How Long the Lonely Road

They fill the children full of hate To fight an old man’s war And die upon the road to peace. —Tom Waits Our bus returned Amelia and I from Bethlehem to the Damascus Gate, and under the setting sun we walked back up the Mount of Olives, through the crowded rows of the Jewish cemeteries. The Mount is prime real estate for the dead—the buried there end at the front of the line when the Last Judgment comes around. Tuesday we tried to enter the Temple Mount, that holiest site of Abraham’s test and Mohammed’s ascension where one prayer is worth ten thousand, but the guards shut the gate in our faces. Only a certain number of non-Muslims could enter during the two daily windows the Mount opens to tourists, and we were two too many. Dismayed, we went up through the Old City, the streets full of Nigerian pilgrims, Zionist American tour groups with their hired riflemen, girls with unloaded guns slung over their backs huddled around some map as part of their army training. All Israel’s women se...

Jerusalem was a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohammedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present. Its people, with rare exceptions, were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. —Lawrence of Arabia On Christmas Eve, as our taxi drove to the bridge across the River Jordan, we passed a convoy of fifty pick-ups, vans, ambulances, and tractor trailer trucks. They bore the flags of Palestine and Turkey, were filled with waving men and desperate supplies, and honked in return to welcoming Jordanians. The murals called them a “Lifeline to Gaza.” The obese Palestinian man sitting next to us in the taxi said they were sent by George Galloway, an Englishman. They would drive to that Red Sea corner where Jordan, Israel, and Egy...

I wore my boots out walkin', Poured my heart out talkin', I felt the pain and I broke the chain, But I still got a long way to go. Been on the road ‘til tomorrow, Been through the joys and the sorrows, Came through the flood, And I pulled through the mud, But I still got a long way to go. —Railroad Earth So we sat on a train back to the filth and ochre splendor of Cairo. We were afraid, since Denniz on his trip north had sat in a seat full of bedbugs that left 200 marks on his ass, and we were cold, since the Egyptians blast air conditioning all times of the year and all hours of the day. I had on my new jeans, long-legged to fit the Nubians of Aswan, and slightly flared at the bottoms, as was the local style—and had discarded those denim cut-offs that served me from the second-hand store in Varna all the way to the border of Sudan. Alas, and farewell! Sven, Amelia, and I intended to go on from Cairo to the Siwa Oasis, where Alexander was confirmed into godhood. The picturesq...