Into Thick Air (9 page)

A half hour before sundown I crest a rise and there's Lake Eyre. It extends beyond the horizon, just like the sea, if the sea were white and silent and you could ride your bike on it. I push and drag my machine through
the dunes fringing the shore, bump over a scatter of gibbers to reach the salt crust, then pedal onto the lake. There are a few snags of driftwood to avoid, locked in the salt as if frozen in ice. Beyond, it's clear sailing. I could pop open my tent, strap it to the bike, and in this wind set a land speed record.

Turning back into the wind, my speed drops and I break through the salt and sink two inches into a damp black clay. No matter: I stop and take a picture before pushing the bike back to shore. Like a sand creature, I find a hollow between the dunes and hunker down out of the wind. I dig through my panniers and find my meager reserve of brandy, just in time for a bloody sunset over Lake Eyre.

The problem with Mount Everest is that you can't spend the night on top. Tonight my noodle dinner is ready extra-fast because water boils hotter at forty-nine feet below sea level. Tonight the wind fades and the quiet settles in and comforts me. I fall asleep, all alone at the edge of a salt lake in the desert. In the night I wake to find the moon down and the stars zinging bright, and although I'm at the very bottom of Australia, I'm feeling pretty high.

—Estragon, in Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot

 

DEPRESSIONS BECAME my destiny. Shortly after my return from Australia, Discovery Online sent a gift basket of fruit to my door. Nobody had ever sent me a fruit basket. It seemed that Lake Eyre was a test pit, and the results were positive. The editors gleefully reported a high number of hits on their internet site and advised that an encore was on the horizon.

I munched my gift fruit and marveled at my accidental career. It wasn't much of a career—I'd been asked for one more continent, not the remaining five—but this did not stop me from reveling in my success. Once my Royal Pear was reduced to a core, I turned on my computer to read e-mails from those who'd followed me to Lake Eyre.

I pictured that Scot, spilling a wee bit of whisky on his kilt and keyboard. A crude message, but I liked it and read the next.

I used something called oil, but wasn't about to disclose my secret to a gear-head with a lubricant fetish. Worse, he neglected to include a bit of flattery—the key to my heart and a reply.

Of course I replied: Yes. But then I thought: really? The blurt of mail made me realize that somebody besides my editors expected me to carry on, to pedal to every depression. And, to my surprise, this wasn't an entirely happy feeling.

Australia had been a pleasant lead-off. Not that I'd forgotten the crocs and the cyclone and the flies. But it was remarkable how the passage of time burnished my memory. Plus, in Australia I could drink the water straight out of the tap. The people spoke a kind of English. I could whip out the computer in a roadhouse and nobody blinked.

But what of the remaining destinations in my bottom-of-the-world scheme? They were no longer simply a list on my desk and dots in my beautiful atlas, a book that made every country inviting. I pored over the maps, considered my chances, and submitted my proposal to Discovery Online. I would go to Djibouti, Africa.

I was not brave. I knew nothing of Djibouti, and my imagination filled the void with fierce folk and slobbering carnivores. I was afraid, and in my mind it was best to get the African pit out of the way, finished, forever. The powers-that-be didn't agree, however. A month later, the Queen Editor rang me and said: Africa, no. It's not safe. We're thinking a better choice is the Dead Sea.

I grumbled but gave in after realizing that nobody else had offered to pay me to ride my bike. My fate decided, I pulled out the atlas and flopped it open to Plate 35, Israel-Jordan. It was not remotely similar to the map of Australia. Lake Eyre is a broad splash of salt on a desert plain. The valley
of the Dead Sea cleaves a high plateau with a gash as deep as the Grand Canyon. The little Jordan River twists and turns along the valley bottom, not much as rivers go, but enough to form the thirty-mile-long Dead Sea. The seashore is pegged by surveyors at minus 1,350 feet. That makes it the lowest point in Asia and the grand prize winner for the deepest depression on the surface of the globe.

East of the sea is Jordan. To the west, the map reads, “Israel Military Administration”—the Palestinian West Bank. It took me all of ten seconds to imagine a soldier, sweating under the moonlight, his finger on the trigger of an Uzi as he crept toward my camp.

That settled it: I would finish my ride on the Jordanian side. But where to begin? Jordan is only a third the size of Arizona, and I hankered to ride farther. To the north is Syria, and to the west, Iraq—more guns, more soldiers. To the southwest is Egypt, and there I found my route.

I would begin in Cairo and take the most topographically interesting route, which happened to be the same path blazed by Moses and crew during the Exodus 3,200 years ago. The convergence of our ways was a coincidence, but it made me suspect that Moses had more in mind than eluding Pharaoh's army.

Some Exodus scholars have objected to the popularly accepted route of Moses on the grounds that it seems unnecessarily scenic. But making a beeline from the Nile to the Dead Sea would have been the biblical equivalent of taking the interstate, a straight shot across the most tedious landscape. Why not swing south to dip a toe in the Red Sea's Gulf of Suez? Once there, Moses likely caught sight of the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula and headed east for the stupendous heap of granite 8,000 feet above the desert—surely there would be water and palms in the canyons, and a chance to consult with Yahweh at the top. From the summit of Mount Sinai, the remainder of the route was obvious: down to the eastern shore of the Sinai, the Gulf of Aqaba, then north to the great scarp rimming the Dead Sea. The Promised Land.

Moses had a little help with the parting of the Red Sea, but the best evidence that he was truly blessed is this: he pulled off the trip without a single permit from the Egyptian authorities. “The first documents that
attest the existence of bureaucracy,” wrote Lewis Mumford, “belong to the Pyramid Age.” Mumford puts it at 2375 BC.

Nearly 4,400 years later, while I worked the phone in an effort to get official permission for my trip, an Egyptian minister of information explained to me, “When you go by bike, they cannot say where you go. There is rules in Egypt. No nudity. The officials are concerned—they cannot give their approval.”

They were concerned because they didn't want me wandering the country unescorted on a bicycle loaded with spy equipment—a digital camera, a computer, and a Nera satellite telephone. The sat phone was a consequence of problems I'd had trying to get an internet connection in Australia. I assumed it would be impossible in Egypt without a satellite phone.

I called the journalists in the Egyptian Foreign Press Center in Washington, D.C. They gave me their gung ho support and forwarded my scheme to the proper state officials. Weeks later, the Foreign Press Center called me back to gloomily recite from the fax they'd received.

“ ‘
To ensure that
,' blah, blah, blah, OK, here it is: ‘
Because your equipment is worth $10,000 and the road is dangerous, we cannot guarantee your safety
.' ”

Who, I asked, cannot guarantee my safety? And I didn't ask for a guarantee, just permission.

“The letterhead and signature are blacked out. Top secret stuff. It is possible that they just want to keep an eye on you. In Egypt, a non-Egyptian with a camera needs to meet all the requirements.”

I wasn't granted permission, but neither was I denied. The Foreign Press Center recommended I bring as many official forms and letters as possible. “Everything must be original, not a copy. Better if it is stamped. Much better.”

I accumulated a fat portfolio for Egypt, then sought permission from Jordan. A pleasant man from the Ministry of Information said: “No problem. You do not need a permit for a telephone.” Disbelieving, I asked for a letter repeating these words in official form, but was told there is no such form. “Just bring your visa.”

I didn't want to beg. Besides, I had to move on to Israel, a slender piece
of which lies between Egypt and Jordan. An Israeli official first made clear that they were not a bunch of hayseeds living in the past. “Such telephones are common in Israel.” That's wonderful, I said—can I bring one in? “Of course. But there can be new security concerns at any time.”

Meaning, it was a crap shoot. Forms were necessary but made no difference in the end. All that mattered was the moment I crossed the border.

I turned my energies to Arabic lessons. Sadly, I have trouble enough with English (I struggle to understand song lyrics on the radio), and Arabic has sonic nuances like the “voiceless pharyngeal fricative.” I learned little more than hello and good-bye, yes and no, how to give thanks to God, plead for water, and declare “I am lost.” My Egyptian-born tutor, stressing the primacy of the family in Arab lands, also taught me “Your children are very nice” and “My wife is pregnant.” In theory this was a form of life insurance, because it was not honorable to kill a defenseless family man. The theory was my own, invented to soothe my friends and family who worried about my safety whenever the news carried another story of an Arab who blew up himself and several Israelis.

Such desperate acts were hard to reconcile with the legendary hospitality of Arabs. The World Trade Center still stood, and I wasn't venturing into a war zone, so it was more likely I'd be killed by a taxi than a terrorist. I assumed that although Arabs might despise the American government's support of Israel, they would recognize that I was not the government. I was just a man who wanted to ride his bike to the Dead Sea.

Exactly one year after Lake Eyre, I was roused from bed by the spring chortle of a backyard mockingbird. Laid out on the dresser were my travel pants with the secret money pocket, proof that I was leaving. I paced the cool concrete floor and checked essentials: bike box securely taped, stapled sheaf of plane tickets, passport in a slender wallet that hung from my neck. Driving to the Tucson airport with Sonya, down Speedway Boulevard and past a billboard for Tuff-Sheds, I was glumly aware that we would have separate beds for the next forty days.

I felt better with a window at 30,000 feet, with free peanuts to boot. A flight attendant leaned over row 34 and confessed, “I was almost crying
watching you two say good-bye.” It's love and hormones, I said: my wife is pregnant with our first child.

This father-to-be looked out onto the slumping gravel heaps, frozen lava spills, and jump-off-and-die mesas of the American Southwest. It was certainly possible that the Dead Sea desert looked like this, but I'd scrupulously avoided photographs. Travel without surprise was merely an agenda.

 

THE MOMENT FLIGHT 346, Zurich to Cairo, lifted off the runway, every man in my row lit a cigarette. And they were all men, Arab men, sipping Cokes and enjoying our unveiled stewardesses. The fundamentalists were right: hair
is
sexy.

My neighbor, Ahmed, sucked on a Marlboro and offered me a stick of gum. He was from Alexandria. “Cairo, big people,” he said. “Alexandria, little people.” Smoke leaked from his honest smile, and I realized that Ahmed and I shared the same gift for foreign language.

Another Egyptian explained, “He means Cairo has many people. Fifteen million. Why do you come to Egypt?”

Journalist, I said.

“I think you find it a very strange country. Very rich people, and very poor, with not many between.”

The very strange country was across a Mediterranean only an hour wide. The rim of Africa was wind-smoothed desert, and the delta of the Nile dense green and spotted with tight villages of white homes stacked like boxes. The desert was blank. There was no intermediate zone. It was the Nile or nothing. A hundred miles inland, the enormous triangle of river distributaries and farms came to an apex, and at that point was the city of Cairo.