Let beasts and Bedouins be your guide.

By the time you reach this snack bar and its Bedouin countermen, you'll have an appetite of biblical proportions. Most climbers of this roughly 7,500-foot mountain start in darkness, share the trail for hours with foul-breathed beasts (the view only changes for the lead camel) and summit with the sunrise. A chapel and mosque stand at the top and a monastery down below, along with a dry desert floor and thousands of land mines, maybe millions, left over from 20th-century wars. Is this: