Mount Sinai is a peak of red granite 2,285 metres high in the south of Egypt's Sinai peninsula, and Jews, Christians and Muslims all trace the Ten Commandments to this one summit. At its foot stands Saint Catherine's Monastery, raised by the emperor Justinian in the sixth century behind granite ramparts that have never been breached. In fifteen centuries it has not once been sacked or abandoned. Christian, Muslim and Ottoman rulers each protected it in turn, and the monks keep a charter they say carries the Prophet Muhammad's own promise of protection. Inside the walls grows an evergreen bramble they identify as the Burning Bush, with the church apse built directly behind it; cuttings taken elsewhere are said never to root. The library is among the oldest still working anywhere, and it was here, in the mid-1800s, that a visiting scholar came upon the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the earliest surviving copies of the Christian Bible.
You start climbing in the dark, on one of two routes. The steeper is a stairway of 3,750 stone steps that a single monk is said to have cut into the ravine behind the monastery. The gentler is the winding camel path, where Bedouin lead the animals up by lantern light. They meet at Elijah's Basin for the last steep flight to the top, where the rocky crown holds a Greek Orthodox chapel, rebuilt in 1934 and usually locked, standing shoulder to shoulder with a mosque still used for prayer. A few steps take you from one faith to the other. Then you sit on the cold granite and wait. The sun clears the horizon and floods the surrounding peaks gold and then rose, while the valleys below you stay in shadow. The guides belong to the Jabaliya, families Justinian sent from the edges of his empire to protect the monastery. They took up Islam generations ago and kept the mountain, and the lanterns moving up the camel path in the dark are theirs.