Mount Sinai

Gebel Musa, "the mountain of Moses", rises to 2,285 metres directly behind St Catherine's Monastery. Almost everyone climbs it at night to be on the summit for sunrise, which is the single most popular thing to do in South Sinai.

The two routes

• The camel path — longer, gentler, and the one most groups take. Camels can be hired for the lower two-thirds; the last section must be walked
• The Steps of Repentance — around 3,750 rough stone steps cut by monks straight up the mountainside. Much harder, much shorter, and best used for the descent in daylight

The two meet at a small plateau below the summit, and the final 750 steps are common to both.

What to bring

A proper jacket — it is genuinely cold at the top before dawn, at any time of year, and windy. A head torch, water, and shoes with grip. Blankets can be hired at the top, and there are small stalls selling tea on the way up. Allow two to three hours to climb.

On the summit stand a small chapel and a mosque. The view at first light, across a chaos of bare granite peaks in every direction, is the reason people do this.

Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition all identify this massif as the mountain where Moses received the commandments. The identification of this particular peak is a Christian one, settled by monks and pilgrims in the early centuries CE, and it is traditional rather than archaeological — several other mountains in Sinai and beyond have been proposed, and there is no physical evidence favouring any of them.

What is not in doubt is that people have been climbing this mountain for religious reasons for at least seventeen hundred years. The steps were cut by monks as an act of penance, one at a time.

A pilgrimage that never stopped

The 4th-century traveller Egeria, a woman from western Europe who made a long journey through the Holy Land, wrote a detailed account of climbing here — including the monks who met her, the chapel at the top and the local guides. Her description of the route is recognisable to anyone who does it today.

Pilgrims have come continuously since, through every political change in the region. The tea sellers on the path are a recent commercial layer over a very old habit.

Sinai's granite

The mountains here are not sandstone like most of Egypt but ancient granite and volcanic rock, part of the same basement complex exposed by the rifting that opened the Red Sea. That is why the landscape looks so unlike the rest of the country — jagged, dark and bare, with almost no soil.