On Vanishing by Lynn Casteel Harper

Author:Lynn Casteel Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226295
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

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In 2010, four years before my grandfather’s death, I had a transformative experience with darkness, and its complementary relationship to light, atop Mount Sinai. I admit, a minister claiming to have had a religious encounter on Mount Sinai is a bit “on the nose.” My story, however, is not supernatural; my face did not shine, nor did I receive tablets of divine commands. At the time, I did not have the words to describe what had so moved me, but as I reconsidered the metaphor of darkness in the months after Jack’s funeral, my memories of Mount Sinai took on a new clarity.

Our ascent of the mountain began at 1:00 a.m., with a faint tapping at the door. Ryan and I, and our friends Matt and Hana, were sound asleep after a long day on a hot bus, winding through the streets of metropolitan Cairo, slowly passing through the Suez checkpoint, bribing our way through military outposts in the Sinai Peninsula, and finally settling in at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai. The knocking persisted, grew louder.

“Matt, is that the guide?” Ryan asked.

“It’s too early,” Matt groused. He rolled out of bed, cracked the door, muttered some Arabic, closed the door.

“He wants to leave now,” Matt announced.

Yousef, our teenage Bedouin guide, had come to fetch us much earlier than we had planned. He said it would be better if we did not wait until later. He did not say why taking off at such an ungodly hour was preferable. It just was, and it seemed wise for us to trust him. From our sleep, we quickly arose and began our nighttime ascent of the mountain—in the pitch black, in the cold, with only the slobbery snorts and shit-smell of camels and the dim light of Yousef’s iPod keeping us on the narrow path. Yousef glided effortlessly in sandals upon the rocky earth.

Muffling our heavy breathing and ignoring the sweat that turned to icy scales on our foreheads and chins, we made no complaint as we trailed Yousef’s faint light and passed other pilgrims (many on camelback) as if they were standing still. The next day, we met a young American tourist, who said that it had taken him a full three hours to scale the mountain. Yousef had us to the top in half that time.

The last leg of the journey involved following tiny lights, held by old Bedouin men, who crouched near the ground, illumining steep, narrow stone steps—courtesy or perhaps emergency lighting for those who had made it this far. Yousef pointed to the rocky, vertical path, “go here,” then he and his light disappeared. His vanishing, which he executed so nonchalantly, unsettled me; when one travels an alien path, the absence of a guide can feel like an eternity. Once we had made it to the top—at this point, there was no masking our heavy breathing—Yousef reappeared, looked at us with what I read as judgment—what took you so long?—and led us to a small stone wall at the edge of the mountain.

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