Trashing Mount Sinai

By LANCE MORROW

Elvis Presley's Graceland in Memphis has become a shrine, a sort of tackiness made sacred. Mount Sinai, where God came to earth, is about to become a sacred place made tacky.

A billboard on a road six miles north of Sinai's Monastery of St. Catherine says, "At this site will be 500 villas, a tourist village with 250 rooms, two hotels with 400 rooms, shopping center, school and hospital, supplied by all facilities." The "great and terrible wilderness" described by Deuteronomy is on its way to becoming a tourist trap.

The pilgrim will no longer have to make the 2 1/2-hour climb from the monastery, on the steep steps carved in rock by Byzantine monks who began the task in the 6th century. Unless better angels intervene, there is to be a cable car to whisk the pilgrim up the volcanic rock. At the upper terminus, according to one plan, he will find a restaurant, a casino (which in Egypt is not a gambling house but a nonalcoholic nightclub) and probably an asphalt walkway lighted at night to take the visitor to where Moses and God met.

"In other parts of Africa," the author Paul Bowles remarked, "you are aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to look at the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter." Is that the reason the three great monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) were born in the desert, the reason that all the specialized deities left the earth and went into the upper air to coalesce into one invisible God?

The Lord "descended upon ((Mount Sinai)) in fire," Exodus records. The Lord gave the Law to Moses there: "And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking . . ." Today a visitor sees the massive granite front of Horeb that rises perpendicularly out of moonscape and in the autumn and winter months may be surrounded by sudden clouds, thunder, lightning and lashing rains.

"Whosoever toucheth the mount shall surely be put to death," said the Lord. For over 3,000 years, the occupiers of the Sinai peninsula, from Justinian to the Prophet Muhammed to Abdel Nasser and Golda Meir, took the site under their protection. Mount Sinai is enclosed in a convective divinity that is primitive and powerful. The mountain seems to gather thousands of years into a prismatic clarity. The Egyptian Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction, however, is not awed.

The tourist pressure has been building for years. Today some 30,000 visitors a year come to Mount Sinai. Most arrive in buses from Cairo or else take a twice weekly Air Sinai flight that lands at an airstrip built by the Israelis during their occupation. If the Egyptian government's plans go according to projections, some 565,000 tourists -- an almost 1,800% increase -- will arrive every year. What is wrong with that? That part of the Sinai is a wilderness populated mostly by Bedouins and the 17 Greek Orthodox monks at St. Catherine's monastery. Egypt urgently needs hard currency. The other tourist sites, the pyramids at Giza, the temples at Luxor, are overwhelmed by foreigners. Why not open up a sluice of tourism to the Sinai?

There are three irretrievable losses waiting here.

The first is to the monks of the Greek Orthodox monastery. St. Catherine's sits in a wadi at the foot of Mount Sinai. For 14 continuous centuries, the monks have prayed there. Since the middle of the 6th century they have placed the skulls and bones of dead monks in the monastery's charnel house. In one corner of the monastery, surrounded by a protective wall, is what tradition says is the Burning Bush, a large, dense bramble whose leaves have been coming out olive green for 3,000 years. The monks' medieval tradition of hospitality to the wayfarer was never meant to accommodate tour buses. The volume of tourism is exhausting the monks. Increasing the load of visitors to an average of 1,500 a day would swamp the monastery. The monks might have to close down. ! Or perhaps the government could hire people to impersonate monks -- a sort of Williamsburg pageantry. (Do prayers performed by impostors have any spiritual voltage?) Or the government might make the monastery a museum. Or a hotel. What would the ministry do with the skulls?

The second loss would be to the environment. There are 812 species of plants in the Sinai, half of them found in the high mountains around St. Catherine's. Of those, 27 are endemic, found nowhere else in the world, according to Joseph Hobbs, a University of Missouri geographer who has studied nature on the massif. Ibex browse and graze on Mount Sinai, virtually tame, because the Bedouins never hunt them, regarding the territory as sacred. The contemplated tourism would arrive in that nature like a neutron bomb.

The third catastrophe would be visited upon the idea of sanctity itself. No one would propose to raze the old city of Jerusalem, which contains some of the holiest sites of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in order to make way for parking lots and discotheques. But because Mount Sinai is mere raw nature, somehow it is more vulnerable to the idea of "development" -- a business word suggesting (ridiculously in this case) improvement.

Somewhere this bulldozing desanctification for money must end. If the attraction of Mount Sinai is its holy wilderness, and even the physical effort required to approach it, tourist development threatens to destroy the uniqueness and transcendence of the pilgrimage. The Egyptians are often haphazard about protecting their dead treasures. Now they seem ready to sacrifice a powerful, living mountain that is in their care. Perhaps they will make the cable cars in the shape of calves and gild them. The golden calves can slide up and down Mount Sinai and show God who won.