Wenesday we went to Masada, a rock plateau that looms 1,400 ft. above the Judean Desert floor (1,100 ft. above sea level). The fortress at Masada was originally built by Herod so the ruins have all the makings of a minor community....if communities logically operated on isolated mesas in the middle of deserts. But Masada earned its fame as the refuge of a group of Jewish rebels against the Romans nearly two thousand years ago. The short version is that the Romans laid siege, it took them a year, the Jews preferred self-inflicted death to Roman submission and that was that.
We chose to climb to the top rather than take the cable car - not so many steps as we usually get in, but each one was worth a lot! The path snakes (possibly why it's called the Snake Path) so the views alternate between the mountain and the Dead Sea...with its backdrop of the western mountains of Jordan.
As I climbed, I kept imagining what the Romans would have been thinking: "darn Jews, why did they need to take refuge SO high?? And why do I need to schlep all this stuff just to lay siege to people who can't go anywhere anyway? Couldn't we just camp on the side of the mountain and let nature take its course?" But our ascent was sunny, not too cold, and we had no siege gear, so as a hike, it was nice.
Perhaps I had an overly fantastical expectation of what Masada itself would be like. I certainly did not expect the moonscape that is the reality. But talk about a view - out across the De
ad Sea all the way to Jordan. The
Israeli flag is a nice touch. Must have been really nice in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Jordan wasn't exactly thrilled about the existence of Israel.
The way the Masada story ends is that the Romans built a ramp so that they could reach the walls and wreak their usual destruction. Again, I imagined something rather elaborate and clever - they took a year to get there!! So when I saw the huge dirt pile on the side, it did not register to me that the dirt pile was THE achievement of Masada, the famous ramp. I suppose 2,000 years ago, the simple feat of moving that much dirt and rock was a big deal.
Walking down the Snake Path was easier aerobically than the ascent, but a bit tough on knees and quads. We pretty much had the place to ourselves by then, which made for an oddly and eerily peaceful descent.
Welcome to the blogging world, only you could master it the first time around:-)
ReplyDeleteLove your writing and photos... so why did the Romans do such good work in Italy?
xoxox
There's no place like home?
ReplyDeleteFrankly, there's a rather well established claim that the Roman's didn't have to complain about the climbing and the schlepping, for the rather simple reason that ... you're right: they basically camped at the base of the fortress and let nature take its course. Some even claim that the siege was an army exercise, since a few fanatics sitting way up at the top of the mountain were far from a threat to anyone, and if they came down to launch a surprise attack ... by the time they got down it was hardly a surprise. This interpretation admittedly detracts a bit from the heroic story as it's ordinarily told, but history is rarely as awe-inspiring as its Hollywood version.
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