Ghosts of the Negev

It was hot, scorching. Sweat was rolling down my neck pooling into the valley where my t shirt met my pants as I walked several kilometers to my room. Only a week ago I was wearing four layers in a blizzard, then ventured to the blistering heat of the desert. Never before had I felt the squeezing, incessant fire of the Negev.

Monochromatic mesas and ravines lined the barren area. The drab landscape was alluring, it had a constant sense of danger as if the desert could swallow you without a trace. The highway I walked along was dusty and slowly bobbed up and down etching a line in the huge expanse of desert before me. Occasionally, semi trucks honked as I trudged along the road back to my room, warning me to keep far enough away from the road itself and to stay in the gravel.

Across the highway was a Roman fort. Nothing grand, a crumbling edifice of a long dead empire. At least that was what Benni, a local, told me. To the common wanderer it looked like a line of rectangular stones that the sand could consume with the slightest wind.

Heat emanating from the asphalt created a vision of waves the fabric of the present seemed to shudder in the slight breeze.

I paused and sat against a large boulder to take an unmannerly large gulp of water. Water streamed down my face soaking my already wet shirt as I relaxed against the slight shade of the rock. My mind wandered and every piece of history flashed before me. The bare feet of our paleolithic ancestors emerging from the womb of Africa, the leather sandals of the Israelites, the boots of soldiers from the countless wars all the way to my worn black converse.

I could almost see transparent phantoms waked in front of me. An eternal loop of history being played out over and over again. The thousands of people who had walked the same path flowed through me, connecting me to the stream of history.

It was a feeling of eternity.

Those fleeting, blissful thoughts faded away and I was back walking along the road. Into the abundance of experiences that awaited me in the Negev.