Crack in the Earth A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley

Chapter One At the end of the promenade, past Herod's, over a rainbow bridge, the swanky stores of Eilat's hotel strip abruptly vanish. All along the beachfront, high-rise heavens with angled windows and palm-ringed swimming pools gaze down an arm of ocean that reaches out to them from the Arabian Sea. Only the plebeian strip of the promenade's fast-food stands and street vendors remind four- and five-star vacationers that the luxury they enjoy is tenuous and temporary. The gaudiest tower of them all is the faux palace that bears the name of the ancient East's greatest manipulator, madman, and master builder. Its rococo extravagance, all arches framed by columns and crowned by moon-bright domes, would have deeply offended the easily offended king's classical sensibilities. Herod's ("Where the Legend Comes Alive") is a temple of earthly delights that offers all-inclusive vacations of endless meals, celebrity shows, and classy boutiques. It would have enraged the great king so much that he'd probably have murdered yet another of his sons. It's not my kind of place. I'm staying at the youth hostel way down past the other end of the promenade, across the street from where the shoreline turns south toward Egypt and Africa. But the epicurean paradise ends at Herod's eastern wall. Beyond it is a placid, silent canal spanned by an unlit convex bridge. On it, a few middle-aged fishermen cast their lines out, observed by their wives and by a silent, hungry cat. I step off the bridge into the planet's natural terrain. The elements rule the October night. Sand, sea, stone, and skythe loneliness in which God resides. Thousands of stars suppressed by the brash promenade streetlamps reappear; the Dolphin and the Water Carrier hover to my right, over the sea; Polaris, low on my left, marks Route 90, the northward path of the two-week trip that I began four days ago. The beach is sandy and largely deserted, except for a couple of cars and a clapboard shack, which emits some light and the lilt of songs with Hebrew lyrics and Arab melodies. I stand at the landfall of a great rift valley, a crack in the earth's crust that begins where the Indian Ocean's waters mix with those of the Gulf of Aden. It heads west by northwest, turns more sharply to the northwest, and at the Strait of Tiran, where the Sinai Peninsula comes to a point, it takes another turn and heads nearly due north before ending in the mountains of Anatolia. This rift is one of the globe's largest features, clearly visible from space, and I live on its edge. It forms an intricate landscape that makes the human soul turn end over end in wondereven in people who are sure they have no organ by that name. One would have to be an automaton not to stand in awe of the God who designed it. Or so I felt when I first viewed the rift three decades ago. In fact, we needn't call upon God to explain either the lay of the landscape or its origin. The rift is a geological fact, the product of enormous forces operating inside the globe, and it would exist even if there were no humans to observe it. Yet humans have been a part of it nearly since there were humans; the section I will travel, from the Red Sea north to the mountains of Syria, served as a corridor through which prehistoric humankind passed on its way out of Africa to colonize Asia and Europe. From that time on, they have left their mark on the valley, and it has marked their minds. Now, even in satellite photographs, the rift cannot be seen pristinely. The light and heat emitted by Eilat and its Jordanian sister city, Aqaba, by Jerusalem, and by Tiberias on the shore of Lake Kinneret the Sea of GaWatzman, Haim is the author of 'Crack in the Earth A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley', published 2007 under ISBN 9780374130589 and ISBN 0374130582.