Still making my way through Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses and I came across another interesting bit worth passing along. The author, remember, is a non-religious truth-seeker going through the lands featured in the Pentateuch. He made his way with a scholar-archaelogist friend named Avner to Mt. Sinai and after leaving the monastery (the passage I quoted here), they climbed the mountain by camel and on foot. After reaching a crest, he has this experience:

We made our way back from the overlook through a fascinating corridor of amber-colored stone, which the wind had carved into a series of undulating forms, a fun house of brown sugar. …

The corridor eventually spilled into a small enclosure near the middle of the mountain. A stone chapel dedicated to Saint John the Baptist sits in the middle of a scene so green it could be in Ireland, with hawthorn, fig, and apricot trees scattered in a small grove. Water, collected by a dam that prevents rainfall from cascading on the monastery below, was so plentiful here that early monks who lived on the mountain were actually able to grow wheat. In the sixth century, as many as three hundred monks resided here at one time, Avner said, and there are countless chapels dedicated to everyone from Saint Gregory to Saint Anne to Saint Panteleimon, and nooks and crannies named after Moses, Elijah, Jethro, even the “Virgin Mary’s Holy Girdle.” …

A few minutes’ walk from the enclosure, Avner led us to a sheer cliff overlooking the eastern side of the mountain. The wind had picked up a bit, and the sun was glaring off the red face of the stone. Though it was early afternoon, the air was chilly and bracing. I could only imagine how raw the place must feel in winter. Avner hadn’t mentioned where we were going, but when we arrived, he pivoted me around to face a tiny cave, the mouth of which was no higher than my waist. “This is a Byzantine cave,” he said. “A hermit lived here.” The space between the top and bottom of the opening was no more than a foot and a half. I had to bend over, squat down like a frog, lean forward even more, and go rear-end-first into the cave, just to fit. Inside I crossed my legs in front of me and managed to sit down. My left knee touched the left wall; my right knee touched the right wall. I could reach forward and touch the front lip; I could reach back and touch the back wall. My head rubbed against the top.

“How long would he have stayed here?” I asked.

“Six days a week.”

I closed my eyes. The wind was so loud it seemed like cars whizzing by, and the sensation reminded me of my first day in the desert when the sounds were so loud they had an isolating effect. The wind as white noise. Here, the stimulation came from the front, from this extraordinary window on the world. … Looking out, I couldn’t help wondering what that landscape must have represented to the monks who sat here. Was it a mirror of their soul? A mirror of God? Or are those the same thing? I could see how sitting here hour after hour, week after week, the view through the eye-shaped opening would begin to consume one’s imagination. Here you’re not on top of the world; you’re inside it. You become, in essance, part of the land.

And how better to remind yourself of the lowly qualities of your body, which will ultimately return to the ground, than to return to the ground yourself. What better way to liberate your spirit than to cut off your body from the world. Not until I slid inside that envelope of earth did I realize how much these individuals were reacquanting themselves with Moses, who met here with God; with Elijah, who fled here from Israel; with Jesus, who sequestered himself in a similar location in the desert and was later placed by apostles in a cave outside Jerusalem. A space like this, coupled with strict self-denial, might be as close as a living person can come to the concept of resurrection.