5-27-15. Ein Gedi, Israel
The long bus ride to Masada followed the shore of the Dead Sea for about half its length. In the past few decades, this landscape, always more than a little apocalyptic, has become even more desolate. Deprived of water by Israeli damming of the River Jordan, the surface of the Dead Sea has dropped more than seventy feet, leaving huge areas of former lakebed puckered with sinkholes and torn by drainage rivulets.
Fortunately, this degradation, so obvious from the highway, was invisible from the awesome eminence of Masada. The site was visible from far off, a mesa rearing more than a thousand feet sheer from the Dead Sea plain. I had initially planned to hike up the narrow “Serpent Path;” but since this trail was closed on account of the heat (it was over 100 by 10 AM), I swallowed my pride and took a cable car to the summit. The ruins on the summit date principally to two periods of intense activity: the reign of Herod the Great, who developed the site as an elaborate palace-fortress; and the time of the first Jewish Revolt, when Herod’s palace was occupied by bands of zealots. This second occupation is the source of Masada’s fame. Three years after the fall of Jerusalem, a legion was dispatched to subdue the zealots. Undaunted by the towering cliffs, the Roman commander set hundreds of slave laborers to work building a massive ramp, which was then used as a platform for siege engines. When, after months of labor, the Romans finally succeeded in effecting a breach, the zealots – according to the Jewish historian Josephus – preferred mass suicide to enslavement.
After the foundation of Israel, the story of Masada became a cornerstone of the new national narrative, and the bloodthirsty zealots were whitewashed as proto-Zionists. Thanks both to these associations and to the natural drama of its setting, Masada is probably the most-visited archaeological site in Israel. To my considerable annoyance, I shared the summit with three immense tour groups of American teenagers, difficult to ignore on account of their dawdling pace and inane chatter. I found some peace by walking the circuit backward, which allowed me to enjoy uninterrupted a spectacular panorama of red cliffs, tan desert, and cobalt sea. With the exception of a few finely-laid mosaic floors, relatively little remains of Herod’s palaces. It was, however, still possible to appreciate their opulence and dramatic siting; I particularly liked the northern palace, built on a series of Cliffside terraces overlooking the Dead Sea.
After a mercifully short wait in a brutally hot bus shelter, I rode some twenty kilometers north to Ein Gedi, a nature reserve on the shore of the Dead Sea. The park is centered on two deep wadis watered by perennial springs, which shelter remarkably lush ecosystems in the heart of an otherwise barren desert.
Having only a few hours at my disposal, I decided to walk up the Wadi David, the shorter of the two valleys. Since the temperature was well over 100, however, even this hike proved exhausting. For the first half-hour, the path hugged the valley bottom, where a swift-flowing stream leapt down a series of picturesque waterfalls. But shade and water disappeared for the next forty minutes, as the path charged up a sunbaked slope. Although the heat, coupled with the exertion of a long climb, was almost unbearable, this section of the path afforded spectacular views down over the Dead Sea behind, simmering in a cloud of salt fog; and the rosy cliffs ahead, burning in the afternoon sun.
It was with a sigh of relief that I followed the path back down towards the shady stream bed. After a few hundred meters of bridges and switchbacks, the trail ended at a cave beside a babbling waterfall. The walls and ceiling of the cave, dripping with the waters of dozens of tiny springs, were carpeted and hung with moss. Seated on a boulder just behind the gossamer curtain of water across the cave’s mouth, I savored the cool damp air. Then, I did something extremely uncharacteristic: I relaxed. I sat in the cave for almost a half-hour, watching the wildlife (at one point, a large crab scuttled out from beneath the main waterfall), catching in my hand one or another of the rivulets dripping from the ceiling, and (a little more productively) jotting some ideas in an increasingly damp notebook. Yet my reverie only delayed the inevitable return to the furnace outside. I retraced the path as quickly as I could, indulging in a cold strawberry drink on my return to the visitor center. I then had to wait nearly an hour in one of Israel’s more desolate bus stops – a rusty metal shelter poised on the brink of the Dead Sea – for my ride back to Jerusalem.