Not long after leaving the town of Nuweiba, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the old-school white Datsun truck parts ways with the pavement, an abrupt final farewell to civilisation. My Bedouin driver barrels into the wadi, a dry valley with sheer, dark walls of towering granite mountains formed by long-extinct volcanoes that press ever closer the deeper we go. When we come to a halt, the cloud of dust that had been trailing the truck follows Newton’s first law of motion and carries on obliviously without us.
The place where we stop seems monumental, but no signs markI drape it over my hair, and Musallem gingerly takes the folded edges of the square cloth and folds it in proper Bedouin style behind my head, nodding with fatherly approval at his work. Now that this essential ritual is taken care of, our journey can begin.
