CREATURES OF THE DESERT
Gerda Cohen meets the settlers
and scorpion-watchers on the edge of Israeli territory
Eilat THE most interesting thing in Israel since my last visit has been the introduction of draught beer. Spelt 'draft', it has in the local mind some connection with over- draft, a hint of needed sin. The best draught beer is to be found at the edge of the great crater in the desert south of Beersheba. Here the Eilat bus halts at a café run by Bedouin turned urban. Their sharp bird-bones, desert-skinny, contrast with our lumbering khaki. Most of my fellow passengers are going back to base, young officers and men doing their reserve duty. There isn't a war on, but a state of tolerable siege.
We pile into the café and order draft Maccabee beer, half a litre. It's sharp and clean, like Watney's Best. Nobody here ever gets drunk. The bus driver had Coke. Outside, the desert light is a blinding glare. In the cool, girl lieutenants in white socks get on with their knitting, their sub- machine guns slung on the mock-pub bench. They belong to a tank brigade based nearby. 'That's what we got for handing Sinai to Egypt,' the bus driver glints through his dark glasses, 'a kick up the behind.' His route passed the big air base moved out of Sinai when Egypt took over in 1982. 'Our desert got little, all of a sudden. No space.' He got up to go. 'No space' — Hebrew has only one word for space and territory. It's a blunt language. As we leave, the light is so dazzling that figures have a halo around their blackness.
A vast cirque dips sheer away from the road, cut off as with a knife. It's the great crater of Makhtesh Ramon, fissured, dried, heaped coke on the bottom. It could be a deserted open-cast mine. Smudges of coke, slag, grit, remind me of Scunthorpe in a heat-wave. If you fell off the edge, you'd get killed. Tourist coaches park here, for lectures in the extremely fine Observatory. A party of young soldiers, cradling their weaponry, listen to a girl captain explain the crater's origin. Erosive, not volcanic. Erosion will destroy any- thing, in time. Her Hebrew sounds harsh and final; like a gravestone. 'You thought our desert is big and empty. It has become small.' Tank manoeuvres destroy the myriad crinkly, defensive plants which hug the shale and the dry wadis. Nature con- servation has a special edge in Israel. A zeal and urgency which must prove some- thing, a territorial right.
Down the road to Eilat, immensities of solitude rear into sliced-off white moun- tain, spoil tips, black glassy slag. The whole thing could be a furnace. A bunch of air force girls get out in nowhere, sulphur- ous shade to the horizon. They seem cheerful, aged 19 or so; good sorts, the type who would be rowing for Oriel. A metal sign points to their camp. Baboon- headed rocks with stone nostrils point the other way, to Akaba. Jagged mountains on the Jordan side turn the most incredible violet, then magenta, then indigo. Sun- down already, and I yearn for tea. The desert makes me continually yearn for tea.
Meanwhile the bus driver has gone sombre, frowning: 'If I drive a bit to the left, I'm in Egypt; if I drive to the right, I'm in Jordan. No space,' he yawns out loud, `no space.' Our descent through the moun- tains, magnificent, ends in a sharp smell of hamburger. As dusk irradiates the rift valley, charging the mountains with gran- deur, the smell of chips arises from Eilat. Vulgar, gritty, no worse than any other package concrete spewed out around an exquisite bay — what do you expect?
To cheer myself up, next day, I go for 'I'll stretch a point — one amoeba.' lunch to the five-star hotel in Taba. Curios- ity alone would have taken me there. Israel and Egypt have been arguing about Taba for ages. Whose territory? It's a ten-minute bus ride, past the municipal tip, the fake ranch and Hawaii-type bungaloid clutter; the foreshore empties awhile and you can see the gulf, dazzling ultramarine. A little stretch of gravel, some rusty barbed wire — that is Taba. 'Isn't it enough for you?' The border guards stretch out by their jeep, eating fried egg. Beyond the barbed wire at a distance, other guards slouch about, and the promontories of Sinai edge saw-tooth into heat haze. 'Sure that's Egypt,' the border guard eyes me, indiffe- rent, 'see their patrol boat? Rammed our yacht. It's boring, so the patrol rams yacht every other day.' But why all the fuss about Taba? 'Why give them a metre more?' He goes on' chewing fried egg.
The gulf waters look ravishing here, ultramarine shot through with red, forever whipped and glinting in a dry wind. 'My single complaint about this hotel,' remarks a fat man at lunch, 'is wind. We get wind after breakfast, wind after dinner; it never bloody stops."Henry, language!' This warm couple, tanned magenta, are staying at the Sonesta on Taba beach. They run a cab hire firm in Ilford. 'We always book at the Sonesta; best hotel in Israel.' Henry and Viv particularly commend the service, which is indeed excellent. 'Half the waiters are Jewish and half are Arab.' Henry lifts his green eye-shade to accentuate the point. 'Just shows you, leave 'em alone, they get on okay!' Drifts of heat haze obscure the sullen reds of Jordan across the gulf. 'We've booked up for next year'. VI" anoints herself lovingly. 'Get in before the Germans.' They laugh. But suppose EgYPt took over? 'Never,' Henry got up quite sharply, 'never!' We drink some bitter coffee in the Bedouin tent which the management has pitched downwind. A stench of camel pee hangs about, from the snooty, moulting camel tethered onshore. `Camels moult in winter.' Viv is deter- mined on optimism. 'You should see them in Whipsnade.' The drifts of heat haze turn out to be phosphate, a white cloud veiling Akaba port. We count half a dozen freighters queueing across the water. All the freight for Iraq goes through Akaba, since tile? Gulf war began. How many years ago? `Forgot about that war, didn't you,' Hall sounds triumphant, 'leave 'em alone, they kill each other off.' Israel must be the quietest country in the whole Middle East; Quieter, older, sadder. On the bus north, notice how people don't talk any more' They don't talk, spit, or crack sunflower seeds, even the North African immigrants of yesteryear. A hybrid has grown up, quite new, inhabiting new cities like Beer sheba. Dry desert winds blow through Beershe- ba, the too wide boulevards and waste- lands of ochre grit. Tiny scentless roses bloom amid the silent traffic. By day it's ugly. At dusk a sky of radiant purity arches over the hulking ochre blocks, and the desert stars appear, oddly green. I am staying with young cousins who like Beer- sheba. 'It's warm-hearted, lively.' North African and Polish and Romanian, all mixed up together. By the time the media abroad had heard of an ethnic split, Moroccans here were marrying Polish blondes. Now it's a general hybrid, secular. Not Jewish? 'Jewish but not aggressively Jewish.' A good reason for living in Beer- sheba, explain my easy-going cousins, is the total absence of maniac orthodoxy. On Saturday morning people go to synagogue, and on Saturday afternoon people go to the football match. Football is the predomi nant passion. But the ultra-orthodox want to ban matches on Saturday, the holy Sabbath, even though tickets are sold beforehand to avoid profanation. 'Typical Israel! If there isn't a war on, we fight each other.' Judaism is the great divider now. I would like to appreciate Beersheba, city of the future, but the only thing which moves me is the small cemetery for soldiers of the Allenby campaign, its humility and order. The gravestones are carved with regimental insignia; young men from Suf- folk and Somerset, all killed on the same November day in 1917. An and gale, tasting of grit, whirls between the head- stones and out to the bus station. There's a curious smell of weed-killer from the che- mical works. I yearn for tea, but I am due at the Desert Research Institute, in the wilderness of Zin. To be exact, on the edge of the wilderness. The laboratory, where People are studying high-protein cress and solar energy, peters out, all of a sudden, in empty ashen space. The neat staff villas go rIght up to an immense canyon, a scraped- _out desolation called Zin. The rocks ribbon horizontal about this canyon, cauterised white and black, like an endless gnashing Of teeth. In the still afternoon, hot and sae, nt, the place exerts an awful allure. L intend staying quite a while,' says Yael _ubul, who has invited me for tea. She is the attractive, laughing, an authority on the black widow spider and scorpions. 'I go oYael Pours China tea into her dainty white porcelain. 'Lemon or milk?' She has baked spicy apple cake whichperfumes her cool apartment. 'Am I afraid to go out at night?' she asks, laughing and glinting. 'Of course not; Israel is safer than Nicaragua.' :11e really is most attractive, with her prinklY smile and dry Hebraic voice. 'No t131 not married. Invertebrate predators Curti me on,' laughing. 'Take some more hake.' I do. It's the best tea since leaving ooTTIle; would Yael ever visit England? °0 wet for me. I need desert. Israel is w° –11.e of the world centres of the black twr goof spider, which has an ingenious ska,Ping mechanism. They hang the one of their prey outside the trap; no -.e &flows why.'
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