desire to cycle those old roads again. Once you realise that there are no real rules (in France at least) with regards to bringing bikes on trains, it is far easier to overlook the stupefied and insulted expression of conductors and remove the front wheel and shove everything into the luggage compartment. The French hate rules, but they love making them apparently. One rule I try to set for myself was only to cycle roads I’ve never taken before.
From Lyon the most physically demanding part of the trip unravelled itself over the space of a week as I negotiated the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps. I spent one night in a very expensive lodge at the foot of the Eiger where, in the clear morning, I borrowed a pair of binoculars from a very amused Bavarian chap, and looked up at the north face where Tony Kurtz and his companions had died, less than ten metres from safety, in 1936. I traced the white spider, the Hinterstoisser traverse, and the traverse of the Gods. These little stretches of ice and rock stained with a history of young men seeking glory, or whatever it was they thought lay at the top of that mountain. I think it dawned on me then how the latter might make a neat title for a travel blog entry, though I hoped my trip wouldn’t prove quite as fatal as that of Tony Kurtz and his young friends.
The idea of writing a travel blog always seemed a bit cheap to me, even if it could help me pay my way. I’ve never really had the desire to share my experiences with anyone, let alone complete strangers online. And I bear no small amount of contempt for those who post evidence of their uninteresting tourism so wantonly and with such transparent narcissism for the sake of assuring themselves that they are in fact alive. Just look up at that mountain, and imagine yourself clinging to a shelf of ice while a storm blows in. You’ll feel perfectly alive, and won’t be in much of a hurry to tell anyone about it, I assure you.
People sometimes ask me why I don’t raise money for charity on my cycling trips. The simple reason is that while my trips are challenging and I thoroughly enjoy them, I do them for myself. The idea of other people paying for my holiday while I take credit as some benefactor of mankind, brings a guilt I can really do without during the long hours on the road where I have only my thoughts for company. I hasten to remind these people that they can simply donate their own money to their own charity, in their own name, in their own time, and tweet about it as much as they like. I don’t owe anybody anything by going on cycling trips.
These familiar ruminations on the ethics of travel blogging kept me occupied as I coasted downhill into Lombardy, eating my weight in gnocchi. Ten days later, I was crossing the Ionian on a boat from Brindisi to Patras. There were mostly tourists onboard and I struck up a conversation with some young Italian newlyweds who were cycling the Peloponnese.
They had met while training to be a priest and nun, and were amazed when I told them my plan to get a ferry from Athens to Izmir in Turkey, and horrified when I told them of my plan to cycle south into the holy land.
“Is through Syria, no?” the woman said.
“Yes”.
“You cannot do that,” said the man.
I tried explaining to them that in my experience “unsafe” places are usually far less dangerous than is made out, and the people there are usually more friendly and accommodating than those in supposed cradles of civilisation like Paris or Rome. The only city where I truly feel unsafe at night is my native Dublin as a matter of fact.
“But that is crazy,” the man said, as they both looked at me wide-eyed.
“We’ll see,” I said.
They continued staring at me, and I made some excuse about going to my cabin to stretch. As soon as I left, they started raging at each other. I had met with this kind of response from nearly everyone I’ve shared my plans with. Sometimes the responses scared me and made me second-guess my itinerary, but I always have to remind myself that people are more or less decent wherever you go and that hospitality usually means more to people in poorer countries than in rich ones. I planned my route to avoid active trouble zones, and told myself that commercial airlines fly into and over “dangerous” places all the time, and no-one was the worse for it. However, something about this couple did spook me. Maybe it was the fervour with which they spoke, a remnant from their more religious days perhaps. I spent the rest of the ten-hour trip thinking about the passage through Syria and Lebanon and whether it might be best to get a boat from Athens directly to Egypt and approach Jerusalem from the south. I needn’t have worried so much since I never made it to Jerusalem.
The Italians avoided me for the rest of the trip, but while we were disembarking the young man, whose name was Emidio, pulled me aside and urged me to reconsider my plans. I was halfway through telling him I would take care of myself and not to worry, when he forced a small wooden cross into my hands. I looked down at the thing. It was crudely shaven as though Emidio had whittled it down himself, and was made of some thin, unyielding wood. It felt almost weightless in my hand. I saw Emidio’s wife watching us from down on the jetty, not even pretending to look away when I caught her eye. I didn’t want to be rude to this man, a complete stranger, who had taken such a such an interest in my safety, so I thanked him, wished him and his new bride a lovely honeymoon, and told him I would think about what he said and make a decision once I got to Athens. He seemed pleased by this, but still eyed me as though he thought I was completely out of my mind. I wasn’t entirely convinced a wooden cross would do me much good in the places so charged with religious and political tension, but I slipped the little thing it into my bag nonetheless. I have a rule about not accruing random crap on the road, but the cross was so light I didn’t think it would matter.
We parted ways as they headed south and I headed north over the Rion-Anterion and made one-hundred-kilometre cycle to Delphi. After that, it was another two-days to Athens where I stayed with a friend who was doing an internship.
The boat for Turkey left the next morning, and I don’t know if it was the voice of Emidio ringing in my ears, or all the alcohol and weed I shared with my friend, but my original itinerary suddenly seemed out of the question. The next boat to Egypt left in two days, giving me more time to relax and take in the sights. I told myself I needed time to pack as much energy into my body as possible, and ate approximately five gyros per hour.
After saying goodbye to my friend, I boarded the ship for the four-day trip to Alexandria. Up until that point I had been well within my comfort zone. I’d been cycling around Europe since my early twenties and had a pretty good command of most of the languages. I felt that I knew Europeans quite well, and had developed an almost instinctive knowledge of their different sensibilities and customs. But now I was moving into the unknown. I could probably pass as a local in most places I visit, so long as I didn’t open my mouth, but Egypt wouldn’t be one of them. I didn’t speak Arabic, and I didn’t really know what to expect from the people there. I spent most of my time on the boat checking and re-checking my new plan, making sure that the distances made sense.
I would be taking a roughly seven-hundred-kilometre route from Cairo straight through the Sinai Peninsula to the gulf coast before heading north towards Jerusalem. I hoped I could make the trip in one week, as opposed to the forty years the ancient Hebrews had managed, and chose my particular route primarily to avoid Gaza, which wasn’t somewhere I felt I would encounter friendly locals. Taking this longer path meant I would have to ration supplies and water carefully. Up until now, I was able to stop at shops and restaurants to ask them to refill my water bottles, but I wasn’t sure how possible this would be in the desert. East of Suez, there’s really nothing except the odd gas station, and no app or google map will tell you where there is water or a good place to stay. Dehydration and heat stroke were now real possibilities and if I collapsed in the middle of the desert it would be curtains.
Negotiating the roads of Cairo was hell. The drivers were all murderously insane, but the heat was worse. After one hour I felt as if I had done six, and I was sweating so heavily I had to dose my water bottles with little sachets of salt to keep my muscles from seizing. The experience really hammered home how difficult the desert would be, and I made the immanently simple decision to cycle only by night, which was something I hadn’t done before.
Suez was far calmer than Cairo, but I had a hard time explaining to the hotel manager that I needed a room for the day, and not the night. Eventually we agreed I would pay half and he even threw in a free lunch and dinner. I slept for ten hours, waking only to get my meals and keep myself hydrated. At eight o’clock in the evening I checked out, and made my way to a nearby bar-café to wait for nightfall. The glare of Cairo was visible even before the sun had set, but the eastern horizon over the desert was dark and still. The journey across Sinai itself would be about two-hundred kilometres, which I felt I could manage in two nights, all going to plan.
Between Suez in Egypt and Eilat at the coast in Israel, is a town called Nekhel which marks a very rough halfway point. When the sun finally set, I triple checked everything and cycled off into the desert, with my mind fixed on reaching Nekhel before dawn the next day.
That first night was everything I’d could have wished for in a desert crossing. The farther I cycled the brighter the sky became. The stars and moon were enough to light the way, and the solitude and cool air made the going incredibly easy. I was making such good progress that I stopped and walked a lot of the way, taking in the surroundings and munching away at some bread I’d bought in Suez. Two or three cars passed me in the night, but it was so quiet that I heard them coming from miles off, and stood in the sand with my lights off until they passed.
The sun was just beginning to rise as I saw Nekhel emerging at the desert horizon. I knew it would still be a few hours before the town woke up so I found a little nook near a rock to pitch my tent and get some sleep. When I woke the sun was up and I could already feel the heat. The streets of Nekhel were still mostly empty, but by the time I reached the petrol station where I hoped to buy some more water and supplies a little crowd had formed around me.
The locals had some basic understanding of English and were very amused to learn that I was Irish, and amused further still by the trip I was making, “for fun”. They seemed happy I was there, though a few of the older residents regarded me very sceptically. The children in particular were excited by my presence, and the stupid idea that I was like Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey while children laid down palm trees came to mind. My imagination didn’t allow that ass-like analogy to stretch to its grim conclusion, at least not yet.
I was expecting to find a few bottles of water somewhere in the gas station but there were none. I had to settle, in the end, for an ancient looking bottle of coke which probably still had cocaine in it. Back outside, three bearded middle-aged men were waiting for me, all smiles. They gestured to their mouths with their hands asking if I wanted something to eat. I showed them the handful of snickers bars I had just bought, and they all laughed. Without much say in the matter I was led away to one of their houses where they assured me my bike would be safe unchained outside. I chained it anyway, hoping this gesture of mistrust wouldn’t go down too badly. Despite my ragged, dusty appearance, I still undoubtedly appeared like some rich westerner, and fair game for extortion.
Inside the house they gave me bread and some meat. I assumed this had all been prepared by the women of the house, but they were nowhere to be seen. The men poured out some fruit juice too, the kind you get in plastic bottles everywhere in the world. After that they all knelt on the floor and prayed while I sat on the couch awkwardly, wanting very much to lie down. While they knelt, my mind slipped to negotiating the next one hundred and fifty kilometres to Eilat. I could make it in one push if I started just as the sun was setting, I thought. Eilat would be crowded with tourists and I could book a good hotel for three days and even have a swimming pool. All it would take was one hellish all-nighter. The only thing I needed was three litres of water and a place to sleep until night-fall. This couch would do quite nicely, I thought.
Once the men had finished praying, they all looked at me and I smiled back at them. They laughed when I gave them the thumbs up, not knowing what else to do. I think I even bowed to them at some point.
I had learned the word for water of course, in preparation for the trip. Ma’an, which is pronounced more like Mah-on. I said it to them gesturing to the empty bottles hanging from my bag. They all nodded, and I thought they would go to some tap in the kitchen or behind the house and fill my bottles for me. Instead, they retreated to a smaller room and returned with a map. Using an old pencil whose brand I recognised from my school days, they circled a location some ten kilometres north of Nekhel, where I came understand there was a well. I smiled and thanked them, not thrilled that twenty kilometres had been added to my already overextended itinerary. Twenty kilometres may not sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but it had to be at least forty degrees outside by now, and I had planned on using this time to rest. They let me keep the map, and I thanked them again for their hospitality. One of them told me to “keep it cool, dude”, as I unchained my bike. I smiled and assured him that I would.
It was unbearably hot outside and I felt the energy being sapped out of me with every pedal stroke. The coke had given me water and sugar but the sweetness left my mouth feeling clammy and dehydrated anyway. I was thankful at least that this smaller uphill north road was in good shape, though it was littered with here and there with small rocks. I wove between them as carefully as I could. A puncture was the last thing I needed.
After about seven kilometres the tarmac gave way to gravel and the going became even harder. My wheels couldn’t get traction on the loose rocks and it felt like the slope was becoming steeper. At last, dehydrated and exhausted, I came to a small village which seemed roughly the place indicated on the map. When I say village, there were four off-white squat rectangular buildings, all flat-roofed and dilapidated looking. A few cattle and some goats were resting in the shade of the buildings, and behind them, in a sort of clearing, was a circle of tents with ornately patterned rugs draped around and over them. The scene was dominated however, by a large rocky outcrop, maybe fifty metres high, that loomed up above everything else. I had been pushing so hard on the bike that I hadn’t noticed it until just then, and I realised that I had been steadily climbing this same hill since leaving Nekhel. This last part was just a summit of sorts; a towering pile of rocks marking the end of the way. Among the smooth undulating landscape of the desert the thing looked like a rogue wave breaking in the middle of an otherwise calm ocean.
There was an old man leaning against the closest building whipping at flies which a long thin reed.
“Ma’an?” I said, walking my bike over to him. “Ma’an,” I said again, gesturing to my mouth.
He gaped at me wide-eyed and sort of straightened up. He looked me up and down at least four times before I got close enough to show him the map. He regarded it intently, and with an almost panicked look as though it was telegram bearing bad news.
“Ma’an?” I repeated, making some odd slurping noises, hoping that he got my point.
He looked directly into my eyes with his own small brown ones. I saw clumps of dust and sand in his long coarse hairs of his face. His forehead wrinkled as his eyes flicked between each of mine. A smile suddenly broke across his face.
“Ma’an,” he said, “Ma’an”. He repeated himself as though instructing me on how to pronounce it properly. He laughed as I tried to mimic the sound, and patted my shoulder with his hand. I nodded and smiled, then pointed back to the map. The man turned and pointed up at the rocky hill. From this vantage point in the shade I saw some trees sticking out here and there, which meant there had to be water up there somewhere. It didn’t look like the type of thing that could be climbed easily however, even without dragging a bike along too.
I thanked the man anyway and gave a little bow, he took one of my hands into both of his and shook it, still smiling. When he released me, I turned to the hill, cursing the fact I’d have to climb in this heat when I was supposed to be conserving energy. I hadn’t noticed till then but the little village had suddenly become quite crowded. I couldn’t quite figure out why, but they didn’t seem like the friendly type. They looked somehow different than the men in Nekhel, as if they were from a different tribe. They didn’t seem at all interested in striking up polite conversation or feigning friendship in exchange for money.
Before I realised it, I was surrounded, and the kind man who had given me directions had disappeared. I remembered some forum I’d read about jihadis controlling mountain ranges in the Sinai. At the very least the villagers probably thought I was some gun-toting American coming to lord it over them. A few younger boys started pulling at my bike and arguing with me, presumably about giving them a go. The bike had cost me about two-thousand euro, and I had spent another fifty disguising to look like it cost twenty. A much older gentleman, wearing what I can really only describe as a long grey rag, began shouting in a very strained gravelly voice. The others went silent at this, though the children did not stop trying to prise the bike from my grip. Not knowing what else to do I started swatting their hands away and driving my knuckles into the backs of their hands to get them off. I remembered the swiss army knife in my bag which I used sometimes when camping. I always felt it might one day get me out of a dangerous situation, but now that it came to it, I wasn’t at all convinced stabbing my way out was the best option.
Penned against the wall of the building, I tried to push against them and make my way towards the rocky hill. They didn’t like this, and took up shouting at me with renewed rigour. I just smiled back at them and waved, thanking them for their hospitality. But soon I was seizing fistfuls of cloth and pushing them out of the way with my free hand. Then a few of the older men raised their arms to the sky and started screaming and chanting as though beseeching their God to rid their village of this unwanted visitor. I freely admit that this was a bit unnerving, but what concerned me more was the man who jumped on my back and wrapped a skinny arm around my neck.
I tried to hit his face with the back of my head while keeping a firm grip on my bike. I thought I felt my skull connect with his nose and his grip around my neck loosen a bit. When I looked, I saw that they were now brandishing stones. I raised my hands instinctively just as the stones hit my arms and torso and went pinging off my bike and against my exposed legs. This is what everyone had warned me about, Emidio and all my friends back home. I was finally being repaid for my cockiness and ignorance of the real world. I gripped the handlebars, lowered my head and ran as fast as I could towards the hill, too desperate to notice my shadow disappearing from the golden sand in front of me.
Even now, it feels like I slipped out of consciousness for those moments. Or that some passing desert mirage had swept over the scene, and trapped us all momentarily in the eye of it’s grim echoing vortex. Just as I passed beyond the circle of tents, feeling more stones against my back, a chill fell over the desert. I heard the screaming growing louder, though the rocks and sticks had stopped flying. The violent desert heat had been instantly replaced with a cool darkness, and it was this I think that finally stopped me in my tracks.
Out of habit I wiped the dust from my watch and glanced at it. 10:11. I turned to look at the villagers who had stopped screaming by now. Then I saw the moon, huge and black, casting the sun in a blinding crescent in the sky. I covered my eyes without second thought.
As the moments passed, the darkness deepened and I chanced another glance upwards. But for little beads of light poking out around the sides, the eclipse was total. I was transfixed by the sight for a few moments, but the villagers seemed utterly bewildered. Many had fallen to their knees in apparent prayer and some had begun chanting again, this time in reverent, supplicant tones. Still others ran for the shelter of the houses and tents.
These moments allowed my panic to subside a bit, and I realised that the heat of the desert would return in a minute or two, and presumably the full fury of the villagers along with it. Part of me wanted to warn them not to look directly at it, but then, they had all wanted me dead only a few moments ago. In that moment I figured the more of them that were blind the better off I would be.
So I started running again, pushing my bike over the sand, feeling the empty plastic bottles bobbling around awkwardly behind me. I was just about to disappear from view around the back of the tents, when a great booming noise and wind swept down, as though out of the hill, towards me. I shielded my eyes from the dust and sand feeling it cling to the insides of my nostrils and mouth. I struggled to take a breath amidst the whirlwind but almost as soon as it had arrived, it had passed. I looked back at the townsfolk just as the wind hit them. It was in that moment I heard the faint whirling and whooshing noise somewhere above me and the villagers pointing up at something else which had appeared in the sky.
I saw him then, the little boy, ten years old maybe, spinning horribly through the air. Spinning so fast and in such an oddly contorted way that it made his limbs splinter out and crack in horrible directions. He hadn’t fallen, it was as though he had been thrown, more like catapulted. Being where we were, I immediately thought a bomb might have gone off somewhere, or that some long-dormant landmine had been unwittingly unearthed. But that didn’t make sense. The boy had descended from such a height and with such force that his body disappeared from my view amid a cloud of sand and dust as it slammed into the desert.
A moment later my bike lay abandoned behind the tents, and I gathered around the small crater with the villagers. When the dust settled, I saw the boy’s arms and legs jumbled haphazardly in around his body. His head hung back so unnaturally his neck was surely broken. I could see thin white bones sticking out through the skin at his joints. There was a faint hissing noise coming from his body too and the acrid smell of burnt hair was dense around him. In another moment fresh blood began to seep out of him into the surrounding sand.
He was known to the crowd. Of course he was a local, why else would he have been there? And the shrieks went up from the villagers in piercing, skin tingling-tones. Mini-avalanches of sand cascaded down around the body as the crowd struggled closer. I was pushed aside and fell as the strength in my legs gave way. A man who must have been the boy’s father flung himself down into the pit, wailing horribly.
I lay there on the sand not knowing what to do. It felt wrong to go fetch my bike and head for the hill even after they’d tried to stone me to death. Nor did I feel I should intervene in the scene in any way. But before I could even begin making up my mind, two men approached and dragged me roughly to my feet. They marched me towards the hole, and gestured down to the boy. At first, I thought they were trying to blame me for what had happened, but then it seemed as though they were pleading with me. Others turned towards me too with desperate expressions on their faces. These villagers thought I might be able to help the boy, presumably with some advanced western medicine which I, being white, had full knowledge of. Cognisant of the fact that I knew nothing about medicine, other than how to treat blisters and saddle sores, I knelt down at the hole while the father was led away.
The boy was so obviously dead it felt wrong to even look at him. I had known he was dead before he hit the ground, as did everyone else. The blood that had leaked out of him, now forming a horrible black cement with the sand, was all that needed to be observed, not to mention his neck. But feeling the gaze of the villagers on me, and not wanting to do nothing, I looked under each of his eye-lids at the vacant brown eyes beneath. I held a hand against his throat and wondered how long you were supposed to wait to feel anything. His skin was hot to the touch, hotter than a fever, but no obvious signs of burning were upon him. I hoped my disturbed look didn’t give the villagers hope that the boy might still be alive, because they all went silent. I waited, looking down at my watch. I let twenty long seconds tick away before I looked up at the men who had held me, and shook my head. I lifted one of the boy’s tiny limbs and let it fall limply back to the sand. I told them I was sorry and they seemed to get the picture. Everyone was silent then, even the boy’s father.
Somewhere in the minutes that followed I remembered the cross Emidio had given me on the dock in Patras a week previous. I went to my bike to fetch it, and gave it to the man huddled over his son. He looked so detached from his surroundings that I doubt he knew what was going on or what I had given to him. It became immediately clear to me that I might have just made some horrible blunder and offended them. I assumed this tribe was Muslim, though I knew there were some Christian Bedouins on the Sinai, but I hoped they would take it as a gesture of inter-faith goodwill either way. Some of the other men still eyed me suspiciously, but the anger was gone from their expressions. Then, in unison, they sank down to their knees in silent prayer. Not wanting to be the only one standing, and not even thinking about slinking away to the hill any more, I sat down in the odd twilight of the eclipse near the hole where the boy lay.
Their prayer lasted a long time, and I noticed the intense heat returning to the day. I looked just in time to see the last piece of moon traversing the sun. I could feel my skin instantly burning but didn’t dare fetch the sun cream from my bag. It was just becoming unbearable when the men slid upright and stood. They walked up one by one to place conciliatory palms on the fathers back. I followed suit, hoping I wasn’t interrupting the crucial step of some holy rite. I watched with the others as the father lifted his little boy from the hole, and with two men flanking him, carried him off to one of the houses. The rest of the men began filling in the hole where the boy had landed until the scene was just as it was when I had arrived. Then they too retreated off to their tents and houses to get out of the heat. They had forgotten all about me it seemed. I took this as my cue to get to the well, get some water, and get the hell out of there.
The hill turned out to be far larger than I originally thought. It stretched back a couple hundred metres and it’s sides were so steep that there was no straight route to the top. After twenty minutes of walking I had circled it twice, and still felt as though I hadn’t gone very far. The heat was becoming too much, and as much as I hated thinking that I had managed to deplete my energy when I was supposed to be resting, I finally had to admit to myself that I was exhausted. I collapsed beneath the first copse of trees I found, and finished what was left of the coke which was hot and flat. I tied the empty bottle to the others, cognisant as I did so, that I was now completely out of water. I didn’t let myself dwell too long on what would happen if I didn’t find water, but I could hardly believe how badly things had gone in the space of only a few hours. The beautiful calm of the desert the previous night seemed a long way away.
After twenty long minutes I started walking again, and around a corner, I saw a little alcove where the cliff was over-hanging. On the lip above, stood a tall acacia tree, its roots running down through the rock where I saw the sand had darkened. I stooped and drove my hands into the wet cold sand past my wrists. I felt my temperature dropping almost instantly. As I crouched, I could hear the faint trickle of water running somewhere inside the cliff. The well had to be close-by, and sure enough, after my next circle, I saw it, a little circular jumble of rocks near the base of another tree.
I had never seen a well so abundant with water, and was very glad that I didn’t have to fashion a rope out of my shoelaces to lower the bottles. I set about filling all of my bottles and spent a good half an hour in the shade, sipping away until I had drunk half a litre. Having finally secured water, my mind turned to finding a place to rest until nightfall when I could start cycling again. I really didn’t fancy going back out into the sun, and I thought the little overhang below with the cold sand would be an ideal place to catch a few hours of sleep before setting off again.
I made my way back down and unclipped my bag from the pannier and pulled out my towel. I laid it down and placed my bag as my pillow at one end. It was nearly three o’clock by now so I set my phone timer for seven hours and shut my eyes. I fell asleep to the faint sound of running water and the pleasant idea that I still stood a chance of crossing the peninsula that night. The next thing I remember was opening my eyes and feeling like my heart was exploding out of my chest.
I drew myself up onto my elbows staring blankly at the side of the little cliff face. The image of the boy spiralling down out of the sky, and his broken body bleeding out into the sand thrust to the forefront of my mind. I could taste the fresh lamb the men in Nekhel had given me on my breath, and could feel the first sting of sunburn I had so diligently avoided until now. I remembered giving the little wooden cross to the boy’s father. I remembered all of these things. Had they all really just happened? The evidence of all my senses suggested so. But then what on earth had happened to that boy? I felt as though the layers of my adult brain were being stripped away as each tried and failed to rationalise what I had seen. I was gripped with a horrible, yet familiar childish fear, one of those things you are very glad to bid farewell to as you grown older. There was something deadly nearby.
I clawed at my memories of the scene, seeking out holes and vulnerabilities, looking for a thread of logic that would explain how and why the boy had died. Instead I realised, with redoubled panic, that the boy had emerged from somewhere over my head somewhere near the hill, probably from the hill itself. Whatever it was that had caused his death wasn’t too far from where I was lying right now. He had spun so fast, had been broken and twisted so irreparably, I could think of nothing that could have caused it. It was as though he had tumbled straight out of the sky after fighting a family of bears, or after spending a week in a cement truck. But the blood had oozed out of him so freshly, so hot. I could still feel the heat of his skin in my fingers and the limp weight of his arm as I had lifted it. He was freshly dead. Perhaps had still been clinging to life as he spiralled downwards.
I felt dizzy and my vision spun in front of me. I grasped at a bottle of water, downed half of it and emptied the rest over my head, hoping to clear my senses. Clumsily, and barely keeping my balance, I shoved my towel back into my bag and hooked it back onto my bike. I took a moment to close my eyes and steady myself before prising my bike from the wall and beginning the winding descent.
My hands and feet were numb, and my shoulders and arms shook as I tried to navigate the narrow path. It was all I could do to focus on putting one foot ahead of the other. The voices of all my concerned friends spun into my head. Emidio’s concerns were loudest of all. I remembered the panicked expression on his face, and it seemed to pitch my own panic somehow even higher. I was alone, sunburnt, sleep-deprived, probably on the verge of cardiac arrest, on some random hill in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula. I shook my head, and promised myself I would never do anything so stupid ever again. If I ever got off this hill I would cycle to the nearest airport and fly home, abandoning my bike if I had to.
Keeping my eyes focussed only on the next metre ahead of me, I managed two circles of the hill, but as I was moving around into the shady side once more, there was a deep crumbling sound from somewhere behind me. I flinched instinctively imagining a hail of rocks and rubble sliding down. After a moment had passed and feeling nothing but the hammering of my heart, I opened my eyes. There was no cascade of rock, but when I looked, I saw a cloud of dust rising from somewhere up above, as though something had been dislodged. I made my way as quick and as light-footed as I could. This was easier said than done however, as my bike laden with all my supplies clanked along, and my clumsy feet slid awkwardly on the loose rock. My head was still spinning, making the walking ten times harder. At times I nearly forgot about the steep drop-off to my left, and felt my bike skid and slide down before I yanked it back up with trembling arms.
I had barely gone twenty metres further when there was another disturbance in the hill up above, and this time I heard the unmistakable rumbling and cracking of loose rock. I braced myself against the wall. It was hot to the touch, even though this side of the hill was in shadow. I swallowed, my ears trained on the air above, waiting for something to move. I stood frozen, gazing upwards, waiting for the rocks to come spilling down into my field of vision when a horrible hissing and spitting noise began from somewhere close-by.
There were snakes in the Arabian desert. I’d known this before I’d left, but I didn’t think I’d be so unlucky as to encounter one in the wild, let alone in such a precarious position. But when I looked down, expecting to see a black coiled thing baring it’s fangs a few feet away, there was nothing. The narrow path before me was quite empty. I breathed a little easier, hoping this somehow signalled a change in my fortune. It was then I noticed dark patches on the wall where it met the sand, as though steam was percolating up and wetting the cliff face. Then, a small crack in the rock began to sputter and hiss as steam and little streams of water began bubbling out of it.
At first the steam came with a weak hissing, but soon it was coming in large sputtering jets, and not just from a tiny sliver in the rock, but from what now seemed like a wide fault line running up the entire face of the hill. I staggered backwards against the heat, watching as a wall of water sprang outwards from the cliff.
When I regained my balance, I gripped a little nook in the rock and leaned out over the edge of the path. Beneath me was a five-metre vertical drop after which the terrain levelled out to a rocky slope. If I caught the start of the slope the right way with my feet, I felt I could make it, but I doubted my bike would survive the fall without some more delicate part getting mangled. I thought for a second of dangling it over the edge and letting it slide down as gently as possible, but thankfully a part of my brain that was still working overrode this.
The fissure continued to spit and hiss, and I could feel it’s heat again as I inched closer. It was too hot, hotter than water and steam should be. I could feel it radiating through the wall. I sized up the drop on my left one last time, before gritting my teeth and setting my sights on the path before me. If I timed it right, I could slip past the fissure during a temporary lull in the stream. Then in five or ten minutes I’d be back on the road with my bike still intact. I waited for the next big burst of water to subside, then strode along as quickly as I could, squeezing the handlebars of my bike with a death grip.  
I seemed to have picked the right moment, and even felt a stupid little thrill at what a proper adventure this was, when something caught my eye, and I stopped moving. I was level with the fissure now, and thinking back, I still can’t imagine how dazzling the thing must have been to stop me there and then, directly in the line of fire.
A pale light was emanating from somewhere inside the hill. It was as though someone was shining a torch back out at me, but the light felt richer somehow than torchlight. It was like starlight. It’s furnace was lit with some rare primordial element which burned with a hue no human eye had ever seen. The gap in the rock was quite narrow, narrow enough maybe for a small child to slip into. Without thinking, I crouched and leant in closer to the rock placing my hands against it and squeezing my face inside. I felt the heat of the rock against my face, but I didn’t care. If a jet of steam or water had come at that moment I would have been blinded and badly burned, no question. But all thought of danger, exhaustion, or really any thought at all, had vanished.
As I looked, I saw that the light had a white goldish quality about it. I could feel it vibrating the rocks beside me and causing the little bits of dirt and gravel around me to dance and jitter back and forth. I realised then the source of the light, somewhere in the heart of the hill, was making a noise. A noise so deep and otherworldly that I could scarcely make it out. It was like the deepest growling of a long dormant giant in the mountain, it was barely at the limit of my perception. I squinted harder trying to see deeper, to put some definite shape on the light, but I couldn’t. I even wriggled one of my hands inside, but I couldn’t reach. My eyes began to sear with the brightness, worse than with the eclipse which had fallen over the little boy. I felt the air on my face grow hotter, and a maybe little bit of sense crept back into my brain. I pulled out for a moment and blinked my eyes to get my vision back into focus. I had every intention putting my face back into hole when I felt the rock beneath my hands begin to shake and become so hot it was unbearable to touch. I took a step back. One step too many.
I fell, feeling every horrible empty inch of the drop as I went. I fell amid flecks of shattered rock, boiling water, and steam, feeling tiny patches of my skin beginning to scald. I remember a moment later landing on my bike, the steel of the frame digging horribly into my back and knocking the wind out of me. I remember sliding down the slope while above me the hill continued to spew steam and chunks of rock flew out into the air. By some miracle the larger stones seemed to fall around me, though one struck horribly into my right shin and the another thudded against the soft flesh at my right shoulder. I remember being circled in a cloud of dust feeling every bit of pain, ten times worse than the worst bike crash I’d ever had.
 I don’t remember passing out, but when I came to, the dust had settled and I was staring back up at the hill, noticing the wide streak through the rubble I must have made as I slid down. I don’t know how long I lay there after rolling painfully off my bike, but by the time I felt I could get up again, night had fallen. I found was able to walk more or less fine, though my back and knees ached horribly. Breathing was painful though. I had broken at least one rib, that felt certain, and the rest were badly bruised. But my bike seemed to have survived the fall unscathed. Some spokes on the rear wheel had been bent but miraculously the rim hadn’t twisted. One of my water bottles had been punctured and its contents had leaked out around me as I lay, but I still had three bottles to get me through the night.
I remember standing beside the hill, seeing its dark shadow silhouetted against the stary sky. A little bit off were the faint glowing lights of the village. All was still and calm. It occurred to me that the villagers were performing the requisite rituals and rites for the safe passage of the boy who had died only a few hours ago. As I walked my bike past the village, I saw one of the little buildings was crowded with people, all turned and focussed on some central point, where I knew the body of the little boy lay.
When I had walked well past the village, and the hill itself had disappeared into the night, I drew a deep quivering breath of the cooling desert air and let it out rapidly in one great puff. I hadn’t decided what I would do with regards to sleeping, though I figured I’d at least head back to Nekhel to stock up in the petrol station. I hoped it wouldn’t be closed.
In the easy downhill ride, while part of my brain was taking care of all practical matters, I was also mulling over what I had seen inside the hill. Maybe it had been some miniature volcano or some new fissure that had been torn up because they were digging for oil somewhere close. There had probably been an explosion, a mini-eruption which killed the little boy, and I had been hit with the aftershocks. This explanation made some sense but it really didn’t sit right with me. Leaving aside the fact that the water I got from the well should at least have been a bit hot if it was near an active volcano, the light I had seen inside the hill was not the dim orange glow I would have associated with lava. There was no earthy, burning, sulphur smell at all, and the light had been golden white. As I got settled into my regular cadence, I reminded myself that in my panicked, semi-delirious state, I had probably missed some little piece of evidence that would have made the truth of the matter perfectly clear. Either that, or some exceedingly rare natural phenomenon had happened which I had no knowledge of. This would suffice for now.
I leaned against the wall of the petrol station tearing into a snickers bar and downing as much coke as I could swallow. Nekhel was as quiet now as it had been when I’d first rolled in that morning but it felt utterly changed, as though ten years had passed. The western sky was the darkest shade of purple while the east was entirely black. After its dramatics during the day, the moon had disappeared off behind one of the horizons. The sky was full of stars and no wind disturbed the frozen sea of the desert sands. I made one last check of my bags and supplies before setting off once again, planning on cycling as far as I could then finding somewhere to sleep before finishing the journey to the gulf the next night.
Thirty minutes in, I felt completely alone again. It was just me, my bike, and the empty expanse of space above and around me in every direction. Whenever I look back, these times of utter solitude are the ones I remember most fondly. Though I may, in some lonelier moments, post a picture online just to see the likes ticking up from the people I know around the world, the real treasure of my trips, as in most things I’ve done, are the moments I’ve shared with only myself. Moments for which there is no proof they’ve happened at all, except my own memories, in whatever form they may take. Sharing moments like these always feels crude in some way, like telling someone about a good deed you did. There is a far deeper satisfaction from doing the good things anyway and telling no one.
The darkness stretched on and on into the small hours, and my body was faring better than I’d expected. But somewhere deep in the heart of the night, my solitude was broken.
After I’d ticked over one-hundred kilometres, and it seemed like the lights of the stars were finally beginning to fade, I saw a figure on the road up ahead. When you cycle in near complete darkness you sometimes see things, like the colours and patterns that spring up when you close your eyes, but I saw the young boy then, as clearly as when I’d held his arm and felt the thin lifeless skin of his neck. There was no blue glow, or transparency. The boy walked quite plainly along the opposing hard shoulder, wearing the same loose clothes he had died in. He turned his head and our eyes met, blue on brown. He didn’t smile, but his face was not expressionless. There was a hint of curiosity there, but above all was an odd sort of aged certainty. The comfort of a great secret shared only by dead things.
In the next moment we had passed and my hands, a little numb from the cold, struggled to tug on the breaks. I came to a jerking stop and nearly lost control and toppled into the sand. When I looked back, I saw only the white the soles of his feet disappearing into the night, like the pale flames of two candles slowly flickering out. Then they were gone. I looked all around me, suddenly afraid, as though expecting more people to be there, but there was no one. For a little while I considered cycling after him, just to be sure that he had really been there. But at some point, I must have gotten back on my bike and continued cycling east, for when I finally came to my senses, the sun had risen before me and I was approaching the Red Sea and the border crossing at Taba.
The Israeli guards looked at me, astonished. I must have looked like a ghost myself, pock-marked from the boiling water and covered in a thin film of dust. After checking my passport, they turned my bag inside out, and inspected every inch of my bike. Then, after pouring out all of my water bottles, and without a good enough reason not to, they stamped my passport and let me in.
The short stretch of coastline to Eilat was like any other seaside tourist destination, and was so different from the desert, that I had an odd disjointed feeling as if my immediate experience was being channelled through somebody else’s eyes. I passed large convoys of tour buses and at least seven resorts on the road before I got to the city. Signs for restaurants and hotels popped up everywhere. Lightheaded and still wrestling with the thoughts of everything I had seen, I checked in for a three-night stay at one of the first hotels I saw. After receiving assurances that my bike would be safe in the store room, I went to my room and dumped all my gear in to the cupboard. Then it was a long cold shower, over-priced room-service, and sleep.
It was bright when I woke up, and checking my watch I saw that I had slept through the night and well into the next day. The pain from my fall and the full night of cycling had caught up with me, and my body ached everywhere. In the end I checked in for a further two days, and spent most of my time in the pool trying stretch out my muscles and get them ready for the next push north through the holy land. But by the fourth night, after I had time to think everything over, I decided to cut the trip short and booked a flight back to France.
Often, it’s the idea of avoiding failure that helps me through the longer trips, but I didn’t feel like a failure for quitting early this time. The thought of going through “less safe” areas like Syria was off-putting enough, but more than that, I felt more exhausted than I had ever been in my life, and the five days I spent lounging around the hotel had done nothing to help. Dodgy border-crossings and the odd resurrection, these standard events when traversing the middle east, were more than enough experience to justify taking the trip, I decided.
Thankfully, there were direct flights from Eliat-Ramon airport to Charles de Gaulle, the only trouble was my bike. I ended up having to purchase a full row of seats, in accordance with the rules of the French airline (you know the one), only for the flight crew to store my bike in the hold free of charge anyway.
When I finally got back to my apartment in Rennes, I flung my bike and bag into the basement not wanting to see or touch either of them for a long while. I spent the extra two weeks of my holidays sleeping in my apartment and drinking beer in the main square. I told the few friends who’d messaged that everything had gone mostly fine but that in the end I’d decided against cycling through Syria. They wanted to know all about my trip though Egypt and the Sinai but I just told them it was a beautiful but harsh place with kind people.
A month or so later, after I’d gone back to work, and the narrative of the journey began its slow transformation from near-lethal death-trip to epic adventure in my brain, I felt the urge to return to the road. In the basement, I found my bike looking like an old crusty relic, and it took a full day to wipe the sand and dust out of each crevice. The derailleur had been cracked too, probably in the fall from the cliff, and would need replacing. But other than that, the bike was in perfect working order.
I opened my bag and found, among the mushy remains of a forgotten snickers bar, an old battered map of central Sinai. Nekhel was clearly marked in the centre of the map, and a faded circle a few centimetres above marked an apparently empty stretch of desert where the village and the hill had been. I traced the faint circle with my finger, as though trying to trace the outline of the events in my head. It was dream-like, but the map was there, and everything I had seen was still sharp in my head. At the bottom of my bag I found a roll of clean, unused white socks, and had to laugh to myself.
Back upstairs, I turned my bag inside-out, threw everything into the washing machine, and flicked all the setting to maximum. I was about to throw the clean bundle of socks into my cupboard when I felt something hard rolled up inside them. Probably some errant rock or long-lost bike tool I thought, but when I pulled the socks apart, a small wooden cross sprang out and landed on the bed. I looked down at the thing for a few minutes, as though it were some intruder, or a grenade that had fallen from the sky. I held the thing in my hand remembering the boy and his father, and I could see them quite clearly again. I could even smell the seared hair and flesh of the boy.
Without thinking, I hurried to a little drawer in the sitting room where I keep old notebooks, plans, and any artefacts I find on my travels. The cross looked awkward sitting there on top of everything so I covered it with some photographs and crumpled pieces of paper with distances and elevations marked in faded ink. I went back to the bedroom to fetch the socks and threw them into the machine, before sitting down to plan my next trip.
I really meant to forget about that cross. But those trinkets and things locked away in drawers always have a way of surfacing again. The more things I pile on top, the more these deep things bubble up to the surface of my brain. Ideas and images of old places and old roads, of little nooks in hills and memories I tell no one about. Pictures of Swiss mountains marked with death. Forbidden hills frozen in desert time. Where for brief moments I’ve seen the shadows of those who have traversed the narrow ledges and crevices, seeking treasure and shelter in the places our world keeps her Gods. It’s this search, I think, that keeps me coming back to the places I’ve never been.