Selected Detective
SINAI PENINSULA

There is a mystery, that is what Parents can say about it. Like so many other things in the desert. Rays when there should be no light, shadowy figures that come and go with darkness, neatly furnished space in the midst of wildness. In seventy years, he had never seen anything like this.

It began a year ago, when he sought one of his goats in the middle of a shallow, winding valley that lay along the border with Israel, and he was just about to abandon his hunt when, at the top of a dreary ridge, he caught a dim light inside the abandoned army border post. There have been no soldiers in this part of the desert for decades, there is no one at all other than Bedouin people who sometimes come like him just to pass by because the area is a quiet, barren, inhospitable place, even for those who are used to violence in the desert. But now there was a light in a place where there had never been a ray before, and people, too, appeared to be inside the low stone building.

He crept, forgot his goat, approached the building and tiptoed to peek through the window. Inside, under the rays of kerosene lamps, there were two men; one with a cigar tucked away at the end of his lips, with a long codet on his right cheek and a white head covering as the Jews wore; another was younger, handsome, with dense black hair and a keffiyeh crossed over his shoulder. they bowed towards the foldable tent table, read on a map and spoke in a language he did not understand. Their fingers followed the pattern on the paper on the table. On their right hand sides, two comfortable armchairs side by side stuck to the wall; on the other table was a flask of flasks and a plate of bread sticks that had been eaten.

He watched all of this for a few minutes. Then, afraid of being discovered, he stayed away from the building, enveloped himself so as not to get cold and slipped behind the rock while waiting for what would happen. At one point he heard an angry shout; a moment later the younger man came out and peed behind the wall. He stayed there all night, watching, listening, until just before dawn, the lights went out and the two men appeared in the night, moving around the side of the building. He counted to fifty and slipped among the boulders, kept his distance, finally arriving at the high rock, and saw a large helicopter in the air. The air flow under the helicopter had caused the dust to fly so much that it choked. The heli was on it for a while, then flew into the gray eastern sky.

After that he saw the two mysterious figures several times.

Sometimes two months at most. However, they always came in the middle of the night blind, and always left at the beginning of the day, as if afraid of the sunlight. He told some of his Bedouin friends, but they laughed and said that his brain had been made soft by the sun. After that he never told her again, which he felt good about, because he preferred the idea of secrecy that no one else knew.

“One day you will be involved in a number of major events,” once upon a time his grandmother once said when he was a child, before the Jews came and war raged.

“Events that will change the world.” Squatting behind a rock, observing the flashing lights and listening to the man's voice, she felt sure this was what grandma meant first. And he was so happy because, somehow, deep down in his heart he always knew his life would be about more than just watching a bunch of skinny desert goats.