Egyptians May Build Cable Car Up Mountain of 10 Commandments

For nearly 2,000 years, pilgrims have followed the footsteps of Moses up, up, up the mystic mountain of the 10 Commandments.

As tourists outnumber pilgrims more and more, Egyptian officials have a plan to let climbers bypass many of the 3,750 stone steps to Mt. Sinai’s summit laid by centuries of monks.

A cable car, they say, would make for a quicker and easier trip up the mountain, which is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Officials of the government’s Misr Sinai Tourist Co. believe that such an attraction would help increase tourism and provide Egypt’s hungry economy with much-needed dollars. Opponents object on religious, spiritual, historical and environmental grounds.

“This is a holy place. It belongs to the world,” said Greek Orthodox Archbishop Damianos, head of the Monastery of St. Catherine, which has stood at the mountain’s base for 1,400 years.

Abdel Azim A. Bassiouni, Misr Sinai’s chairman and chief advocate of the cable car, replied: “We Egyptians are very religious. It’s unrealistic to think that technology has no place in sacred places. We cannot bring it here if (it would) destroy the sanctity or the solitude.”

Traditionally, the 2,500-foot climb up Mt. Sinai was not meant to be comfortable.

Early in the Christian era, as pious men in Egypt developed the practice that became known as monasticism, self-denial and the search for solitude brought the first hermits to caves in Sinai’s rocky walls. Today, one hermit-monk still lives in the hills, in the name of sacrifice.

Every day, at sunrise and sunset, scores of outsiders wind their way to a chapel atop Mt. Sinai dedicated to the Holy Trinity.

Misr Sinai’s cable car, designed by Egyptian and Swiss engineers, would facilitate their trek, ascending 1,650 feet up adjoining Mt. Safsafa.

From the upper terminal, tourists would continue to the top of Mt. Sinai on foot. The two-minute ride would cut 45 minutes from the usual 2 1/2-hour climb.

The project’s cost of $2.3 million would be financed by the Ministry of Housing, Utilities and New Communities.

Mt. Safsafa is a few hundred yards from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Across a paved road from the prospective cable car’s lower terminal is the chapel of the Prophet Aaron, built where legend says the restless Israelites donated their jewelry to build a golden calf.

The Old Testament stories of Moses, the Burning Bush and the mountain of the 10 Commandments have made the area holy to believers since early times.

In 330, the Byzantine empress Helena dedicated a chapel to the Virgin Mary in the shelter of the Sinai peaks.

Two hundred years later, Emperor Justinian ordered a great walled fortress built around the site of the Burning Bush. The fort remains as the Monastery of St. Catherine, a living relic for the 13 Greek Orthodox monks who call it home.

It has been protected by Crusaders, the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, Arab rulers, Napoleon and, in this century, the Israeli and Egyptian governments.

Priceless collections of icons and manuscripts, and a library second in religious importance only to the Vatican’s, make St. Catherine’s a major antiquities treasure.

As traditional keepers of the area’s hills, chapels, caves and tombs, the monks oppose the cable car. They already must deal with up to 100 visitors a day.

“Look at all this beauty,” said Archbishop Damianos, sitting in the stillness of his monastery office. “The Egyptian government can make the project because they can force it, but we do not agree. We’ve never agreed to it.”

Neither did 10 people asked as they stood with several dozen others near the chapel atop Mt. Sinai, awaiting the famous sunrise.

A Michigan student attending American University in Cairo, who did not want his name used, said he has experienced the sunrise five times, but “if they build a cable car, I’ll never come again.”

“It’s important to climb up,” said Dirk Glaesmann of West Germany. “You feel a part of the mountain. If you put up a cable car, the whole thing would lose its appeal.”

An Egyptian environmentalist, Mohammed Kassas of Cairo University, believes that the cable car would be an eyesore where there now is beauty.

“If they wanted to pick a worse place to put the cable car, they couldn’t find it,” Kassas said.