The dust sprites of Masada

Masada, 11 December 2010

Masada – the place of Jewish legends and heroism is a majestic accomplishment of Herod in his paranoid megolmanic phase – constructing a palace fortress 450m straight up a mountain. He used the stones from the mountain itself to build and then decorated it in opulent Roman style – including of course storehouses that could contain more food than they could almost ever use- for as for so many times in the land the real issue turns out to be water and not food. It also included plaster lined rooms and the obligatory bathhouse. Resting on a terraced sort of arrangement as if the bow of a ship he commanded an unbelievable view across the dead sea and up the valley.

It was hard not to be awed. But perhaps even more awe inspiring than the building and survival stories of the place was the weather. As we watched dust sprites danced into view obscuring the sun and dancing around us on the wind, travelling hundreds of metres from the desert floor below. Their intensity increased til they whipped into our faces and jammed the shutter lens of our cameras. Not a tame place the desert when it flings itself at you. Inhospitable and daunting I paused to reflect yet again on the brutuality of this place that people for 5000 years have fought over almost as brutually. There must be something about land than sinks into a cultures soul – the dispossessed Bedouin on their high places, children not school and camels and trinkets ever present; the Palestinineans indigenous in the face of the migration into this place working abroad for years and all the time longing to return in their retirement, the Zionists sure that God has promised them this place with their right of return from anywhere in the world making their children wear guns to keep it. This land a powerful tameable place.