Iryna

If I start to talk about Israel, My Israel, it would take too much time and you couldn’t avoid going, (normally people couldn’t avoid). So I won’t not to ruin your plans. Though in any case I’ll tell you about Timna park. You can Google it if you don’t know and read: “Timna Park, located some 25 km north of Eilat, combines beautiful scenery with special antiquities. The horseshoe-shaped valley covers some 60,000 dunams and is surrounded by steep cliffs. Timna is the site of the world’s first copper mine…” But it’s not what I wish to tell.

We went there at night. No, we weren’t late. If you’ve been to the desert at night you understand why.
It was one of the most inexplicable sensation I have ever felt. The desert and the rocks, hamidbar vehaharim in Hebrew… Here you can see and touch the Time and the Earth, the Eternity. The rocks have been there for millions of years, they’ve seen everything, more then we can imagine or realize, nothing has changed for them… No, the sand is continuously changing… Mysterious lighting makes the scenery both real and unreal. Touching the rock I absorbed its energy and strength, its unsolved secret and now I know too about the Earth, a little bit, of course.
There was a surreal musician, sitting on a solid rock with his pipe. You can’t leave him, I guess it was some kind of “eternal music”. Can you imagine? Just night, desert, the rock and the man on it playing the pipe… It seemed he had been there as long as the rocks.

I don’t know how but I eventually left him in his Eternity. Then we were listening to a concert of Israeli singer, I don’t remember her name or her songs, I had completely lost feeling of reality. She was singing high in the rocks (how had she got there???) wearing white clothes, the her powerful voice covered the desert, wrapped the rocks and me together… It wasn’t the Eternity anymore, it was phantasmagoria.
And divine figs. There were divine figs dried in the most delicious way ever. Usually I don’t like figs but these were divine, never before, nor later I’ve been lucky to taste such fruit. No doubts they were divine, I even saw Egyptian god copper-mining not far away. The dinner in a “restaurant” (you eat just sitting in a desert, may be like King Solomon long ago?) was cooked by gods too, amazing egg-plants with tkhina for sure. Their agent being a chef hired in Pantheon.
So… I’ll come back to hear the rest of the rocks’ secrets, they didn’t tell me everything.