On the eighth day He made Snickers.

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It’s an emotional parting from Dahab. Though he’s only been out of bed for two days, Paul’s managed to endear himself to much of the town’s workforce. There’s Khalid, the young waiter from the Chill Out Café, who pats his chest warmly, over and over, intoning the word inshallah that they might meet again. There’s the young artist who makes his Technicolor paintings of fiery sunsets and camel silhouettes, his voice swollen with gratitude over the piece Paul’s picked up for E£30 - just under six US bucks. There’s the owner of the pharmacy next-door to the hostel: in just two days, he’s sold Paul enough Band-Aids, gauze pads, lotions and creams to outfit New York Presbyterian. He hopes that Paul can return to Dahab someday soon, his bloody foot limping into the pharmacy with a trail of bandages behind it.

We’ve worked out a deal to take a private minibus to Mt. Sinai for a sunrise hike, then continue on to Cairo by early-afternoon. Hoping to bring down our expenses, Paul’s been working hard to lure others to split the cost with us, chatting up a few Brits at breakfast in the hostel and all but setting up a bake sale by the waterfront. During a snorkeling trip to the Blue Hole he manages to rope in three young Columbians; we seal the deal while they’re having dinner, blindsiding them with a sales pitch they couldn’t have seen coming when they sat down to their chicken fattahs. The minibus is set to leave at 1am; the hike itself should take a couple of hours.

It’s as stupid a way to start the day as any. We’re sluggishly packing our bags at half-past twelve, having squeezed in a two-hour power nap and said our last few delirious goodbyes. There are more inshallahs around the hostel, a few half-baked promises to keep in touch. The Columbians are in the convenience store across the street, loading up on cookies, soda and bags of potato chips. They’re wearing jeans and running shoes, looking for all the world like they’re about to spend the morning buying CDs on the streets of Bogota, not ascending one of the planet’s most sacred peaks. Paul is doing stretches and power lunges on the sidewalk, though all our fancy hiking gear, all those layers and shells, does nothing to dispel the fact that there’s no place we’d rather be than snugly tucked back under the covers.

The road is a desolate black ribbon cutting through the silhouettes of Sinai’s craggy cliffs. There are checkpoints at regular intervals, bright fluorescent lights casting an alien, luminescent dome over the dark desert landscape. At some we’re met by serious-looking soldiers with assault weapons and nervous frowns who rifle through our passports; at others, a few disheveled teens in massive parkas puff into their hands and glance into the bus with extreme disinterest. The security situation in Sinai is perpetually tense, even moreso in the wake of bombings in recent years in Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh, and Dahab itself. I’d met a few young guys - dive instructors and café workers - who remembered the day the bombs ripped through, ironically, a restaurant called Al Capone. One helped treat a few wounded at his dive center: the hospital was too overwhelmed to handle the traffic pouring in. Another remembers the arms and legs bobbing on the sea, those miraculously clear waters grown murky with blood.

Adding to our own worries is the fact that Paul hasn’t seen his passport since Hurghada. He’s afraid it might’ve fallen from his pocket aboard one of our buses, or that he might’ve left it - along with a large chunk of his ruptured bowels - in the toilet aboard the ferry. As we reach each checkpoint he pretends to doze in the front seat, hoping a less-than-zealous guard will pass him by. When a couple of no-nonsense soldiers insist that he dig it out of his bags, they lose their resolve as he slowly starts to unpack - one T-shirt at a time - the massive sack he’d slung to the roof of the bus.

At the foot of the mountain, just steps from St. Katherine’s Monastery, the souvenir shops have already rolled out the welcome mat. Since a good chunk of the tourists visiting Mt. Sinai on any given day roll in at around 3am, it’s only natural that the touts would be ready with offers of hats and scarves and camel tours to the top. It’s a weary trudge from the parking lot, the mountain’s black outline looming to the side, a canopy of stars flickering above us. At the trailhead there’s a sign that says it’s 3.4 miles to the summit. Paul - as seasoned a hiker as any - lets out a disconsolate little grunt. For those of you who’ve been following from home, there’s not much in these annals to suggest that a certain scribe is one to hike seven miles round-trip on just over two hours of sleep. The Columbians have forged ahead, chattering away in Spanish, crunching on Egyptian chips. Now and then we jerk to the side when a small caravan of camels - led by local Bedouins - suddenly comes bearing down out of the darkness.

Around us the silhouettes of the mountains are dramatic and imposing; the word that comes to mind, not coincidentally, is “Biblical.” For an hour, climbing a mild pitch that seems to get us no closer to the summit, there’s nothing but the staccato crunch of our footfalls to break the silence. There are more stars than I’ve ever seen in a single night, a forest of them, stretched across a sky so wide and immense that it feels like we’re ascending to heaven with the constellations at our feet. Seen from a certain historical perspective, it’s a fine place to go looking for commandments. Before long, we’ll discover it’s an equally fine place to put a snack bar. Every fifteen or twenty minutes we reach a small wooden shack with candy bars and soda cans neatly lined across the counter. You can see them as you approach from a distance, the soft yellow glow of electric bulbs the only thing to break the blackness. We buy a couple of Snickers bars that give a very necessary sugar rush. At one stop we meet an American with snowy hair holding a cup of tea with both hands. He explains to the Columbians that he studied Spanish in Cartagena, his accent flat and listless, his H’s hard enough to break glass.

A half-hour from the top there are voices ahead: not a few disparate souls calling out to each other in the darkness, but the clamorous pitch of a flea market in downtown Cairo. After a few blind turns we’re surrounded by dozens of aging tourists - their breaths huffing awkwardly, their necks muffled against the cold - stepping gingerly over the rocky path. It’s impossible to tell just where they’ve come from, whether their tour buses made the steep climb up the side of the mountain, whether a nomadic band of Japanese tourists has made a home in the harsh terrain around us, using their tripods to burrow into the earth for fresh water sources. When we reach the final ascent - the famous 750 steps hewn from the mountainside - there’s a bottleneck of tourists that must number in the hundreds. They’re giving each other encouragement, their headlamps bobbing, or taking a breather on the side of the path. Before long we’re passing packs of stooped, breathless old women and men - the most bodies littered around these parts since the Six-Day War. Of all the things I expected from this morning atop Mt. Sinai, not a single one of them involved a pair of Russian spinsters muscling by in matching tracksuits and running shoes. You take what the road gives you, I suppose.

At the top there are men offering blankets and mattresses that, you suspect, had already seen their share of wear when Moses himself hunkered down beneath the stars. The first thin ribbon of light appears to a few ecstatic sighs. Soon a large group of Polish pilgrims begins to hum a hymnal, striking the soaring chords of “hallelujah” as the sun broaches the horizon. It’s a theatrical touch that, I’ll admit, I’d be hard-pressed to top. I’ve spent the past ten minutes munching on cashews and spitting date pits into my palm, having awkwardly realized that the first few I’d spat over the edge were hitting the pious heads below. A guy in a dirty gelabbiyah is still pushing his blankets our way, even though the sun’s warming rays are striking our weary faces. On the way down we can still hear him offering gloves and scarves, as if a nice, warm, burning bush weren’t just around the bend.

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