Travel: Less is more in the Sinai Desert

The Times Online (Rachel Campbell Johnston)

Last week I visited Egypt for the first time. Even running a finger-tip over the silvery visa stamp was exciting. This was the land that had glimmered in my imagination since the boy king, Tutankhamun, brought pharaohs and falcons and scarabs and sphinxes, spooky bandaged corpses and brain-extracting hooks, into my plodding school history lessons.

This was the land of the biblical plagues, of Tintin and his mummy's curse, of Shelley's vast hubristic idol. Its lone and level sands stretched far away into a lost childhood world.

So did I hop on a camel and head straight for the pyramids? No. I didn't even see them. And no, I wasn't disappointed. This wasn't the right moment. This time my thoughts were adrift in another desert. I was in the holy empire of Byzantium.

I had come to Egypt to visit St Catherine's on the Sinai peninsula, which has kept its sacred traditions unbroken since the early 6th century, when the great builder Justinian constructed it from huge hunks of granite around a chapel marking the spot where Moses had seen the burning bush.

Here, in preparation for the magnificent Byzantium exhibition, which opens at the Royal Academy next week, I passed two days like a lizard in a rocky desert fissure. I gazed at the earliest surviving icon image of Christ's face, pored over manuscripts in the world's oldest Christian library, and attended dawn service in the Greek Orthodox basilica.

As the first grey light of morning leaked into the arid Sinai Valley, it spread its shimmer of divine glory across gilded mosaics. “Gather me into the artifice of eternity,” wrote Yeats. How could one not feel the truth of his yearning?

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