Holy Shit
We were in the middle of nowhere. The jagged mountains slashed upwards into blinding light. It was that kind of hot and desolate waste land that Cormac McCarthy sees in his dreams. The only structure of note was St Catherine’s, a walled fortress monastery built in the 6th century to withstand the onslaught of time. It had been on the same schedule for the last 1500 years but was closed that weekend for holy week. Disappointed, and a little afraid, we departed from the portcullis and walked to the foot of the mountain. This was the mountain, holiest of all mountains; Mount Sinai where the lord appeared out of smoke and fire to hand down the ten commandments to Moses, his autistic prophet. We were suckers for this sort of thing. The holiness of the mountain was self-evident; it was holy because the bible said it was: god had even made Moses remove his sandals.
Looking up from below we could see the stair winding precipitously up to dizzying heights: this path was called the Steps of Penitence. Hell yeah, we said and started climbing. It was very hot and the climb was hard. Somehow the conversation turned to Marxism. I had been carrying the Communist Manifesto in my back pocket (as a spell to ward off my parents) but I did not understand it. My companions asked me what it meant. The abolition of private property? That made sense; Good Christian children that we were, we knew very well that the rich man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.
The mountain incline was empty and inhospitable. A sun-blasted, barren slope of sharp and unyielding rocks. We took careful sips from our warm water bottles and kept hiking. The relentless sun hung in the hot sky like a falling hammer. But the top of the mountain appeared sooner than expected with a little chapel and mosque and a stone kiosk manned by a few stalwart Egyptian attendants. They were excited to see us, selling us cold water and candy bars and offering regional postcards; the postcards looked like pictures of a well-lit hell. One of the Egyptians wanted to buy my sleeping bag. “But I need this to sleep in later!” I said; we were going to sleep on the mountaintop to experience the holy and watch the holy dawn.
That we actually believed this mountaintop to be more holy than any other in the region is testimony to how far we had been born into the hallucination. It is obvious now that Mount Sinai is rather more profane than the other mountains because of its visiting crowds of tourists.
The spirit moved in me, as is only regular, and looking for the bathroom, I went hiking down a narrow path. The sun sank without warning from the sky and the shadows deepened in the defile. The top of the mountain seemed to be manicured in a series of carved and labyrinthine passageways. I felt I was in the climax of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazis open the face-melting box. The smell of the toilet was obscene even before I could see it. It was a stone outhouse and the toilet was overflowing with hot wet shit. I turned away in horror and climbed up onto a ledge while the last beams of day flared like the molten fires of a dying god. The ground everywhere was covered in feces; dried and desiccated shit that clustered in piles and that seemed to be composed of twisted hair. I climbed up another ledge and found yet more heaps of human waste, even while bits of wind-blown toilet paper stuck to the rocks. I had never seen so many turds in my life; poop, on that holy ground, was the common organic element. I felt bad to add to this shit but I could not keep it in and I didn’t want to get shit on my boots in the toilet stall. Finally finding a clean corner and with a view of that whole darkening valley down below me, I lowered my pants and relieved myself.
