Bethlehem and Jericho
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aster was a low rock fence strung along the road's edge, as high
as our hub caps. The driver seemed to have lost his nerve: he
inched along slower than a trot. As we skirted the weird canyon's rim, hugging the safety of the mountainside, to my
astonishment I saw that people had once lived here. There
was a series of man-made entrances to caves, with steps dug
roughly into the rock. I had read that hermits and ascetics
often lived in these forsaken areas; that Christ was tempted
by the devil in this same Judean wilderness; that John the
Baptist preached here. Further on we saw a small monastery,
teetering over the dizzy precipice, then a larger one, then one
still larger and truly magnificent, embedded in the rock. They
were Greek Orthodox sanctuaries, where no women were allowed to step foot and monks died without seeing anyone outside the forbidding walls.
I turned to Zaki. "I wonder how we will find Moustafa."
Zaki rubbed the red dust from his lips. "I don't know," he
said gruffly.
The car lurched violently and we all held on for dear life
again. It was no time for social intercourse.
After a hairpin curve we began to climb still higher. A
majestic panorama spread before us: to the dim distant right
were the spires and skyline of Jerusalem; to our left were the
terrifying gorges and chasms in all the hues of the wild Judean
sunset; behind, the rock-hewn mountains plunged into the
deep azure waters of the Dead Sea; while directly ahead the
city of Bethlehem began to loom. We came to another hairpin curve, spiraling upward so steeply that our engine, grinding in first gear, could not pull us up. From the front seat the
driver frantically shouted to us to get out and push. With the
alternative of toppling backward, even Zaki bestirred his fat
rump and, together with the giggling Ismail, helped heave until at last we found ourselves on the level ground of a high
plateau, with Bethlehem directly ahead. It was almost dusk
when we arrived. It had required five hours to travel the thirty
to