This beautifully illustrated book describes the unique environment and the natural history of St. Katherine in Sinai from the perspective of its inhabitants—the Gabaliya Bedouin. The Gabaliya live in the high and rugged mountain massif of South Sinai, enclosed within the St. Katherine Protectorate in an area now declared as a World Heritage Site. St. Katherine is one of the world’s most important protected areas for its special historical, cultural, religious, and environmental heritage. It contains Egypt’s highest mountain—Mount Katherine—and one of the world’s most sacred: Mount Sinai. The Gabaliya have a unique history, and their intimate relationship with their harsh environment is equally unique. In the arid landscape within the great Ring Dyke they have created their own orchard agriculture, growing fruit and vegetables in irrigated walled gardens that seem to grow out of the rock on remote wadi floors or on the steep mountainsides themselves. This book introduces—from their own observations—the gardens and the unique culture and heritage of the Gabaliya, the vegetables and fruits they grow, and the mammals, birds, lizards, and insects associated with their gardens and environment in this remarkable landscape. The book is fully illustrated with photographs and watercolor paintings.

David Roberts, one of the most skilled landscape artists of his time, set out for Egypt in 1838, where he made countless sketches of the most remarkable sites and monuments during the course of his eleven-month journey through Egypt, Sinai, and the Levant. Superb lithographs made from his work, first published between 1846 and 1848, are richly reproduced here in resplendent color, along with Roberts’s diary accounts of his travels along the Nile Valley from Alexandria to the fabulous Abu Simbel temples. Each illustration is accompanied by a photograph showing the same view more than 150 years later. Fabio Bourbon’s lucid essay introduces anew this nineteenth-century fine artist and contextualizes his images for the modern reader.