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The first is to the monks of the Greek Orthodox monastery. St. Catherine's sits in a wadi at the foot of Mount Sinai. For 14 continuous centuries, the monks have prayed there. Since the middle of the 6th century they have placed the skulls and bones of dead monks in the monastery's charnel house. In one corner of the monastery, surrounded by a protective wall, is what tradition says is the Burning Bush, a large, dense bramble whose leaves have been coming out olive green for 3,000 years. The monks' medieval tradition of hospitality to the wayfarer was never meant to accommodate tour buses. The volume of tourism is exhausting the monks. Increasing the load of visitors to an average of 1,500 a day would swamp the monastery. The monks might have to close down. ! Or perhaps the government could hire people to impersonate monks -- a sort of Williamsburg pageantry. (Do prayers performed by impostors have any spiritual voltage?) Or the government might make the monastery a museum. Or a hotel. What would the ministry do with the skulls?
The second loss would be to the environment. There are 812 species of plants in the Sinai, half of them found in the high mountains around St. Catherine's. Of those, 27 are endemic, found nowhere else in the world, according to Joseph Hobbs, a University of Missouri geographer who has studied nature on the massif. Ibex browse and graze on Mount Sinai, virtually tame, because the Bedouins never hunt them, regarding the territory as sacred. The contemplated tourism would arrive in that nature like a neutron bomb.
The third catastrophe would be visited upon the idea of sanctity itself. No one would propose to raze the old city of Jerusalem, which contains some of the holiest sites of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in order to make way for parking lots and discotheques. But because Mount Sinai is mere raw nature, somehow it is more vulnerable to the idea of "development" -- a business word suggesting (ridiculously in this case) improvement.
Somewhere this bulldozing desanctification for money must end. If the attraction of Mount Sinai is its holy wilderness, and even the physical effort required to approach it, tourist development threatens to destroy the uniqueness and transcendence of the pilgrimage. The Egyptians are often haphazard about protecting their dead treasures. Now they seem ready to sacrifice a powerful, living mountain that is in their care. Perhaps they will make the cable cars in the shape of calves and gild them. The golden calves can slide up and down Mount Sinai and show God who won.