PAUL SALOPEK

Out of Eden Walk

FROM National Geographic

 

I. To Walk the World

 

WALKING IS FALLING FORWARD.

Each step we take is an arrested plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. In this way, to walk becomes an act of faith. We perform it daily: a two-beat miracle—an iambic teetering, a holding on and letting go. For the next seven years I will plummet across the world.

I am on a journey. I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage. Not because it delivered us the planet. No. But because the early Homo sapiens who first roamed beyond the mother continent—these pioneer nomads numbered, in total, as few as a couple of hundred people—also bequeathed us the subtlest qualities we now associate with being fully human: complex language, abstract thinking, a compulsion to make art, a genius for technological innovation, and the continuum of today’s many races. We know so little about them. They straddled the strait called Bab el Mandeb—the “gate of grief” that cleaves Africa from Arabia—and then exploded, in just 2,500 generations, a geological heartbeat, to the remotest habitable fringe of the globe.

Millennia behind, I follow.

Using fossil evidence and the burgeoning science of “genography”—a field that sifts the DNA of living populations for mutations useful in tracking ancient diasporas—I will walk north from Africa into the Middle East. From there my antique route leads eastward across the vast gravel plains of Asia to China, then north again into the mint-blue shadows of Siberia. From Russia I will hop a ship to Alaska and inch down the western coast of the New World to wind-smeared Tierra del Fuego, our species’ last new continental horizon. I will walk 21,000 miles.

If you ask, I will tell you that I have embarked on this project, which I’m calling the Out of Eden Walk, for many reasons: To relearn the contours of our planet at the human pace of 3 miles an hour. To slow down. To think. To write. To render current events as a form of pilgrimage. I hope to repair certain important connections burned through by artificial speed, by inattentiveness. I walk, as everyone does, to see what lies ahead. I walk to remember.

The trails scuffed through the Ethiopian desert are possibly the oldest human marks in the world. People walk them still: the hungry, the poor, the climate-stricken, men and women sleepwalking away from war. Nearly a billion people are on the move today across the earth. We are living through the greatest mass migration our species has ever known. As always, the final destination remains unclear. In Djibouti city, the African migrants stood waving cell phones on trash-strewed beaches at night. They were capturing a cheap signal from neighboring Somalia. I heard them murmur: Oslo, Melbourne, Minnesota. It was eerie and sad and strangely beautiful. After 600 centuries we were still seeking guidance, even rescue, from those who had walked before.

 

Herto Bouri, Ethiopia

“Where are you walking?” the Afar pastoralists ask.

“North. To Djibouti.” (We do not say Tierra del Fuego. It is much too far—it is meaningless.)

“Are you crazy? Are you sick?”

In reply, Mohamed Elema Hessan—wiry and energetic, the ultimate go-to man, a charming rogue, my guide and protector through the blistering Afar Triangle—doubles over and laughs. He leads our microcaravan: two skinny camels. I have listened to his guffaw many times already. This project is, to him, a punch line—a cosmic joke. To walk for seven years! Across three continents! Enduring hardship, loneliness, uncertainty, fear, exhaustion, confusion—all for a rucksack’s worth of ideas, palaver, scientific and literary conceits. He enjoys the absurdity of it. This is fitting. Especially given our ridiculous launch.

I awoke before dawn and saw snow: thick, dense, choking, blinding. Like plankton suspended at the bottom of a sunless sea, swirling white in the beam of my headlamp. It was the dust. Hundreds of animals in Elema’s village had churned up a cloud as fine as talc. Goats, sheep, and camels—but, sadly, not our camels.

The cargo animals I had requisitioned months before (a key arrangement in a project that has consumed thousands of hours of planning) were nowhere to be found. Their drivers, two nomads named Mohamed Aidahis and Kader Yarri, were absent, too. They never showed up. So we sat in the dust, waiting. The sun rose. It began to grow hot. Flies buzzed. To the east, across the Rift, our first border, Djibouti, was receding at the rate of three quarters of an inch every year—the speed at which Arabia is drifting away from Africa.

Are you crazy? Are you sick? Yes? No? Maybe?

The Afar Triangle in northeast Ethiopia is dreaded as a waterless moonscape. Temperatures of 120°F. Salt pans so bright they burn out the eyes. Yet today it rained. Elema and I have no waterproof tents. We have an Ethiopian flag, which Elema wraps himself in as he walks. We have found and rented two camels. We plod across an acacia plain darkened to the color of chocolate by the warm raindrops. We tread on a photographic negative: the camels’ moccasinlike feet pull up the frail crust of moisture, leaving behind ellipses of pale dust.

After a dozen miles, Elema already asks to turn back.

He forgot his new walking shoes from America. And his flashlight. And his hat—and the cell phone. So he hitches a ride from our first camp to his village to retrieve these vital items. And now he has jogged all the way back to catch up. He complains, laughing, of crotch rash.

This absentmindedness is understandable. It is impossible to remember every detail on a walk of this scope. I have forgotten things myself—nylon stuff sacks, for instance. Because of this, I begin my trek out of Africa with airplane luggage, a city slicker’s rig with plastic rollers and collapsible handle, strapped to a camel’s back.

It is the scientists of the Middle Awash research project who invited us to begin walking at Herto Bouri, our symbolic mile zero in the Ethiopian Rift—one of the richest human boneyards in the world. This is the famous site where some of the world’s oldest human fossils have been found. Homo sapiens idaltu. Gone for 160,000 years. A big-boned ancestor—a dawn version of us.

The Middle Awash Project researchers, a team led by Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Giday WoldeGabriel, have uncovered in Ethiopia many of the most important hominin fossils of our day, including Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4-million-year-old biped. My unpredictable Afar guide, Elema, is their veteran fossil hunter.

Raised in a nomad culture feared for its tough warriors, Elema speaks three languages—Afar, Amharic, and a profane English patois gleaned from the Middle Awash scientists. He is a paleontologist in his own right. He exclaims “Wow” and “Crazy, man” and “Jeezus” while identifying the Rift’s key geological strata. (Me he calls, not without endearment, White Asshole; I return the compliment with equal fondness, dubbing him and his perennial rash Burned Asshole.) He is the balabat, or traditional leader, of the Bouri-Modaitu clan of the Afar. His cell phone holds the numbers of Ethiopian grandees and French academics. Educated to the eighth grade in schools of the Emperor Haile Selassie, he bridges more cultures than a Malinowski. He holds more time warps inside his head than an Einstein. He is a phenomenon.

We are camped at Aduma when the Middle Awash scientists find us. They have come to show us a Middle Stone Age site.

“These tools are still a little early for the people you’re following,” says Yonatan Sahle, an Ethiopian researcher based in the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “But their technology was basically as advanced. They made throwing weapons that allowed them to outcompete the other hominins they encountered outside Africa.”

We lean over a delicate stone point, a work of art that lies where its maker dropped it 80,000 to 100,000 years ago. In the distance we hear screaming. We look up.

An Afar woman strides in from the desert, waving her arms wildly. Where did she come from? Is she warning us off her hill? Is she mad? No. She marches up to a man dozing nearby on the ground. She gives him a sharp kick. She hefts a stone—a Middle Stone Age tool, perhaps—and threatens to brain him. Is it the collection of a debt? A matter of the heart?

I hear the victim laughing. I know this maniacal laugh. It is the man who will guide me to Djibouti, to the Gulf of Aden.

 

Dalifagi, Ethiopia

Water is gold in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia.

No surprise. This is one of the hottest deserts in the world. Walking for three days near the western scarp of the Rift, Elema and I find only one miraculous pool of muddy rainwater to ease our camels’ thirst. But we stumble across a new type of water hole a day later—a coveted oasis of electrons, the village of Dalifagi.

The immense saltscapes that shroud the borders of Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea weren’t even mapped until the 1920s. For centuries the martial Afar pastoralists who ruled the area resisted all incursions by the outside world. Today, though, besides their usual armament of pointy daggers and Kalashnikov rifles, they carry cell phones. They embrace the tool of instant communication with a vengeance. “It has given them power,” says Mulukan Ayalu, 23, an Ethiopian government technician who maintains the tiny power plant at Dalifagi. “They can call different goat traders. They can choose their selling prices.”

The diesel generator at Dalifagi chugs out a 220-volt current for six hours a day. Ayalu plugs in the nomads’ cell batteries for a few cents each. On Mondays—market day—grizzled Afars line up at his office door. The folds of their saronglike skirts bulge with dead cell phones of faraway neighbors. The nomads are addicted to the devices. “Hallow? Hallow?” Elema bellows into his phone on the trail, with an accent that sounds, to my ear, straight out of Brooklyn. But he is asking directions to some ancient well. Or exchanging news of the dreaded Issa, armed raiders from a rival nomad group.

The electronic oasis at Dalifagi would never draw tourists, much less inspire the verse of caravan poets. But it is the real story today in sub-Saharan Africa. Nine hundred million people. A headlong sprint into the digital age. Exploding aspirations. Consequences unknown.

 

Near the Talalak River, Ethiopia

Footwear is a hallmark of modern identity. How best to glimpse an individual’s core values at the start of the twenty-first century? Look down at people’s feet—not into their eyes.

In the affluent “global north,” where fashion caters to every whim and vanity, shoes announce their wearer’s class, hipness, career choice, sexual availability, even politics (the clog versus the cowboy boot). It is disorienting, then, to be walking through a landscape where human beings—millions upon millions of women, men, and children—slip on identical-style footwear every morning: the cheap, democratic, versatile plastic sandal of Ethiopia. Poverty drives demand. The only brand is necessity.

Available in a limited palette of chemical hues—black, red, brown, green, blue—the humble rubbery shoes are a triumph of local invention. They cost a pittance to manufacture. Any pair can be had for the equivalent of a day’s field labor. (Perhaps $2.) They are cool—permitting the air to circulate about the feet on the desert’s scalding surface. The ubiquitous sandals of rural Ethiopia weigh nothing. They are recyclable. And home repair is universal: owners melt and mend the molded-plastic straps over wood fires.

Our binary camel caravan—our two beasts are named A’urta, or Traded for a Cow, and Suma’atuli, Branded on the Ear—has been joined at last by its two long-lost cameleers, Mohamed Aidahis and Kader Yarri. These men caught up with us from our departure point at Herto Bouri, crossing miles of gravel pans and rumpled badlands during days of quickstep walking. In the manner of life here, no explanation was asked or given regarding the nature of their weeklong delay. They were late. Now they were with us. Each wore a pair of the region’s signature plastic sandals. Color: lime green.

The dust of the Rift Valley is a palimpsest stamped by such footwear. Yet if Ethiopia’s populist sandals are mass-produced, their wearers are not. One man might drag his left heel. A woman might mar her right shoe’s sole by stepping on an ember.

Elema knelt the other day on the trail, examining this endless mutation of impressions.

“La’ad Howeni will be waiting for us in Dalifagi,” he said. He pointed to a single sandal track. La’ad was waiting in Dalifagi.

 

Near Hadar, Ethiopia

We are walking in the direction of Warenso.

The world changes when you are thirsty. It shrinks. It loses depth. The horizon draws close. (In northern Ethiopia the earth butts against the sky, hard and smooth as the surface of a skull.) The desert tightens around you like a noose. This is the thirsty brain compressing the distances of the Rift, sucking in the miles through the eyes, magnifying them, probing them for any hint of water. Little else matters.

Elema and I have trudged more than 20 miles through the crushing heat. We have separated from the cargo camels to visit an archaeological site folded into a wrinkled draw: Gona, the location of the oldest known stone tools in the world. (Age: 2.6 million years.) Our water bottles are empty. We are uncomfortable, anxious. We speak little. (What can be said? Why dry the tongue?) The sun’s rays corkscrew into our heads. An Afar proverb: It is best, when you are lost or thirsty, to keep walking under the sun, because eventually someone will see you. To be tempted into shade, to drop under one of 10,000 thornbushes, means death: no one will find you. So we stagger on into the blinding afternoon—until we hear the faint bleating of goats. Then we smile. We can begin to relax. Goats mean people.

Our hosts: an Afar family camped on a hill. Two strong, smiling young women. Eight children in thin rags that once may have been articles of clothing. And a very old woman—she doesn’t know her age—who hunches like a gnome in the shade of a reed mat. Her name is Hasna. She has been sitting there, weaving with spidery fingers, since the beginning of time. She invites us to join her, to rest our bones, to remove our shoes. From a battered jerrican she pours us water—chalky and warm, so salty, so alkaline, it oozes down the throat like soap, but precious nonetheless. She offers us a fistful of yellow berries from a wild tree that grows in wadis. She is our mother.

When our ancestors wandered out of Africa 60,000 or more years ago, they encountered other species of hominins. The world was crowded then with strange cousins: Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, the Denisovans, and perhaps other varieties of people who weren’t quite us.

When we met them, perhaps like this, on some remote hilltop, did we share water, or even interbreed peacefully, as some geneticists suggest? (Outside Africa, modern human populations seem to contain as much as 2.5 percent of Neanderthal DNA.) Or did we rape and kill, launching our species’ long and terrible history of genocides? (In a cave occupied by modern humans, Fernando Ramirez Rozzi, of Paris’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, has identified a Neanderthal jawbone mutilated by the cut marks of butchery, perhaps cannibalism.) Scientists still debate this puzzle. All that is certain is that we alone survived to claim the earth. We won the planet. But at a cost: We are without close family. We are a species racked by survivor’s guilt. We are a lonely ape.

Hasna’s gentle voice lulls me to sleep.

When I awake, Elema is hunkered in low conversation with the men of the nomad camp. They have returned from tending their flocks. We shake hands. We thank them. We leave packets of crackers for grinning Hasna, and walk on. We are hurrying to meet the camels, walking toward Warenso. That night, while sipping our gift of salty water around a red fire that saws back and forth in the wind, Elema tells me the men of Hasna’s camp had threatened him. He was not of their clan. He nearly hit them over the head with his walking stick.

 

Dubti, Ethiopia

Moving north and then east, we abandon the desert and stub our toes on the Anthropocene—the age of modern humans.

Asphalt appears: the Djibouti-Ethiopia road, throbbing with trucks. We drift through a series of gritty towns. Dust and diesel. Bars. Shops with raw plank counters. Garlands of tin cups clink in the wind outside their doors.

Then, near Dubti: A sea (no, a wall) of sugarcane. Miles of industrial irrigation. Canals. Diversion dams. Bulldozed fields. Levees crawling with dump trucks. Elema becomes lost. Night envelops us. We end up pulling the weary camels in a gigantic circle. “Wow, man!” Elema says angrily. “No way! Too much change!”

This is the multimillion-dollar Tendaho sugar plantation, an Ethiopian-Indian project that is making the Afar Triangle bloom. Fifty thousand migrant workers will soon toil here, tending 120,000 acres of desert that have been scraped, shaped, molded, and flooded by the Awash River to sweeten the world’s coffee, its tea. Eventually it could make Ethiopia the sixth largest sugar producer in the world. It will help break the country’s dependence on foreign aid—a good thing.

But the benefits of economic progress are rarely shared equally with all involved. There are winners and losers in every improvement scheme. Here, one of the losers is a bright young Afar woman—a girl, really, though her poise makes her seem old beyond her years. She is wrapped in a red dress. She stands by a new levee. She is collecting water from what used to be the Awash River.

“The company moved us off our land,” she tells us, waving her arm at the sheets of cane. “We get a little work, we Afars, but it is always the lowest work. Watchmen. Shovel work.”

A typical sugar plantation salary: $20 a month. The girl says police came to expel the Afar diehards who refused to move. Shots were exchanged. Blood flowed on both sides.

How old is this story? It is one of the oldest stories in the world.

What are the individual names of the Sioux forced from the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory by gold miners? Who remembers this anymore? Who are the millions of people who surrender their livelihoods today—Irish farmers in the European Union, Mexican ranchers shunted aside by highways—for some abstract common cause? It is impossible to keep track. Humanity remakes the world in an accelerating cycle of change that strips away our stories as well as the topsoil. Our era’s breathtaking changes flatten collective memory, blur precedence, sever lines of responsibility. (What disconcerts us about suburbia? Not just its sameness, but its absence of time. We crave a past in our landscapes.)

Dubti is a busy green frontier. Ethiopians are flocking there, bringing new hopes, tastes, ambitions, voices, a new future—a new history.

In Dishoto, another truck-stop town, I recharge my laptop at a police station. The officers are all outsiders, non-Afar, from the highlands, from the south. They are friendly, curious, generous. They ply Elema and me with tea. (It is dense with sugar.) Our conversation is interrupted by government ads. The policemen watch these nation-building commercials intently: music played over video loops of strip mining, roadbuilding, workers in medical labs. We thank them. We walk on.

Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, once wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The Afar girl’s name is Dahara. She is 15.

 

Near the Ethiopia-Djibouti Border

We camp on the flank of Fatuma mountain, a basalt sentinel overlooking the caravan trails that braid eastward to the old coastal sultanate of Tadjoura. The tiny Republic of Djibouti sprawls below: a scalded plain, hotter and drier than the Ethiopian desert, with dry lake beds of blinding white salt, scarps of gunmetal gray, and doubtless, huddled somewhere in the shade of a doom palm, more Afar nomads—herders cleaved from their Ethiopian brethren by a colonial border, speaking in halting French.

This is where I begin to say goodbye to the Afar camel men from Herto Bouri.

Elema, Yarri, and Aidahis declare themselves ready to push on. They wish to walk with me to the beaches of the Gulf of Aden. But this is impossible. Two of them have no passports, no documents, no scraps of paper attesting to their existence. (“This is all Afar land!” they say.) And besides, Elema is sick. He issues his camel-loading orders lying down, from under his shire, his sarong, which he drapes over his head like a sheet. In a few hours we will part ways in the ugly border town of Howle.

What is it like to walk through the world?

It is mornings like these: Opening your eyes to nothing but seamless sky for day after day; a pale, numinous void that for one fleeting instant, when you first awake, seems to suck you upward, out of your body, out of yourself. It is the clarity of hunger, a transparency that seems blown through by the wind, the way a hollow pipe is blown to make it whistle. (We trekked 18 miles yesterday on short rations, on a single bowl of noodles and a handful of biscuits each. My wedding ring, once tight, jiggles loosely along my finger.) It is learning to read landscape with your whole body, your skin, not merely your eyes—sensing camel fodder in a thorn scratch, the coming dust in the smell of the wind, and of course, precious water in the fold of the land: a limbic memory of great power. It is watching the eternity of Africa slip by at a walking pace, and coming to realize dimly that, even at 3 miles an hour, you are still moving too fast. It is the journey shared.

Mohamed Aidahis: a powerful ant-stomping gait. Kader Yarri: the marionette looseness of a skinny man’s step. Mohamed Elema: the spring-loaded step of a square dancer. On our best days we four ramblers recognize our immense good luck. We ricochet down steep mountain trails, almost running, with the desert of Ethiopia shining at our feet. We bounce our voices off the walls of black-rock canyons in whooping contests. Then we catch each other’s eye, three Afars and a man from the opposite longitude of the earth, and grin like children. The cameleers catch the spark, and sing.

What is it like to walk through the world?

It is like this. It is like serious play. I will miss these men.

 

Ardoukoba Lava Field, Djibouti

The dead appear on the forty-second day of the walk.

There are five, six, seven of them—women and men sprawled faceup, facedown, on the black lava plain as if dropped from the sky. Most are naked. They have stripped off their clothes in a final spasm of madness. Sandals, trousers, brassieres, cheap nylon backpacks—their belongings lie scattered, faded, washed-out, bleached by the sun to the pale gray of undersea things. The skin of the dead is parched a deep burned yellow. The little wild dogs that come in the night have taken their hands, taken their feet. They might have been Ethiopians. Or Somalis. A few, probably, were Eritreans. They were walking east. This is what unites them now in the mineral silences of the desert: they were making for the Gulf of Aden—for the open boats of the Yemenis who smuggle destitute Africans to peons’ jobs in the Middle East. How many such migrants die in the Afar Triangle? Nobody knows. At least 100,000 attempt the crossing to the Arabian Peninsula each year, according to the UN. Police chase them. They become lost. Thirst kills them.

“A crime!” Houssain Mohamed Houssain shouts back at me. “A disgrace!”

Houssain is my guide in Djibouti. He is a decent man. He is angry and perhaps ashamed. He strides far ahead, shaking his walking stick at the stone-white sky. I lag behind. I wipe the sweat from my eye sockets and study the dead.

A demographer calculates that 93 percent of all the human beings who ever existed on Earth—more than 100 billion people—have vanished before us. Most of humanity is gone. The bulk of our heartaches and triumphs lie behind us. We abandon them daily in the wasteland of the past. Rightly so. Because even though I have told you that I am walking to remember, this isn’t completely true. As we reenact the discovery of the earth over and over again, to keep going—to endure, to not sit down—we must embark also on journeys of forgetting. Houssain appears to know this. He never looks back.

One day later we reach the Gulf of Aden.

A beach of gray cobbles. Waves of hammered silver. We shake hands. We laugh. Houssain opens a sack of hoarded dates. It is a celebration. We stand on the rim of Africa. The sea is walking—it falls endlessly forward into Africa and then rolls forever back, pulling away to the east . . . toward Yemen and the Tihamah coast, toward the lupine valleys of the Himalaya, toward ice, toward sunrise, toward the hearts of unknown people. I am happy. I write this down in my journal: I am happy.

Brave, foolish, desperate travelers. You almost made it. You fell 3 miles from the coast.

 

II. The Wells of Memory

 

There are thousands of wells in the old Hejaz. We walk to them. Sometimes their water is sweet. More often it is salt. It matters little. These wells, which pock the long-disused caravan trails of Arabia, are monuments to human survival. Each concentrates a fine distillation of the landscape. And the same applies to the people who drink from them. In the Hejaz—the fabled realm of a vanished kingdom of the Hashemites, who once ruled the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia—there are bustling wells and lonesome wells. There are wells whose waters convey the chemistry of sadness or joy. Each represents a cosmos in a bucket. We take our bearings off them.

Wadi Wasit is a well of forgetting.

We reach it on a fiery day in August. We are halfway through a more than 700-mile foot journey, perhaps the first made in generations, from Jeddah to Jordan. We rest in the dendrites of gray shade thrown by the well’s two thorn trees. Here we meet the running man.

He arrives in a pickup truck. Portly, mustachioed, a Bedouin camel herder, he is friendly, curious, talkative, jittery. He mistakes us for treasure seekers. (Why else walk through the scorching desert?) He has come to sell artifacts.

“Look at this!” he says. He displays a tin ring. The iron scabbard of a sword. A well-rubbed coin.

How old are these things?

The running man doesn’t know. “Kadim jidn,” he says: Very old. He shrugs.

The Hejaz—a crossroads where Arabia, Africa, and Asia meet, and long tied by trade to Europe—is one of the most storied corners of the ancient world. It has seen millennia of wanderers. Stone Age people hunted and fished their way north out of Africa through vanished savannas. People from some of humankind’s first civilizations—Assyrians, Egyptians, and Nabataeans—roamed through here, trading slaves for incense and gold. Romans invaded the Hejaz. (Thousands of the legionaries died of disease and thirst.) Islam was born here, in the dark volcanic hills of Mecca and Medina. Pilgrims from Morocco or Constantinople probably drank from the well in Wadi Wasit. Lawrence of Arabia may have gulped its water, too. Nobody knows. Kadim jidn.

“Take it!” the running man says. He shoves his orphan finds at us. “Take it for free!” But we decline to buy his curiosities.

Packing our two camels to leave, we spot him once again. He is running now—sprinting around the well. He has removed his white robe. And he is running through the desert in his underwear, circling the well under the ruthless sun. He runs with abandon. Ali al Harbi, my translator, takes a photograph. Awad Omran, our camel handler, guffaws. But I cannot laugh. He is not mad, the running man. Or drugged. Or playing some joke. He is lost, I think. As we all are when we abandon history. We don’t know where to go. There is an abundance of pasts in the Hejaz. But I have never been to a place more memoryless.

 

A small, bottomless well in the Hejaz: a white porcelain cup.

It holds dark, rich coffee. It sits atop a polished wooden table inside an elegant mansion in the port of Jeddah. Three articulate Hejazi women refill the cup endlessly. They take turns talking, wishing to correct misperceptions about Saudi Arabia: that the kingdom is a homogenized society, a culture flattened by its famously austere brand of Islam, a nation rendered dull by escapist consumerism and by petrodollars. No.

Saudi Arabia, they say, is a rich human mosaic. It enfolds many distinctive regions and cultures: a Shiite east, a Yemeni south, a Levantine north, and a tribal Bedouin stronghold in the center—the puritanical redoubt of the Najdis, home of the ruling dynasty, the House of Saud. The women insist, moreover, that no region in Saudi Arabia remains more independent, more proud, than the realm that has guarded the holy cities of Mecca and Medina since the tenth century—the vanished kingdom of the Hejaz. Fully independent by the end of World War I, the Hejaz was annexed by the Al Saud dynasty only in 1925. It remains a place of contradictions, of complexity, of tensions between religion and geography. On the one hand: a sacred landscape, its holy cities long forbidden to nonbelievers. On the other: the most cosmopolitan and liberal corner of Saudi Arabia, a melting pot, an entrepôt and nexus of migration, brightly checkered with influences from Asia, Africa, the Levant, and a hundred other places—the California of Saudi Arabia.

Laila Abduljawad, a cultural preservationist: “The Hejaz has attracted pilgrims from every corner of the Islamic world. How could this not rub off? Our main dish is Bukhari rice from Central Asia! Our folk textiles are Indian! Our accents are Egyptian! We are more open to the world than the people from the center.”

Salma Alireza, a traditional embroiderer: “The traditional dress for women in the Hejaz was not the abaya”—the severe black robe imposed by the ruling Najdis. “Women here used to wear bright red and blue dresses in public. That was traditional. But life changed in the 1960s. The oil money poured in. We modernized too fast. We lost so much in fifty years!”

Rabya Alfadl, a young marketing consultant: “Is the Hejaz still different? Take a look around.”

And it’s true. The women sit at the table unveiled. They wear casual Western clothing: blouses and trousers. (Such a meeting would be difficult to arrange in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where gender segregation and tribal ways remain so strict that a man will not utter his mother’s name in public.) The house where we chat is sleekly designed, chic, minimalist, global in decor. And outside, in Jeddah’s streets, there are art galleries, cafés, promenades, museums—the cultural hub of Saudi Arabia.

“A sense of cultural identity has persisted in the Hejaz for a thousand years. It developed its own music, its cuisine, its own folktales,” Abduljawad tells me. She turns her cup in her hands. “We are taking our first baby steps to rescue a small part of this.”

These women are daughters of a feminine city. Arab folk tradition holds that the biblical Eve was buried in Jeddah, now a modern, sprawling, industrial port. Eve’s tomb—200 yards long, shaped like a reclining figure—was crowned by an “ancient and lofty dome,” according to the Moorish traveler Ibn Jubayr. It is gone, marked today by a barren concrete cemetery. Wahhabi clerics, who abhor shrines as idolatrous, likely razed it nearly a century ago. But again, no one can remember.

 

More than 300 miles north of Jeddah, near a dry well called Al Amarah, we stop walking. We look up from our tired feet. A car approaches across a plain of glistening salt. It is a Toyota HiLux, the iron camel of the modern Bedouin.

This is an event. Traversing western Saudi Arabia on foot today is lonelier than it was one or two generations ago when the black tents of Bedouin were still pegged to the brittle hide of the desert. The famous nomads of the Hejaz—the Balawi, the Harb, the Juhayna—have resettled in towns, in suburbs, in offices, in army barracks. Modern Saudi Arabia is heavily urbanized (matching the United States in this respect).

Yet a few diehards remain.

One steps from the truck. He is a graybeard in a stained gray thobe, the classic robe of Saudi men. He brings us a gift. “It is our way,” says the old man, who calls himself Abu Saleh. He sweeps a callused hand at the surrounding desert. “We welcome all travelers.”

No other soul is visible on the horizon. Abu Saleh leaves us with a simple goodbye. His gift: a small well of kindness—a dented steel bowl full of camel’s milk.

 

Built of necessity, the wells in the old Hejaz have faded, softened, eroded into objects of beauty and contemplation.

The earliest of these watering stations were established, precisely one day’s walk apart, by the caliph Umar in A.D. 638. “A traveler is the person worthiest of receiving protection,” he declared, before pioneering the most sophisticated rest-stop system in the ancient world: waypoints on the pilgrims’ trails to Mecca serviced by forts, cisterns, guesthouses, date groves, hospitals, canals, even distance markers.

We trudge the same trails—ribbons of desert burnished by countless shuffling camels, by numberless sandaled feet. Scholars from Timbuktu drank from these wells. So did merchants from Spain seeking frankincense. So did sun-boiled nineteenth-century European explorers who rambled the Hejaz disguised as pilgrims. One who didn’t pose was a blustery Englishman named Charles M. Doughty. He announced himself to everyone as a Christian, an infidel, and walked with a knife up his sleeve. (Of one caravan swollen with 10,000 animals and 6,000 people, he wrote: “The length of the slow-footed multitude of men and cattle is near two miles, and the width some hundred yards in the open plains.”)

North of the city of Al Wajh we unpack our two camels at a well, utterly ignored by the speeding traffic of a superhighway. This well, called Al Antar, was rendered obsolete a century ago by steamships. It is made absurd today by the pilgrims hurtling overhead in Boeing 777s. I bend over the well’s lip. A damp air breathes up from its darkness, cooling my cheeks. I hear from somewhere far below the calls of startled songbirds. I think: Arabia is like the American West. It is a landscape of terrible absences.

 

If the Hejaz still inspires romance in the non-Muslim world, it is due to its long caravan of foreign chroniclers.

There is the nineteenth-century Swiss polymath Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who traveled to the religious core of Islam as a pauper—a “reduced Egyptian gentleman”—and never made it home. (He died of dysentery and was buried with Muslim rites in Cairo.) There is the brilliant and pompous Englishman Richard Francis Burton, who, if he can be believed, actually touched the Kaaba, the holiest of holies—a massive cube of volcanic stone in Mecca toward which all Muslims must pray. These Europeans witnessed a world locked in time. They found Red Sea towns built of shining white coral blocks, their arched doors and window shutters painted sea green and dazzling nomad blue. They passed through walled cities whose tall gates creaked shut at dusk. They galloped camels between fortified oases with wild-haired men, the Bedouin, whom they found harshly admirable. (Burton: “We had another fight before we got to Mecca, and a splendid camel in front of me was shot through the heart.”) This literary Hejaz, if it ever truly existed, has long since disappeared under American-style suburbs and strip malls. Yet outside the old pilgrim’s port of Al Wajh, we stumble upon the ghost of one of the most famous of these Orientalists.

Workmen are cleaning out a well.

The well lies within the high rock walls of Al Zurayb fortress, built 400 years ago by the Ottomans. The laborers haul up old explosives: cannon shells that look like rusted pineapples. The ordnance was chucked down the well in panic, probably in January 1917. At that time a camel-back Arab army was approaching fast. The tribes of the Hejaz had risen against their German-allied Ottoman overlords. And the foreigner who had stoked the revolt—he was barely 5 feet 5 inches tall but possessed a masochistic hardness—whooped along with the attackers. Of the Arab cavalry he wrote: “They wore rusty-red tunics henna-dyed, under black cloaks, and carried swords. Each had a slave crouched behind him on the crupper [of the camel] to help him with rifle and dagger in the fight, and to watch his camel and cook for him on the road.”

Thomas Edward Lawrence, more famous as Lawrence of Arabia, is one of our first postmodern heroes: a compromised superman. The young British intelligence officer and Oxford medievalist yearned, subversively, to bring liberty to an Arab world that was then staggering under the corrupt yoke of the Ottoman Turks. Yet he was tormented by the knowledge that the Hejazis who fought alongside him would be betrayed by the European colonial powers that carved up the Middle East after World War I.

“Lorens al Arab,” I tell the workmen at the fort. I point to the live shells.

The name means nothing to them. Lawrence is virtually forgotten in Saudi Arabia. He backed the wrong dynasty after the war. His champion, Faisal, the moderate Hashemite prince of the Hejaz, lost a power struggle to the fierce tribes of the interior led by the peninsula’s future king, Ibn Saud.

“They were a people of spasms, of upheavals, of ideas, the race of the individual genius,” Lawrence wrote of his comrades in the Hejaz. “The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness.”

This is what happens when you peer down wells in the Hejaz. You glimpse your own reflection. Lawrence, an ascetic of empire, was describing himself.

 

Wells of piety: plastic cups of water arranged by the thousands across a stone courtyard in Medina.

It is Ramadan, the fasting month. The holiest month of the Muslim lunar calendar. Just outside Al Masjid al Nabawi, the burial mosque of the Prophet Muhammad, the second holiest site in Islam, at least 60,000 faithful are gathered at sunset to break the day’s hunger.

They come from all quadrants of the earth. I see Indians and Africans. I hear French. I am not Muslim. But I have been fasting all month out of respect. Across from me a big pilgrim from Afghanistan—a red-haired Nuristani—kneels in front of one of the prepackaged meals distributed daily at the site. He hands me his orange. I give him mine. We exchange our food like this several times, laughing. On the loudspeakers an imam sings the crowd into prayer. They pray. And beneath a fading yellow sky, we eat in tender silence.

 

Strange new wells on the roads of the Hejaz: machines humming in the desert.

Their fitted aluminum surfaces shine under the sun. Hallucinations of metal. Of rubber and plastic. They are outdoor electric coolers. They dispense water so icy it numbs the mouth. We encounter hundreds of these mechanical shrines, called asbila: public water fountains commissioned by the pious to earn virtue in the eyes of Allah. One day their rusted parts, jutting from the shifting dunes, will puzzle archaeologists. How can any society afford to chill a cup of water in a barrens as gigantic and remote as the Hejaz? It seems impossible. Mystifying. Yet the asbila from which we gratefully fill our canteens exist because of other wells—ones drilled in the distant oil fields of eastern Saudi Arabia.

“We’ve traded away our past for wealth,” laments Ibrahim, a water engineer in the port of Al Wajh. “My grandfather’s two-hundred-year-old coral-block home? Bulldozed. The docks where dhows from Eritrea brought in camels? Gone. Our city’s stone lighthouse that used to be seen from twenty kilometers at sea? Rubble. Nobody cares. It’s all old stuff. It has no economic value.”

Some Hejazis blame Saudi Arabia’s ultra-conservative version of Islam for much of the erasure of their past. In recent years, for example, urban historians have decried the demolition of the old quarters of Mecca and Medina, including the flattening of ancient structures associated with Muhammad himself. Officially this was done to provide services for the 2 million or more pilgrims who swell the cities on hajj. But religious authorities have frequently blessed the destruction of cultural sites. Wahhabis emphasize that all the past before Islam is jahiliyya: a time of ignorance. And they fear that even the preservation of Islamic sites may lead to the worship of objects, and not God—thus promoting idolatry, or shirk.

It is worth noting that the loudest laments for the disappearing heritage of the old Hejaz come from Muslims outside Saudi Arabia. “It is difficult to get young Saudis involved in their own history,” says Malak Mohammed Mehmoud Baissa, the mayor of Jeddah’s remnant old town. “It isn’t taught seriously in schools.”

Breakneck economic change. Modernization. From tents to Twitter and glass skyscrapers in barely three generations. Europe must have been this way during the industrial revolution. It is miraculous that Paris survived.

Meanwhile, in the fishing towns along the shore of the Hejaz, the last local fishermen strain to sing sea shanties into my digital recorder. Songs from the age of wooden dhows. Songs of warm Red Sea winds. Of beauties waiting in ports. These Hejazi fishermen, most of whom have hired out their boats to migrant Bangladeshis, have earned their own anthropologists. “It is important,” say researchers from the University of Exeter in England, “to capture the last true remnants of the songs of the sea before they become mere pastiches.”

 

We inch northward toward Jordan. We guzzle a gallon of water a day. We seek out wells of memory.

In Jeddah a female artist honors a lost world, displaying on the old city’s walls images of her grandfather sitting with his vanished majlis, a traditional council once common in the homes of Hejaz aristocrats. (The art—titled “Where Is My Majlis?”—is mysteriously removed after a week.)

In Medina a museum director spends seven years of his life constructing a meticulous, 50-foot-square diorama of the holy city’s heart, with its mazy alleys and lemon trees. These timeless features were scraped away in the 1980s to make way for high-rise hotels. (“Old residents come here to cry.”)

The past is fraught territory in every country. Until barely a generation ago U.S. textbooks rarely acknowledged the complex universe inhabited by Native Americans. Israel points to biblical archaeology to cement its right of existence. Yet in Saudi Arabia this blinkered view is changing.

Riyadh has spent nearly a million dollars on a museum devoted to the Hejaz Railway—the storied Arabian version of the Orient Express—terminating in Medina. Jeddah’s antique quarter is also up for review as a UNESCO World Heritage site. (One such global treasure already exists in the Hejaz: Madain Salih, a colossal necropolis of the Nabataean empire.) Most extraordinary of all, an entire Hejazi caravan town of some 800 homes, abandoned and crumbling for 40 years, has been bought by the government for renovation.

“This is our greatest experiment,” says Mutlaq Suleiman Almutlaq, an archaeologist with the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, and the curator of the ancient caravansary town of Al Ula. “We are looking back more. This is good.”

Almutlaq is an earnest, friendly man. He scrambles ahead of me in his white thobe through the walled ghost town located south of Madain Salih. He vaults broken archways and pokes through covered medieval streets. He shows me courtyards where traders hawked incense, lapis, and silk for eight centuries. Kerosene lanterns manufactured in Germany rust on the floors of the empty homes. The legendary Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta passed through in the fourteenth century, praising the honesty of Al Ula’s populace: pilgrims stored their luggage here en route to Mecca. Almutlaq takes pride in this fact. He lived and worked in Al Ula as a youth. The site’s residents were trucked, en masse, to modern apartments in the 1970s.

“I remember,” he says, smiling. And he talks of traveling merchants loading bales of Egyptian textiles. Of farmers stalking in at dusk from the fields. Of women talking to each other from windows latticed for modesty.

Twin wells of memory: Almutlaq’s glasses, flashing excitedly amid the dim archaeology of his childhood.

 

We are all pilgrims in the Hejaz. Wanderers through time. We stop at its wells, or we pass them by. It matters little. Used or not, the wells remain. In their basements shine disks of pale sky—the unblinking eyes of memory.

After six months of walking, I say goodbye to my guides Ali and Awad. I cross the Haql border from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. I carry little. A shoulder bag of notebooks bound with rubber bands. Seven hundred miles of words. Pages crazed with jottings about devastating heat. Inked maps of pilgrim roads. Divinations of Bedouin fire doctors. Bearings for remote wells.

I reach a modern tourist resort. No one pays me any mind. There is the novelty of women driving cars. I watch couples strolling beaches in sarongs. I stop at a minimart and buy a bottle of filtered water: a small plastic well, an artifact from the main channel of history. I peer south, beyond the Gulf of Aqaba—toward the Hejaz. A cloaked place. The lips of its ancient wells are grooved by ropes turned to dust. Dust long since blown away. I sip my water. It tastes utterly ordinary.

 

III. Blessed. Cursed. Claimed.

 

Jerusalem is not a city of war. Avner Goren is stubborn on this point.

We are on foot, walking under a cloudless morning sky in the Levant, following a river of raw sewage that foams in torrents from East Jerusalem—12 million gallons a day, Goren informs me—a foul discharge that runs for 23 miles down to the Dead Sea. We are trailing the waste as a form of pilgrimage. Goren, one of Israel’s leading archaeologists, thinks like this.

“There have been seven hundred conflicts here since Jerusalem was founded,” he says over his shoulder, wedging his way through religious tourists in the Old City. “But there were long times without war, too. And people lived peacefully together.”

There are three of us.

Goren: a native Jerusalemite, a tousle-headed intellectual with the watery blue eyes of a dreamer, and a Jew. Bassam Almohor: a Palestinian friend and photographer, a tireless walking guide from the West Bank. I join them both after trekking north over the course of 381 days from Africa, out of the biological cradle of humankind in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia, and into the rise of agriculture, the invention of written language, the birthplace of supreme deities: the Fertile Crescent. My slow journey is part of a project called the Out of Eden Walk, whose aim is to retrace, step by step, the pathways of the Stone Age ancestors who discovered our world. I plan to ramble for seven years to the last corner of the earth reached by our species: the southernmost tip of South America. When I describe my trajectory to Goren, he replies, “Yes. You’ve come up from the south, like Abraham.”

Our sewage walk—Goren’s grand idea—is as compelling as it is eccentric: he wants to clean up the waste (Germany has promised support for a wastewater treatment plant) and establish miles of “green” trails along a fabled valley where 5,000 years ago Jerusalem was founded. These walking paths would unspool from the spiritual core of the Old City through the biblical desert, where the pollution oozes under a yellow sun. Because the effluent crosses the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank, such a route would bridge the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. The purified river, by collecting in its arid watershed the sacred and profane, would help build peace between the Middle East’s two archenemies.

“This pilgrimage will be different on many levels,” Goren says. “It follows an important cultural and religious corridor, true. But it also connects Palestinians and Israelis in a very real way. And of course there is the clean water.”

We start among the shrines of the three Abrahamic faiths: the Dome of the Rock, the spires of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the towering blocks of the Western Wall, bristling with prayers inked on paper. We sweat down shadeless streets in Palestinian neighborhoods. We follow the sludge through barren hills, where it encircles a sixth-century monastery like a grim moat. The effluent slides through an army firing range. In airless canyons we breathe through our mouths to blunt its stench. Two days later we reach the terminus: the salt sea between Israel and Jordan.

“Monotheism was born here,” Goren tells me atop a cliff overlooking the sheet of iron-colored water. “Once we invented agriculture, we didn’t need nymphs at every spring anymore. The old gods of wild nature were no longer required.”

Only ultimate mysteries remained.

It seems so impossible, so unworkable, so naive, Goren’s dream. (Weeks later, yet another round of Palestinian-Israeli fighting would flare. Rockets would scratch the skies. Israel would invade nearby Gaza. “This will set me back by two years,” Goren would sigh. “But I’ll wait.”) This is how we must have advanced, originally, across the dawn world. Against laughable odds. Across 2,500 generations of setbacks, despair, blows, crises of faith.

Yet surely it is the quest that matters.

 

We walk north, Hamoudi Alweijah al Bedul and I, from the Saudi Arabian border. We climb the brow of Syria.

What is the brow of Syria?

A rampart of rock: a colossal knuckle of sandstone punching up from the Hisma, the pale frontier plains of south Jordan. Arab mapmakers of the Middle Ages drew this high barrier as an edge, a fulcrum point, a divide. To the south, the vast geometrical deserts of Arabian nomads, a redoubt of feral movement, of fickle winds, of open space, of saddle leather—home to the wild Bedouin tribes. To the north, the lusher, more coveted fields of settled peoples, of walled civilizations, of layered borders drawn and scratched out—the many-chambered heart of the Levant. We walk into the Fertile Crescent, the prime incubator of human change. A cockpit of empires. A palimpsest of trade roads. A place of exile and sacrifice. Of jealous gods. The oldest of promised lands.

Hamoudi, my guide, sings his way uphill. He leads a pack mule by a chain, bowed against an icy wind. His faded kaffiyeh snaps like a flag. I walk ahead, pulling another loaded mule. Hamoudi steers me, too, like a dumb beast. “Left!” he cries in Arabic. “Right!” And “No, no, straight ahead!” In three days of walking together, my Bedouin traveling companion and I pass life-sized Neolithic bulls etched into rocks at Wadi Rum, a fabulous corridor of tangerine sand—a primordial valve of human migration that T. E. Lawrence called a “processional way greater than imagination.” We trace our fingers over 2,000-year-old inscriptions pecked by Nabataean incense traders and nomadic herders. We stagger over rubble from Roman forts. We camp beside ruined churches of Byzantium—the eastern Christian empire—their naves caved in, roofed now by desert skies marbled with cirrus. Everywhere we spot the prayers carved by long-dead Muslim pilgrims walking south to Mecca.

The storm belts us on the rim of the Jordan Valley. Gusts chuck up fistfuls of dirt. The mules moan. Deranged by lightning, a hobbled camel lopes past screaming like some mocking portent, only to vanish in the gloom. Bedouin women refuse us shelter. In violet twilight they warn us away, shouting objections from the interiors of their belled and tottering tents. Night falls. We walk on.

“Palestine,” Hamoudi tells three lean, unshaven, deeply filthy sheepherders of the Sayadeen tribe who finally take us in. It’s as good a destination as any.

The shepherds stir the cherry embers of their hearth. They accept our instant coffee sweetened with condensed milk, sipping from plastic cups with pinkies held out like lords. They ask politely after our well-being. They praise God that we are content. My feet are frozen. Hamoudi winks and grins. He will sleep with his dagger on a rug of sand. Tomorrow is Christmas.

 

Humankind paused, midstep, while ambling through the Middle East. Wolfish bands of hunter-gatherers, weary from 200,000 years of wandering, sat down in the chalky valleys of the Levant. They sought out reliable springs of sweet water. They learned to sow wild grasses—barley, emmer wheat, flax. They tamed wild oxen with horns 6 feet wide. The nomadic imperative of hunting was set aside forever. Instead these newly settled peoples began stacking stone upon stone, building the first villages, towns, cities. Smelted metal appeared. So did commerce and armies. A new world entire, bustled, unfolded, expanded—one we still inhabit. This “Neolithic revolution” occurred between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago. It erupted, independently, in the earliest agricultural societies in China, Mesoamerica, and Melanesia. But it bloomed first in the rumpled dun hills and forested riverbanks along our route out of Africa.

Or so say the textbooks.

Hamoudi and I trudge 300 miles north through the lavender shadows of the Transjordan range. We tug our hammer-headed mules along the tourist trails of Petra, the fabled Nabataean capital cut from rock the color of living muscle. We walk past Bronze Age graveyards that contain dead so old and unloved they hardly seem human anymore—Fayfa and Bab edh Dhra, the famous boneyards of the sort that some biblical scholars link to the destroyed cities in Genesis, Sodom and Gomorrah. Wadi Faynan 16 holds no such notoriety.

Discovered in 1996, the site sits atop a remote gravel terrace above the gaunt and dusty Jordan River valley. This obscure site is an enigma, a paradox. It upends the usual narratives of human progress. Circular dwellings, grinding stones, stone tools—its village relics date back an astonishing 12,000 years, deep into our nomadic Stone Age. The people who settled here weren’t farmers. They hunted. Yet they built a large amphitheater of mud, a platform carefully runneled to carry liquid—possibly blood. They came, apparently, to witness some ritual. To pray. And like Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, another profoundly antique cultic monument that has gained worldwide fame, Wadi Faynan 16 suggests that organized religion—spiritual hunger, not empty bellies—may finally have stopped our ramblings, kindled our urbanism, made us modern.

“The amphitheater looks designed for communal worship,” says Mohammad Dafalla, an archaeological guide who helped dig up Faynan 16. “Something very old ended here. Something new began.”

Hamoudi gathers twigs for a campfire. The Jordan Valley sprawls below in a broth of yellow light: a vast and barren causeway trodden by the feet of prophets. By Abraham and Moses. By Jesus and John the Baptist. Early humans strode past out of Africa nearly 2 million years ago, earlier probably. Hippos, now extinct, grazed in the valley’s vanished swamps. Yesterday the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. Not an inch of this antique vista hasn’t been fought over, cursed, blessed, claimed for one divinity or another. It is a land worn smooth like a coin traded through countless fingers.

Hamoudi boils a pot of tea. We squint from the first house of god through a hot desert wind, down at the Holy Land’s novel idea: home.

 

A miraculous desert rain. We slog, dripping, into As Safi, Jordan. We drive the sodden mules through wet streets. To the town’s only landmark. To the “Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth.”

This whitewashed building sits near the Dead Sea, exactly 1,329 feet below sea level. Inside its exhibit hall, behind panes of glass, in a white-lit lab, a team of restorers works on an ancient Byzantine floor: 44 square yards of stone shards rescued from Lot’s Cave Monastery. (Lot: the Old Testament refugee from Sodom.) The floor dates from the fifth century A.D. and contains 300,000 jumbled tesserae in hues of red, brown, yellow, olive green, and white. Greek, Australian, and Jordanian experts have gathered here to piece the small stone cubes back into a whole. They have been doing this for 14 years.

Stefania Chlouveraki, the project leader, stands at a long sorting table. She turns the colored fragments over and over in her fingertips. She fits each one into its place: a magnificent tableau of lions, crosses, pomegranate trees.

“There’s a trick to it,” Chlouveraki says. “One small piece can bring a whole section together.”

Chlouveraki, a tenacious archaeological conservator, has salvaged antiquities all over the Middle East. There is so much history here—so much that needs to be preserved, documented, rescued. Chlouveraki is particularly fond of the neighboring country of Syria. She has many friends in the old Syrian city of Hamah, a major cultural hub. She worries about them—about their safety. Much of that city has been destroyed by the Assad dictatorship in Syria’s brutal civil war. She doubts she will ever see Hamah again. Yet she is wrong. Because Hamah is all around her.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians shelter beneath UN canvas in Jordan. In the irrigated fields of As Safi, these refugees survive hand to mouth, picking tomatoes for $11 a day. We have been staying with them, Hamoudi and I, almost every night. It is remarkable. All are from Hamah. An entire metropolis has taken to its heels, walked away from apocalypse, spilled across borders, over mountain passes, to scatter in the Jordan Valley. The women bring out delicate tea sets saved from blown-up houses. They pin fine Syrian embroideries, called sarma, inside their dusty tents as reminders of home. Their faces, as they remember their dead, become sadly luminous.

Such is the deeper mosaic of the Levant. Here, long ago, we invented cities. Here we scatter again from war, like broken tesserae, back into nomadism.

 

The Holy Land is coveted. It is profoundly walled. Few outsiders realize to what extent.

In Amman, at the banks of the Jordan River between Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, people gather for Epiphany. This is a New Year’s rite for Orthodox Christian believers. The faithful come to the sacred stream to sing hymns, to be rebaptized. They also exchange shouted greetings across 5 yards of sliding brown water: “How is Auntie?” “Hold up the baby!” And “Tell Mariam we will call her tonight!”

These are Christian Arab families divided by the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. A striped metal pole, almost within arm’s reach of each shoreline, juts midcurrent above the water, delineating the border. Israeli soldiers in olive fatigues and Jordanian police in navy blue stand ready to halt anyone who might dare wade across it. A few days later I ford the Jordan River on a bus: foot travel across Allenby Bridge checkpoint is strictly prohibited.

“Checkpoints. Checkpoints. Checkpoints,” Bassam Almohor tells me. “We have checkpoints in our minds. We wouldn’t even know what to do with free movement.”

Almohor is middle-aged, a storyteller. He is a compulsive walker, a Palestinian who expects the worst in life in order to be pleasantly surprised—a relisher of irony. Over the course of two sweltering days of rambling the West Bank, we squeeze through a thicket of visible and imaginary borders, fences, walls, frontiers, barriers, no-go zones. After a year steeped in the oceanic vistas of Arabia, of Africa, such a dicing of landscape into countless microturfs makes me dizzy. My head spins.

Smaller than Delaware, packed with 2.7 million people, the core of a proposed future Palestinian state, the occupied West Bank is partitioned by the Oslo Accords into zones of Palestinian and Israeli control: Areas A, B, and C. Each of the zones has its own restrictions, guidelines, regulations. A political map of the territory looks like an X-ray: a diseased heart, mottled, speckled, clotted, hollowed out. We inch past Hisham’s Palace, in Jericho, a little-visited treasure of eighth-century Islamic art (Area A). Sweating under the sun, we scale the barren eastern scarp of the Great Rift Valley (Area B), edging carefully around controversial, razor-wired Israeli settlements (Area C). Plodding 26 miles on through a nature reserve and an Israeli artillery range (Area C again), we collapse in Bethlehem (back in Area A).

A line of clocks in our cheap hotel displays the time in Lagos, Bucharest, Kiev: the capitals of pilgrims who come to kneel at the birthplace of Christ. In reality the entire world funnels through the Church of the Nativity. The next morning, on blistered feet, Almohor and I join long lines of Argentines, of Russians, of Americans, of French. In clouds of incense, they lay their palms on flesh-polished stones where the Godhead touched Earth.

A medieval Greek Orthodox church controls access to the grotto of the manger. Next door a newer Roman Catholic cathedral makes do with a peephole. Catholic visitors peer through this hole into the yellowed light of the holy birthplace. The hole is big enough, I note by testing, to admit my pencil. Here is a classic West Bank arrangement: a celestial Oslo Accord.

 

See the men dance. Arms draped on shoulders, kick-stepping in circles, they swing bottles of wine. Purpled thumbs cork the bottles. The wine leaps and jumps behind green glass. They throw back their heads, the dancing men. They laugh at the sky. They are happy. They lurch into streets. They reel among cars to the blare of horns. On the sidewalks their children walk, oddly attired—a carnival of pygmy soldiers, ninja, geisha, Roman centurions.

“Everything we hate,” one man explains in broken English. He means sin. Laughing, he dances on.

He is Haredi, a member of the conservative Jewish sect that rejects modern secular culture. Bene Beraq—a low-income, ultra-Orthodox satellite of Tel Aviv—broils on the Mediterranean plain of Israel. Its male residents dress like crows: heavy black suits, black Borsalino hats, the old grandfathers hugely whiskered and the boys in peot, the curled sidelocks of the pious. The women pale and staring under the sun. In plain skirts, drab shoes. In hair scarves. Their drunken revelry jars. A fiesta of Quakers. An imams’ jamboree. A bacchanal of Mennonites.

These godly folk—have they gone mad?

No. It is simply this: after walking the timeworn horizons out of Africa, I have entered a corrugated maze, a knotted crossroads of the world where landscape is read like sacrament, a labyrinth of echoing faiths called the Middle East. The strange zeal at Bene Beraq is a festival of joy, of survival: Purim. Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Jews from a genocide under the Persians almost 2,500 years ago. That slaughter, plotted by the courtier Haman, was foiled by two brave Jews, Esther and her stepfather, Mordecai. Every fourteenth day of Adar, Jews celebrate their continued existence. They exchange gifts. They make themselves “fragrant with wine.” They drink until they “cannot tell the difference between ‘Cursed be Haman!’ and ‘Blessed be Mordecai!’” It is a holiday one feels one can get behind.

I join in. Unkempt, in threadbare clothes, with holed shoes and sun-cured hide, my costume is permanent: the traveler, the man from far away. At Bene Beraq the masked children laugh. They ask for coins.

My walk is a dance.

The anthropologist Melvin Konner writes how the num masters of the Kung San, the shamans of the Kalahari—members of perhaps the oldest human population on the planet—induce a spiritual trance through hours of dancing around campfires. Such arduous rituals deliver up to 60,000 rhythmic jolts—the number of footfalls in a long day’s trekking—to the base of their skulls. The result, Konner says, is a psychological state that we have been questing for since our species’ first dawn, “that ‘oceanic’ feeling of oneness with the world.”

This may explain the neurology of rapture. But why the pursuit of it?

 

I will exit the cauldron of the Levant at the Israeli port of Haifa. I buy passage on a cargo ship that will carry me around the abattoir of Syria to Cyprus. From there, it’s on to Turkey.

One day’s walk south of Haifa gape the Mount Carmel caves. They hold Homo sapiens bones 100,000 years old. This famous archaeological site marks the farthest limit of human migration out of Africa in the middle Stone Age—the outer edge of our knowledge of the cosmos. I trudge to the caves in a squall. The government has seen fit to prop mannequins inside these rock shelters: plaster cave people dressed in skins. In gray stormy light, their painted eyes stare out at the Mediterranean—at Homer’s wine-dark sea, at a corridor into modernity. But in memory my walk’s true coda in the Middle East came earlier.

I had camped months before, on the shore of the Dead Sea, with a family of Bedouin.

The father, Ali Salam, was poor. He gathered aluminum cans alongside the highway. His teenage wife, Fatimah, a shy, smiling girl in a filthy gown, rocked her sick baby under a plastic tarp. She cooked tomatoes pilfered from nearby fields. We ate from a sooty cook pot. Across the asphalt, not 200 yards away in the night, blazed a pod of luxury resorts. I imagined, back then, another couple standing behind plate glass windows: Glasses of minibar wine in their hands, they might have stared out into the dark. Did they see our campfire? Could they hear the child’s persistent cough? Of course not. I tried to resent them. But they weren’t bad, the people in that well-lit room. Certainly no worse or better than anyone else traveling the lonesome desert road. Such was the walk’s only theology. The Bedouin. The people in the hotel. The road that divided and united them.