The Israel- Egyptian border runs like a very straight line drawn with millimeter precision, there is a fence and a road on each side. On the Egyptian side you see with regular intervals military bases all alike; if there is an Egyptian soldier outside and you wink at them, they wink back!
Stopping at the Nitzana Hillocks it seemed to me like fata morgana! it looked like snow! although at 5 pm in August, it was very warm, 33˚C, but of course inside the car the air condition worked hard and of course, this was not fata morgana nor snow, it was the almost blinding white chalk, which made me appreciate my sun glasses.
The white chalk is shaped by wind, sand, rain and a lot of time into rounded small hills and sculptures (weathering).
Chalk is soft, porous and dissolves in water and then washed away, but that is also the reason the chalk stays white and is not colored by human pollution. The differences in temperatures may cause cracks where water can seep in and dissolve the chalk from inside.
Arriving at the end of the day just before sunset, you have long shadows of people and hills which makes very nice contrasts on the photos.
The moment the grandkids got out of the car, they started to run on the hills – up and down, and to jump with the eagerness of children having sat too long in the car. It was beautiful to see how much they enjoyed it, but the backside was that they got completely white all over their clothes, their shoes, their skin which of course was all brought into the car so we had to clean it the next day, but altogether it was worth it.
We were alone there so we could sit quietly and contemplate on yet another wonder of the Desert around us. There was a nice refreshing wind without sand in it.
It is said that where you have chalk, one may assume that once upon a time here was a sea. Chalk is calcium carbonate (CaCo3) and is a sediment of the left overs of skeletons of plankton and the like marine life that had shells and then pressured by the weight of water.
So, at this place about 250 meter above sea level in the middle of the desert, where is/was the sea?
Chalk in Latin is creta; the Cretaceous period (145-66 million years ago) got its name from the period in which chalk was formed (i.e. the chalk period), then the Negev was covered by the Tethys Sea that was shallow warm water.
My command of Hebrew is not deep, so I asked My Dear, what does Homokei mean? It means, he said, “nice female curves”. I felt like having been thrown a bucket of ice water; which is not nice.
Why on earth would they name such a nice place with such a sexist name?
I looked it up in the dictionary, that referred me to the Song of Songs 7:2: How beautiful are thy steps in sandals, O prince's daughter! The roundings of thy thighs are like the links of a chain, the work of the hands of a skilled workman.
מַה-יָּפוּ פְעָמַיִךְ בַּנְּעָלִים, בַּת-נָדִיב; חַמּוּקֵי יְרֵכַיִךְ--כְּמוֹ חֲלָאִים, מַעֲשֵׂה יְדֵי אָמָּן.
Perhaps it is be possible to come up with a less sexist name for this very nice place.
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