Where Mountains Roars, in search of the Sinai desert

Lesley Hazleton

Published by Victor Gollancz, hardcover with dustjacket

Here is a book not simply about the desert but of the desert. Lesley Hazleton has fallen under the spelt of its splendour. At first she found it ugly, a harsh and barren landscape, but then she spent a year discovering its fierce beauty and incredible variety, its natura! rhythms and mysterious wild life.

It is a haunting region, the ancient land bridge between East and West which has served throughout history as a handy route for trading caravans and invading armies—and for the Children of Israel: it is the region of the Burning Bush, the Exodus, the law-giving, the flight of Elijah, and much more of Biblical record. k has seen conquerors and slaves, hermits and saints, nomads and settlers, Arabs and Jews. It is a land to fear, buit there is a unity in its desolation that explains why it became the cradle of monotheism.
Today, can the desert be made to bloom? Life has clung on, even at its outer limits: Lesley Hazleton writes absorbingly about the remarkable range of creatures that have found strange ways of surviving, from the camel to the snail. But now great efforts are being made to irrigate, plant, fertilise. She talks to Israeli scientists and pioneers who are showing the way; and the Egyptians may develop their green revolution tooalthough military demands are reducing vast areas to training grounds and buffer zones.

Tourism, too, is a growth industry: when the author climbed Mount Sinai, she found the summit maddeningly crowded at dawn; and beach resorts are springing up.
So though natural systems persist and human communities survive (not least the tenacious Bedouin, about whom Ms Hazleton writes with deep understanding), they are threatened as much by peace as by war and she is by no means wholly approving of Israel's present policy and approach. Her fascinating book illuminates the fragile future of the desert as well as ...................................