Darkness falls softly.
The mountains are lavender and the moon looks like a white hole in the sky. You can look through into another world.
We slowly descend the trail.
In the hostel dining room there is ice cream with a German couple and a friendly dog. While we eat,
more shots from the Dead Sea direction. No one pays attention.
Breakfast: one boiled egg and yogurt. We hike to the three pools of “David’s Spring”. The lowest pool is useful for shampooing the hair, the middle pool makes a nice bathtub and the top pool is busily building itself a mineral-streaked cavern. There are no other humans to enjoy the cool waterfall drops raining on the fern at the mouth of the cave.
The afternoon bus goes back to Jerusalem. In the Jerusalem hostel we have sweet tea and gasoline-flavored bandy. I draw a portrait sketch of Sunny with her fuzzy red hair down. Tomorrow she is going Tel Aviv to find a kibbutz for the winter and I am going to recross the Jordan and on—earthprobing.
As I leave in the morning, Sunny says: “It’s hard to know what to do.”
I think about these words as I wait alone at the Jordan border with the crowds of poor Palestinians, as I ride alone to Amman and as the moon, always alone, rises over the highway across the desert of Syria.
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