(This remarkable story with photos of this epic adventure has certainly “done the rounds” looking for a suitable home, where it will be archived
and preserved for future generations. Because of the completely unofficial nature of the event it was precluded from the official Regimental Archives and MoD Record Offices. It then went to the BFES/SCE Association (for former teachers in Service Children’s Schools) but yet again held no value to them. Finally it fell into the hands of Jack Raine (Manchester & Ellesmere Port Area) who has passed it over to The Canal Zoners to be included in our archives)

“OPERATION SINAI”
Or
“OUR HOLIDAY ADVENTURE TO ST. CATHERINE MONASTRY”
EASTER 1953

Story By Captain Richard Dix
Photos taken by members of No. 55 Army Education Centre, TEK

Life at TEK
At night Major Bob Ambrose and his patrol went out round the wire perimeter, doing a circular tour in Land Rovers of the watch towers where armed men took pot shots at the shadows beyond the searchlight beams. In the messes the next day you heard how ‘Peg Leg Pete’ the arab gangster king, once employed inside the garrison as a storeman’s labourer, had organised another raid. It was tyres these locals were after, or copper wire or anything else that could fetch money on the Cairo ‘Black Market’. They lived in the several villages which were about half a mile from the perimeter wire and came to work for us each morning but at night would come to rob us of the stores we had paid them to stack and check. They, of course, knew just where to find the stuff they wanted and, braving the machine-gun fire, many got away with it.

So passed the dreary years until at last the aircraft carrying you back home took off from Fayid airfield. Some enjoyed it, most hated it and cursed the whole thing loudly both day and night. Never before in history, surely, had the British soldier a better chance to grouse! Nothing happened; that was the grouse. Life was one long wait for something, but no one knew quite what, until the end came suddenly and Nasser abregated the Nineteenth Century Treaty which had put us there to guard to Suez Canal (not forgetting to guard the wealthy French operatives who ran it) and took over what was, after all, as he proclaimed in word and deed, Egypt’s property – or the land at any rate through which De Lesseps masterpiece of engineering went.

You tried hard to amuse yourself. You bathed weekends and afternoons in the tepid Bitter Lakes. There were Drama Clubs, Camera Clubs, libraries, cinema etc. It was the evenings, after darkness fell at seven that were the bink. There were dances galore for the officers and senior NCO’s, but only the NAAFI for the troops. Women were outnumbered by the men in the proportion of about hundred hungry males to one tantalsing spoilt female – it may have been much more! – and the competetion at dances for one of these grils could only be described as that which we dared not do to Egypt – it was murderous.

So when Major Bob Ambrose, in a fit of frustrated wanderlust, suggested one evening at ‘B’ Mess bar in TEK that an “Educational Training and Desert Endurance Test” be organised in Sinai across the narrow but imprisoning stretch of water (mad as we all knew old Bob to be – we said it was too many long years in the sun) we urged him to go ahead with it. By some means which we didn’t investigate too closely, he got GHQ authority to leave the Zone and lead the party to the fabled Monastry of St. Catherine which in his wanderings with St. Filby, it appeared, he had visited. It was understood that once across the other side of the water we’d be on our own. It was small use appealing to the Embassy in Cairo if we were never seen again. In the political climate of Egypt at that time anything could happen -–as opposed to the next-to-nothing that happened all the time. So we took a chance on it. This unforgettable desert journey to what is surely the most fabulous religious instituation in the world.

Nassar did not interfere with us. There was indeed an altercation with an officious officer (but a junior one) of a detachment of Egyptian soldiers stationed immediately across the water. He told us to go back from where we came from – behind the wire! Bob waved our GHQ authority in his face. It passed, and singing, we went on our way.

The sense of freedom, of going places after being locked for months behind barbed wire more like prisoners of war than the soldiers of a nation not at war at all, dispelled all sense of danger and any thought that things might slip and something seriously go wrong.

We slept in our bags and blankets beneath the stars. We were not on ‘Instructional and Training Exercise’ but a holdiay adventure; for most of us the greatest adventure of our lives. Certainly for the eight members of the Womens Royal Army Corps we took with us on this desert journey, who roughed it alongside us, dug their own latrines and modestly surrounded themselves with a canvas screen at night. Even in the wilderness all the proprieties were observed.

Five days there and five days back it took us, travelling in the weird and wonderful desert of Sinai to the mountain of the Ten Commandments and to the monastry at the foot of it, where we found a small community of Greek Orthodox monks living their strange life in utter isolation. Among them two bearded young men, dressed in the long black robe and dark grey flannel trousers, which were the uniform of the Order, and speaking the English that they learned at school and which their parents spoke. Both were ex-sergeants of the New Zealand Air Force, they said, who had drifted here with war and found peace behind the fortress walls which so forbiddingly shut out the world.

So Our Journey Begins:

All aboard the ferry boat, approaching Sinai	Ship for the Far East passing our ferry

"And they passed through the midst of the sea into the wilderness and went three days journey..... Numbers 33.8"

"When the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt the same day came into the wilderness of Sinai ... Exodus 19.1"

Day Two: The way ahead lies rough and rocky, but there is still a road of sorts – a wide smooth sandy track weaving into the desert used by the locals and by the Arab pedlars who do their rounds with everything, including the kitchen sink, for the black tented Beduins of Sinai.

All that day we wandered, O.C. Party, Major Molly Mordant, map reading on the vague and scanty maps the Army had made available and doing the rest by compass. We drank beer, sang songs and wondered how the end would come.

"For forty years they wandered in the Wilderness" - This same wilderness of the Sinai

And on the evening of that day we nearly lost our Water Truck!

What road or track there had been now lost interest and became an ancient whisper in the sand. When you’re on your own … No radio or telephone …
And many mystery miles to face ….The desert is a most forbidding place! Mosses was a Wandering Jew ... the Desert laughs ...Now so are you!
There were colossal faces laughing everywhere. Look closely at the photo above and see his diabolical expression. The old phallic fellow in the centre of the last photo.

Full circle!! We had gone round in a circle and were back on the coast road, but we had found they way which we had lost. The engine was behaving and things were better. But how many miles distant were the others? So we decided to settle in for the night. And the next day we saw it from dizzy heights....

The Oasis we saw from our dizzy heights

"And they came to Elim, where there were twelve wells of water, and three score and ten palm trees; and they encamped there by the waters .... Exodus 15.27"

"....the children of Israel came into the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai....Exodus 16.1"

At last. The object of the exercise seen from afar. St Catherine's Mount in this vast and silent place.

This is perhaps the most alarming and unnerving sight in Chrisendom, or the religious part of it. One of the party, Captain Richard Dix, managed to persuade the Abbot to let him in. The place is racked along one side and along that rack human skulls are packed tightly, row upon row. Along the other three sides are high stacks of human hands, or rather the wired bones of the right hand of every monk, they claimed, who has lived and died at the monastry of St. Catherine since its foundation. An extravagent claim, but who could contradict it? The skulls are those of the heads of the self-same monks, decapitated after being exposed for some time after death until the flesh had rotted from off their bones (the vultures assisting) and the remains, except for the head and hand had been disposed of. The reason for all this? The monastry garden is the only bit of fertile soil that could be dug and used for the burial of the dead. After all these years, as they explained, the demand for space would have greatly outrun the supply, and so this somewhat gruesome but logical solution to a problem.

Founded in the Early Christian era in the name of St. Catherine, the holy martyr of Alexandria, who gave her name also to the firework, the Catherine Wheel, it being a wheel on which she was crucified.

For over a thousand years this fortress of the Christian faith –
The Monastry of St. Catherine – has resisted the infidel and the invader,
its tiny cannon still mounted in the walls

At the rear of the monastry is the great library containing the famous collection of priceless manuscripts. But the most priceless, or certainly the most cherished of them all, to the sorrow and chagrin of every fresh generation of monastic dwellers that come there, is not in their possession. It is, of course, the CODEX SINAITICUS. A pathetic typescript copy is all they have, and they show it to you with digust. The Codex was removed, late in the past century by Russia, a country that had in the name of the Empress Catherine II, endowed the monastry so greatly. It now resides in the British Museum, they told us …. One day, they hoped, it would be returned.

Note particularly in this picture the white dome of the Moslem mosque used by the Bedouin servants of the monks and the tower or belfry of the Greek Orthodox Christian church used by the monks themselves. Side by side these buildings stand, as an everlasting religious toleration at the foot of the holiest mountain in the world. The mountain of the Burning Bush, (which the monks still show you, growing inside the monastry) and of the Ten Commandments – hewn, like the writing on the rocks we saw earlier on our way, from the vast stones that lie strewn around this valley.

The monks of Sinai employ the local Beduins as servants. The wives wait with the camels outside the walls for their husbands to finish duty. The children fight and play. A monk aloft opens the trapdoor near the bastion in the curtain wall and shower down little loaves of unleavened bread. Complete religious toleration is achieved. Inside this Christian monastry is a Moslem mosque where the servants worship Allah while their masters worship God next door.

For three days we camped outside the monastry walls, rested from our travels, visited the monastry and marvelled at what the monks showed and told us. They let us wander everywhere.

Inside their church, above, we saw jewels and ornaments unpriced. Another Catherine, the Empress of Russia, had endowed them generously in the eighteenth century. The High Altar is endorned with priceless gifts of kings.

The energetic members of the party went climbing mountains. Formidable rocky mountains with tiny crosses on their peaks; steps cut by devoted hands of those who would be nearer to God; little chapels for the solitary in worship. In the monastry an old man, said to be much over a hundred years, with a white beard to his knees and bright blue robe as bright as the desert sky, was living in a stable with a camel belonging to the Abbot. He was simple to the point of idiocy. He showed us childish little holy pictures he painted and babbled in a strange tongue. They had found him living in the desert like a cenoebite of the Thebald and saved him from starvation. So much in this holy valley was like this; to the glory of God on high. A hard demanding craggy God of the Old Testament who had sent the Israelites doing for twenty years in this wilderness what we had done for less than twenty days. As Major Mordaunt said, puffing up the thousand steps that led to the highest peak of all … “if Moses really did this lot, armed with the Tables of the Law, twice in one day, he was a better man than I am!”

A chapel on the mountainside

On Sinai religious toleration still prevailed. We found two tiny buildings side by side. A Christian chapel and a Moslem house of prayer, not big enough to be called a mosque.

It was Easter Sunday when we first climbed Sinai. In the monastry, seen far below, the Archimandrite, flown into this barbarous land by helicopter and dropped down on the airstrip in the sand that King Farouk of Egypt had ordered to be made, was conducting Sunday Service in the ritual of the Greek Orthodox church. In the outer courtyard we had seen a bizarre football match being played – our troops versus a crowd of Greek youths, children of rich families living in Cairo who had made this Easter pilgrimage to Sinai in reinforced desert taxis hired at enormous prices. A grinning audience of Beduins sat along the low wall on one side of the courtyeard watching this unholy Christian sport.

We had found one of these taxis stranded with engine trouble on our way up to the monastry, after we of No. 55 had re-joined the main body of our operation. We took them in tow – but the passengers this time were not Greek, but two young pretty American girls on the strangest holiday, surely, of their lives, which like our own, had nearly ended in disaster. When we found them they were in tears, huddled helpless in the back of the taxi, on the sandy apology for a road between the rocks and pebble. Like ourselves, the convoy of cars with which they were travelling had turned the corner and gone blindly on without them. In a desert of this kind it can easily happen. There is no going back looking for people. Stay together, if you can, because the people you send back looking for ones who have got lost might then get lost themselves…

Easter Sunday - up Mount Sinai

“And there Israel camped before the mount … Exodus 19.2”

“And Moses turned and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand …. Exodus 32.15”

Back “Home” Again!

The end of an epoch Tel el Kebir Officers Dance ‘A’ Mess

Author, Captain Richard Dix, Right Centre

 

 

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