The Gardens of the High Sinai

He hadn’t done it yesterday, so now it was time for Saleh Awad to water his garden.

We wound down the short, soft dirt trail. Grape vines, almond trees, apple trees and even young plum trees all crowded the path as if in greeting, or to offer their abundance for breakfast on this hot summer morning. Bove them and beyond the shoulder-high rock wall nearby, red granite stretched up, barren and rough, into high, wind-sculpted peaks that formed jumbled ridges on both sides of this narrow valley. Awad cinched his headscarf down to better shade his sunken, 61-year-old eyes. He fixed his cigarette to the edge of his lips, bent down, and yanked out the plug on his spring-fed, stone water cistern.

Among the 1500 Jabaliyyah Bedouins who live in these central Sinai mountains, the sound of water splashing freely over rock is the sound of life itself, as reassuring as the crackle of a campfire or the pat-pat-pat of bread dough being shaped by practiced hands. As Awad lifted a rock here and shoveled a bit of earth over there, he watched the flow intently, letting pass just so much water and no more into each branch of his network of contoured channels. First to the string beans, then to the corn the water flowed, then to the cucumbers and to the tomatoes—some so big you couldn't hold two in one hand—and finally to the fruit and nut trees: the figs, the pears, the almonds and the walnuts. From this summer's harvest until next, his family will live mostly on what he waters today.

Awad's garden lies at just above 1550 meters (5085 feet) altitude in Wadi Abu Tuwayta, a day's walk, over two high passes, from the town of St. Catherine if you set out with the famous Jabal Musa—Mount Sinai— over your left shoulder. Along the way, in every narrow rock valley, or wadi, gardens appear suspended below the giant walls of cracked, sun-blasted rock like living green islands.

In Wadi Zawatin, a few kilometers from Wadi Abu Tuwayta, 81-year-old Muhammad Zaytan sat cross-legged as he hacked slowly at the earth with his pick. He was, he said, leveling the ground to enlarge one of his gardens. "Now it takes me four days to do what I used to do in one," he said, but he was as quick with his grin as he was dogged with his pick. Every few minutes he rose and lugged watermelon-sized rocks over to the pile that would later form the garden's new wall. His remodeling marked the latest improvement among the more than 300 Jabaliyyah gardens.

Though a few gardens are only years or decades old, most have been tended, ignored, revived and reworked over centuries. Many have fed people for longer than anyone can remember. Mahmoud Mansour, a Jabaliyyah guide well-versed in the region's history, pointed out one garden wall built of stones far larger and smoother than any others. He explained that it was believed to be more than 2000 years old—possibly of Nabatean origin—because the wall is not like the ones built even by the sixth-century Byzantines, the first group to cultivate these valleys on a large scale. "I don't know who built it, but whoever did, they were tough," he commented.

It was in the early fourth century that Byzantine monks first came to live on the plain at the base of Mount Sinai. Two hundred years later, soldiers dispatched by the Roman emperor Justinian arrived to oversee construction of what would become the Monastery of St. Catherine. As laborers, the soldiers brought several hundred serfs from northern Egypt and what are now Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. In time, the monks alone numbered more than 3000, and many of the laborers were freed. Both monks and freed laborers supported themselves by building gardens in the mountains, where springs were as plentiful then as they are today.

As people of the Mediterranean, the Byzantine monks introduced olives, almonds, walnuts, grapes, figs and pears, all of which the Jabaliyyah now depend on and cultivate with great skill, said Joseph Hobbs, associate professor of geography at the University of Missouri and now an adviser to the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency ."You can't really appreciate the roots of Jabaliyyah agriculture without understanding their relationship with the monastery," he said.

In the seventh century, when the Muslims brought Islam to Sinai from Arabia, many of the monks abandoned their gardens and the monastery. However, descendants of the laborers remained and intermarried with the far more numerous new arrivals.

Now the Jabaliyyah tribe spends each year as it has since the 700's, keeping warm during the cold and often snowy winters in stone houses in the town of St. Catherine, and living from late spring to late fall in mountain houses adjoining their high gardens. Called "vertical nomadism" by anthropologists, this lifestyle sets the Jabaliyyah apart from other Bedouins, most of whom live by guiding herds of livestock from one desert pasture to another according to the pattern of rains.

"People think Bedouins hate agriculture," said Hobbs. "But the Jabaliyyah see farming as one more means—and a very satisfying means—of making a living in a challenging environment."

Though the Jabaliyyah also support themselves with goat and sheep herding, tourist guiding and wage labor, it is the gardens that provide both their psychological and their economic center. At night, when stars light the sky with piercing intensity and people pay visits to each other by firelight, the cloudy strip of celestial luminescence known to Westerners as the Milky Way appears to the Jabaliyyah as the Line of Fruit. In winter, it sinks low in the sky; in summer, at harvest time, it shines directly overhead, as if to bless by night what the sun has nourished by day.

Awad and his family, like all Jabaliyyah, eat what they grow. A part of his almond crop and an occasional armload of fruit to a passing group of foreign trekkers is all that he ever sells. Many gardens are owned collectively within large families, some of whom keep numerous gardens in the same wadi. To judge by the almost complete lack of migration of young Jabaliyyah to the cities of Egypt, their life, like the land itself, is demanding, abundant and ultimately satisfactory.

The way the Jabaliyyah cultivate their gardens reflects their centuries of adaptation to the demands of land and weather. The rock walls not only mark the borders of a garden—into which it is strictly forbidden to enter without the owner's permission—but also help prevent soil erosion during winter rains.

Even though rainfall totals only four to five inches a year, Mansour said, the mountain slopes absorb almost none of it and thus act as stone funnels, often turning the wadis into small rivers. The rock walls divert the strongest flows around the gardens.

Inside the walls, the Jabaliyyah often employ grafting to help their fruit trees adapt to the desert climate. According to Awad, it is an ongoing art of trial and error. He said he likes the experimentation. "Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," he said. "The roots of the two trees must be similar. I talk to other men about it and they talk to me, so we help each other."

The most successful traditional grafts use the drought-resistant, spiny zaruur bush (Cartaegus sinaica), one of the 24 local plant species that grow nowhere in the world but in these mountains. Onto the zaruur, which by itself produces only a small, inedible fruit, the Jabaliyyah have long grafted Nile valley figs, "American" apples and several varieties of pears. They first carve a deep notch into the trunk of a mature zaruur bush, and then tightly tie a perfectly fitted branch of the fruit tree into the notch. The grafted branch grows amid the tangled and healthy branches of its zaruur host and, after several years, produces fruit, apparently as a fully desert-adapted tree.

The availability of water and soil have always dictated the placement of the gardens. Some, like Awad's, are fed by both a spring and a well. Other gardens may have more than one of either source. Soil, created over the centuries by winter rains washing down the mountains, has accumulated most abundantly in the wadis where the slope is gentle. Through careful terracing, however, a few gardens take advantage of less common soil deposits on steep terrain.

When the Jabaliyyah dig a well, they are successful more often than not. The surest way to find water, Mansour said, is to search out a dark vertical stripe in the granite of a mountainside. Geologically known as dikes, these stripes are "like pipes," he said, because they are porous, whereas the red granite is impermeable to water. Thus digging where a dike disappears down into the wadi floor often yields a good well. But there are other ways to find water, too: Three years ago Mansour himself discovered traces of a Byzantine garden wall on a slope not far above his own garden, and figured that the ancient gardener must have drawn water from somewhere. After carefully examining the land, he unearthed a serviceable well "in exactly the place where they would have had to make it," he said.

No one has ever challenged the Jabaliyyah's rights to their garden land. To nearly all outsiders, their environment appears precarious, harsh and unenviable. Only one other Bedouin tribe, the Awlad Sa'id, lives about 15 kilometers (10 miles) away, and the Jabaliyyah say relations are good.

In the town of St. Catherine, Jabaliyyah children have attended Egyptian government schools since 1982. Mansour recalled with a grin the teacher from Cairo who complained to him that the children seemed to be more interested in goats and plants than in the textbooks. Later in life, young Jabaliyyah men put in a mandatory year with the Egyptian army. In 1985, the government began to register the Jabaliyyah garden plots. At first most Jabaliyyah found this irritating, Mansour said, but now see it as legal protection against unforeseen future problems. In May, Jabaliyyah lands will become part of the 5000-square-kilometer (1930-square-mile) St. Catherine Natural Protectorate, slated in time to become a full-fledged national park. The internal affairs of the protected area will be managed largely by the Jabaliyyah themselves.

The protected status will allow the Jabaliyyah tighter control over visitors to the high gardens, who nearly always arrive as tourists. Shaykh Muhammad Abu Haym, leader of the Jabaliyyah for more than 30 years, said that on some days in summer, more than 100 tourists hike out from St. Catherine on Jabaliyyah-led treks. Although litter is a growing nuisance along the trails the Jabaliyyah maintain among the high valleys, and the supplies of mountain firewood are becoming depleted, tourism means income for the tribe, he said. His small crowds, he added, are far easier to cope with than the tens of thousands who annually tour the nearby Monastery of St. Catherine and trudge up the time-worn steps of Jabal Musa.

The Jabaliyyah minimize the trekkers' impact by requiring visitors to employ Jabaliyyah guides. "The guide keeps them from getting hurt or lost," says Awad. "If they sneak up the mountains [without a guide], the people here catch them. I would report them to the tourist police." Guides also serve the trekkers by helping them to understand Jabaliyyah life and by admitting the visitors into family gardens and sharing a bit of the harvests.

Inside Mansour's own garden, on a steep slope in Wadi Itla'ah just about three hours' walk above St. Catherine, he keeps for visitors three blankets, two teapots, a few cups, a few bowls and a few utensils in a battered trunk under the ledge of a large boulder. His is sort of a recycled garden, he explained, one that lay ignored for hundreds of years until he revived it and called it his own five years ago. We walked slowly from one painstakingly leveled terrace to the next as he pointed out the figs, apples, pears, pomegranates and, on the highest terrace, the spring that nourishes it all. We came to rest under the shade of a pomegranate tree, spread out one of the blankets and built a fire for tea.

Not for the first time, I spoke of how impressed I was by the workmanship in this and so many other gardens. He smiled and shrugged lightly. Mostly he enjoyed it, he said. Some days he and his wife work there together while their young son plays among the rocks and trees. Sometimes the work gets difficult, especially in years when the winter rains are slight. But, he added, "if you don't get tired, you don't feel life."

Dick Doughty

Sinai's Watchmen of the Wilderness

Written and photographed by Joseph J. Hobbs

In a sense, Mahmoud Mansour was born a ranger. His grandfather was a hakim , an elder of the Jabaliyyah Bedouin tribe that has inhabited parts of the mountains of south Sinai for more than 1500 years. His grandfather, Mansour says, "knew the world in all its dimensions," and from him Mansour learned which plants to use for which kind of ailment, when to move the herds from mountain to valley pastures, how to inspire confidence in difficult times, and how to give wise counsel. But mostly Mansour learned a love of the land that was the livelihood of his family and tribe.

Wearing, in effect, his grandfather's mantle, Mansour has for much of his 40-odd years immersed himself in one of Egypt's most abundant and delicate natural environments. When he has had the time, he has taken it upon himself to walk for days at a stretch to see mountains he had not seen before, and along the way he has made himself an expert in the region's plant and animal life. He has bathed in nearly all of the many granite-lined pools, and often interrupted his sojourn to repair a trail or a water hole, or to help one of his approximately 1500 fellow tribesmen with his garden, much as they might help him with his.

Although he supplements his agricultural income with guide work and other odd jobs about the town of St. Katherine, Mansour is one of relatively few Jabaliyyah who still spends substantial time in the highland gardens that once were among the tribe's primary sources of sustenance. With help from his wife and three children, he keeps sheep and goats, and he tends peach, pear, pomegranate, quince, apricot, olive and even a banana tree in a rock-walled garden about two hours' walk from the famous sixth-century Monastery of St. Katherine.

In his garden, he has both admired and cursed a wily cast of characters who plunder a portion of his produce—mostly foxes, hyrax, ibex, chukar partridges and Sinai rosefinches. He is reluctant to describe them as pests, and he has never resorted to killing them. But he has thought long and hard about how to come to terms with them: He could put netting over the bearing trees, but where could he find such netting in St. Katherine, a town whose largest store is only a single small room? And what about protection for the hundreds of other rock-walled orchards tended every summer by his fellow tribesmen?

In 1989, I had the privilege of spending seven months walking with Mansour—whom I came to know simply as Mahmoud. As a geographer who had learned much about Bedouin life in Egypt's Eastern Desert, I was in Sinai to focus on Bedouin perceptions and uses of natural resources. I shared my results with the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), which was exploring the idea of conferring some form of protected status on the region.

As Mahmoud and I conversed, I learned he was deeply supportive of nature protection because he was so dismayed by what was happening around him. Most Jabaliyyah gardeners, it seemed, were solving their predator problems with air rifles and traps. Men of his and other tribes had hunted ibex until these great mountain goats had become so rare, and so shy of humans, that he could walk for months without seeing one, though they used to inhabit the mountains in numerous small herds, and were famous for showing themselves fearlessly. Trees and shrubs, historically protected by tribal laws, were more and more being cut with impunity for fuel and fodder by Bedouins whose livelihoods no longer depended so heavily on the land.

Mahmoud, it turned out, had thought hard about how Sinai's wildlife might be preserved, but he was skeptical about the extent to which his compatriots might support any kind of official scheme. His unhappy conclusion was that there would have to be a fenced-off reserve, a kind of outdoor zoo, within which both the several thousand tourists who visit the mountains each year and the local Bedouin could experience what would be left of south Sinai's wilderness. He figured that the mountain bloc known as Jabal Abbas Pasha—an area roughly the size of the Cairo Zoo—would be suitable. His sentiments were shared by a few EEAA officials, and Mahmoud had escorted one to introduce him to the place.

At that time, however, the EEAA was concentrating on its work with the European Union to set up Egypt's first national park, the marine sanctuary at Ras Muhammad at the southern tip of Sinai, host to some of the largest and most delicate coral reefs in the world. In St. Katherine, about 100 kilometers (62 mi) inland, there had for several years been occasional talk about developing a protected area, but little real progress had been made. Yet as eager developers submitted proposals for sprawling hotel complexes and even a cable car up Jabal Musa—widely believed to be the Mt. Sinai of the Qur'an and the Bible—the urgent need of protection grew.

In the early 1990's, the EEAA and the EU began to turn their attention toward the interior of the peninsula, including the Monastery of St. Katherine and the surrounding montane wilderness. By 1996, the Zoological Society of London had become involved, and through it the partnership hired Dr. John Grainger, a self-effacing Englishman who had helped Saudi Arabia develop its national system of protected areas in 1990, and who had also helped in similar developments in Kuwait, Ghana and Sri Lanka. Grainger was thrilled by the natural and cultural diversity of the St. Katherine area, its scenic grandeur, and its potential for scientific research, wildlife restoration and environmentally sensitive tourism. As he spoke to audience after audience throughout Egypt, drumming up backing for the project, he said repeatedly and with heartfelt conviction that "St. Katherine has the potential to become one of the world's great mountain parks."

Today, a decade after those months of walking and camel-camping under the stars, the single mountain that Mahmoud recommended be preserved lies within one of the largest, most resource-rich and most complex protected areas in the Middle East. The 4350-square-kilometer (1740-sq-mi) St. Katherine Natural Protectorate includes the entire high mountain massif of south Sinai as well as portions of its adjacent coastal plains. More than 7000 Bedouin belonging to six tribes live within and close to its borders, along with 27 species of plants found nowhere else in the world and fauna that includes hyenas, wolves, and perhaps even leopards. A budget of more than nine million dollars is sustaining an initial five-year project, renewable in 2001, to establish and manage the preserve.

As for Mahmoud, he is now employed doing what he was surely born to do: With 24 other Jabaliyyah Bedouin, he is a haris al-biyah ("nature guard," commonly translated as "community guard"), whose duty it is to see that the project succeeds both in protecting nature and improving human welfare within the park.

The relationship between protected areas and the indigenous people who inhabit them has frequently proved to be difficult for all. In Zimbabwe in the 1920's, for example, and in Uganda in the 1950's, the Ik and San people, respectively, were driven from their traditional homelands to make way for parks that catered primarily to expatriate and foreign tourists. Both of these relocations brought famine and social disruption. In Kenya, during a drought in the 1970's, local people were denied access to the game animals in Tsavo National Park, their traditional food reserve, and the resulting resentment led to spiteful poaching and a general distrust of wildlife authorities.

From the outset of the St. Katherine project, Grainger and his mentor at the EEAA, Natural Protectorates Director General Ahmad Shehata, adopted an assumption that is increasingly popular, but still largely untested: Inhabitants, tourists and wildlife can coexist.

Shehata, to his lasting credit, believed that to make the assumption a reality, the St. Katherine project would have to begin by talking with the local Bedouin about their concerns. This was unprecedented in park development in the Middle East, and it is rare anywhere in the world. The effort grew into what is today called the "Bedouin Support Program," through which up to 10 percent of the park's budget is directed to the needs of local people, who are in turn encouraged to invest their energies in supporting the park's conservation-oriented objectives.

In 1995, a year before the protected status was scheduled to take effect, I returned to St. Katherine and spent four months recording conversations about day-to-day Bedouin problems and possible Bedouin contributions to the park project.

The following summer, Grainger and Shehata commissioned me to head a team to prepare specific recommendations on the Bedouin role in the park. The team included Egyptian and international anthropologists, a community development specialist, a pediatrician, and staff from Ras Muhammad National Park. Throughout the summer, all around south Sinai, over endless rounds of sweet tea and sumptuous meals of goat meat served over rice, in black wool tents, cinderblock houses and under the shade of acacia trees, we researchers conversed with Bedouin men and women about their livelihoods, their problems and their hopes. Our tapes and notebooks recorded recurring, deeply practical needs: more jobs, more income, better medical care, more access to fresh water through more and better wells, help in the gardens, pest control, and much more.

Late that summer, more than 100 Bedouins representing all the park's tribes, clans and settlements turned out for a majlis, a special "sitting" or conference for discussion and celebration of the project's Bedouin-oriented initiatives. The research team reported what it had learned from the people and outlined the park's action plan for the next few years. The Bedouins were more than a little pleased to learn that many of their suggestions would come to pass, and that one formed a core element of the park: Under the leadership of a professional Egyptian ranger team, 25 Bedouin men, representing all the park's tribes and covering each of its major geographical regions, would be hired as full-time, salaried "community guards." In a tangible sense, this would turn the St. Katherine Natural Protectorate into a park by and for the people who lived within it.

What the Bedouin Support Program team learned that led to this recommendation was that conservation is nothing new to, the Bedouin. Jabaliyyah tribesman described a system they called al-hilf, "the agreement," in which everyone in the tribe agreed not to allow their sheep and goats to forage in mountain pastures above about 1700 meters (5400') between December and May, to give delicate spring plants time to flourish before being pressured by hoof and palate. Muzayna tribespeople, who number roughly 2000, described their own system, which they called dakhl ("essence"), in which an individual man assumed responsibility for the protection of a particular group of trees.

Both tribes used traditional tribal law, called 'urf, to enforce these systems of protection. For example, among the Muzayna, one who cut green limbs or destroyed a tree was fined in cash or livestock, and the fine was turned over to the man who detected and reported the violation. Likewise among the Jabaliyyah, anyone who caught a violator of the seasonal reserve could collect a fine directly from the transgressor.

Members of all six tribes recalled past decades when individuals among them had been personally responsible for the protection of ibex in particular areas. Muhammad 'Iyd, a graybeard of the Ghawalma, stated that he was still responsible for the welfare of ibex near the eastern border of the park, and he listed off all the mountains in his domain: Maytuura, al-Hayaala, al-Misma, Nagabayn, al-Huwaym al-Mugalala, al-Miyraad, al-Mawga, Abul Dhagg, al-Bar-aadi, al-Murra, Budhayna, al-Sadr, Abu Turayfiyya, al-Araada, Mirayyih.... By all accounts, it is thanks to 'Iyd's concern that the ibex on these remote mountains are among the only ones in south Sinai that live free from human influence. That is the essence of 'urfi law: A person pledges to uphold a principle that all tribespeople regard as just, and as long as the person lives and perpetuates that pledge, acting against it violates both his personal honor and 'urf itself.

The problem for Sinai wildlife is that there are fewer and fewer people like 'Iyd who are willing to stake their honor to protect trees and four-footed creatures. Life in Sinai has changed. Most Bedouin are semi-nomadic at most, and their sustenance now comes largely from wage labor as tourist guides, hotel keepers and assistants, construction laborers and truck drivers, and from work in the distant Nile Valley and even abroad. Livestock numbers have declined by as much as 90 percent in a generation, making it virtually irrelevant for the tribe to think about keeping a fodder reserve in the mountains. As each component of the indigenous livestock-and-agriculture economy becomes less important to the society, the conservation ethic that sustained it dies too—remembered by the old, but to the young only a vague vestige of some past time.

Until now. When the Bedouin talked with park personnel about the way things used to be, they found themselves painting pictures of lush landscapes teeming with wildlife, and this often led to words expressing a desire to recover some of that heritage. Musa Muhammad Abul Haym of the Jabaliyyah mentioned a photograph he had seen in Tarikh Sina (History of Sinai), a book published in 1916. "Did you see what the Plain of al-Raaha looked like then? It was all covered with large silla bushes. That is what we could see again here, if we gave the place some protection."

Another Jabaliyyah man, recalling accounts by his grandfather, reckoned it had been 75 years since ibex, gazelles, grackles and partridges would allow men to approach them. But, he said, "if we do not kill the animals they could become as approachable as they were before." All over south Sinai, the park researchers heard a repeated refrain of Bedouin confession and appeal: "We used to have a better environment; we destroyed it; we can get it back if we work for it."

In reply, the researchers asked what the park could do to help in this recovery. At meeting after meeting the answers were nearly identical: The park should use 'urf to assign responsibility for nature protection in specific areas to individual men. The harts al-biyah—the term was a Bedouin one—should be employed by the park to patrol a designated area; in it he would keep track of the numbers and movements of wildlife, supply water to ibex and other animals in times of drought, document violations of park conservation laws, collect trash, help backcountry hikers in emergencies, and perform other useful good deeds as befitted his title.

There should be three or four community guards assigned to each of the larger wadi-and-mountain blocks, the councils tended to agree, and they should not sit in an office or house somewhere but be mobile men, 'ahl al-makan ("people of the place"), residents or frequent users of their areas of responsibility. Above all, they should not be chosen for political reasons, because they were members of shaykhs' families, or men whom the tribe owed a debt. They should work full time, with a salary, because, the men agreed, only that level of responsibility would make any violations of park conservation laws also a violation of 'urf laws. Hunting ibex or cutting trees in an area patrolled by a community guard would constitute a violation of his very livelihood.

During the months following the majlis, Ali Metrash, one of five Egyptians working in the protectorate whose university degree allows him to assume the title of ranger, carried out the delicate task of choosing the community guards. Ali's training as an anthropologist served him well as he conducted scores of interviews among each of the tribes. He collected information about which tribes and clans were presently responsible for particular wadis and mountains, and then he carefully drew the lines of responsibility on his maps. He asked the tribal shaykhs to supply their own nominations, and he also sought the opinions of a wide range of tribal members. In several cases, he recommended a popular choice over a shaykh's choice, in an attempt to check political power without undermining it.

By July 1997 Metrash had formally invested 16 men with the authority of community guard. He and the other four university-trained rangers began spending most of their days walking with these men, and in a process of mutual discovery the roles of community guards and park rangers began to evolve.

Now, it is established that community guards assist the park rangers by reporting any hunting, killing, disturbance or collection of wild species occurring in their respective patrol areas. They monitor and report on the status of wildlife populations, and they set up watering stations for animals. They keep an eye on building and rock-quarrying activities, which take place mostly on the coastal fringes of the mountains, to be sure these are done within the restrictions of their permits. When Bedouins or tourists are injured in the mountains, community guards are there to assist in first aid and evacuation. They report on the conditions of foot trails and vehicle tracks, and perform or arrange for their repair.

Community guards also track the numbers of visitors and their destinations, and they instruct their fellow Bedouin, who work as guides escorting all backcountry tourists, in the basic rules: no cutting of vegetation, no graffiti, no litter. When tourists are not compliant, it falls on the community guard to clean up.

As park employees, community guards also explain and seek support within their home districts for other Bedouin Support Program policies. These include visits to both town-based and back-country Bedouin settlements by doctors and veterinarians, as well as the services of a specialist who is helping women improve the quality of their handicrafts, so that they can market the crafts to tourists and increase their income. In Cairo, park officials are lobbying for legislation that would require off-road tour operators in the region to hire a Bedouin guide—a move that would promote both jobs and responsible tourism.

By late last year, the number of community guides had risen to 25, and there are plans to add six more. In the course of discharging their duties, they have already seen a fair bit of high-country action: Faraj Musa of the Muzayna followed suspicious-looking vehicle tracks to what turned out to be an illegal quarry inside the park, and authorities put a stop to it. In Wadi Ladiyd, near the park's wild and inaccessible southern boundary, Sami Aflan of the Hawaytaat tracked down and intercepted trappers of rare falcons that the poachers would have sold abroad.

Jamil Ataya discovered the dens of several hyenas, a species whose numbers have been in decline, and he began pleading for the animals' protection among his fellow Bedouin, who were well-accustomed to killing both hyenas and wolves that prey on their livestock. This is one of the more delicate issues for the park, whose conservation mandate extends to all wildlife. At present, the park staff is studying the possibility that tourist income derived from viewing these wild predators might help offset livestock losses. But in the meantime, the burden of protecting the marauders falls on the community guard, who must persuade individual after individual to take a hands-off approach.

Murdhi Hamdaan of the Muzayna engaged in water-rights diplomacy when several of his enterprising tribesmen struggled to install three 14-kilometer (9-mi) pipelines to deliver water from a mountain well to the burgeoning coastal tourist settlement of Dahab. Although they sold the water at a tidy profit, their gains meant losses to the Bedouin shepherds and date-palm farmers at the headwaters, the oasis of 'Ayn Kid, whose waters were quickly depleted. As community guard and respected elder, Murdhi was called upon to mediate the conflict, and he engineered a compromise whereby the entrepreneurs were limited to a single pipeline, sourced higher than originally, that would draw water only when the remainder could still meet local needs.

In this region, however, there is at times too much water: Only days after flash floods in September, Jabaliyyah community guard Zaayid Muhammad had repaired several washed-out walking trails and runoff drains. Nearby, Mahmoud had been building waterless composting toilets just below the summit of the world-renowned pilgrim and tourist site of Jabal Musa, the first such facilities on the most heavily traveled trail in all of Sinai.

"So many things have changed since the protected area was established," says community guard Isma'il Ibrahim. "The Bedouin used to throw down garbage. Now they collect it." Like other community guards, Isma'il was chosen because he was already respected, and now the work he does for the park seems to be reinforcing the respect in which he is held, evidenced by the assistance he receives from other Bedouin.

Zaayid Muhammad explained his impressions of his role: "It's our country. We need to take care of it. If we don't, who will?" By investing the responsibility for the park in the people who most benefit from an improved environment, the program seems to be working well.

I last visited Mahmoud in the summer of 1997. We sat together in the shade of rocks atop Jabal Umm Shumar, the lofty apex of the St. Katherine Natural Protectorate, and he spoke about the park's progress. Gone was the pessimism of a decade ago, and in its place was now a deep satisfaction at having played a key role in such a significant project.

Speaking about the mountain, its wildlife, and the future, he recalled being told that "about 200 years ago, there was a terrible drought all over this area. Then people began to notice that ibex were congregating here on Jabal Umm Shumar, in groups of 40, 50 or more. Then it began to rain, and it kept raining, and the drought was broken. So to thank God and the ibex, the people declared that hunting ibex around Umm Shumar was forbidden. Over time, this promise was forgotten. Now we see the people are remembering such things, praising God and protecting the animals."

Joseph J. Hobbs is professor of geography at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He is the author of two books published by University of Texas Press: Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness (1989) and Mount Sinai (1995). He extends his special thanks to Mahmoud Mansour for his unfailing expertise and lasting friendship.