A journey through Jerusalem, Mount Sinai and the Dead Sea becomes a meditation on pilgrimage, responsibility and the uneasy line between freedom and fate.

Twilight slowly descended on the garden and once again I was alone. I gazed at the thick shattered trunks of the ancient olive trees and at their parched, sun-blasted branches that cast feeble shadows on the darkening day. I was in the Garden of Gethsemane, just 50 metres outside the old walled city of Jerusalem. Forty miles from where I stood was the Dead Sea, and just over another 200 miles of desert was Mount Sinai; a trivial distance that took you from the basement to the attic of the world. The geography and topography of the Holy Land seemed straight out of a dream, bewildering and beguiling.

I did not plan to spend so long in Jerusalem. I ran out of money and couldn’t afford the extravagant airport departure tax. So I spent a month washing dishes at the Tabasco Hostel in the Old City. It was run by an Arab man who had high expectations but also wanted to get out of the kitchen as much as I did. I was still recovering from eating the local food on my first night in Cairo. For over a month I had not been able to keep much down. My diet now consisted of plain digestive biscuits and Coca-Cola. In a strange way, these seemed like sacraments. I would take small sips of Coke and allocate myself half a biscuit at different moments of each day.

As long as I was at the hostel in the early evening to wash the dishes, the days were my own. I spent them wandering through the arid landscape of Jerusalem, following some strange inner directive. I walked on narrow winding trails that surrounded the scattered houses on the Mount of Olives, just outside the Old City. On these trails I would sink into deep reflection and imagine I was a pilgrim in 1,000 AD. Very few things in this landscape would contradict this fantasy. There was the odd car that passed by but mostly people were on foot or travelled on donkeys.

In the late evening after I had done the dishes I would walk through the narrow passageways of the Old City, exploring its Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian quarters. Occasionally I would get a glimpse of the underlying tensions when a man would run through the Arab quarter waving the Israeli flag, or when a group of Arab boys taunted a young female Israeli soldier protecting the Wailing Wall. But mostly everyone went about their day-to-day business, running the busy markets in........

© Pearls and Irritations