Sabbat'

Saturday- holy day in these parts, everything stopped happening at about 4 pm on Friday evening and all forms of work were prohibited- well the good bits anyway, like traffic wardens for instance, park where you want during the Sabbat'.
An early start was on the cards so I met D n D at theirs with a breakfast of fruit salad and nuts etc. We hit the road on the aforementioned cross country drive which should take about an hour and a half. It wasn't far off, the sights were as awesome as they were diverse and we stopped on the occassional hill top to view a landscape which was truly Biblical in every sense of the word. As we headed East the Dead Sea and the lowest point on the surface on the Earth appeared below us with Jordan's pink mountains as a backdrop- pretty breathtaking really. Soon we were making our way up the winding track to Masada- I'd never heard about it before and frankly feel I should have. Over 2000 years ago King Herod was under pressure and moved into the mountains- in style. He built a fantastic palace protected by a fort right on top of this monolithic mountain. He knew water would be a problem and fitted cavernous cisterns which collected enough rain water for the inhabitants to not only have enough to drink, not even only enough to have Roman baths, no they had bloody swimming pools! Because of this any beseiging army would not be able to force them out. In the end Herod died and the Roman power dwindled, the Jews took the fort and palace back but within a few years the Romans were starting to get a grip of the Jewish rebellion and wanted Masada back. They brought down a crack legion who had had a pasting up north and wanted some of their own back. They beseiged the Jews suffering the problems designed by thier own side- the Jews even threw water at them just to rub it in. The Romans offered terms to the Jews, give up and be slaves or stay and die. The Romans then filled in the valley between Masada and the next mountain with rubble, like you do in a desert with hardly any water supply, and made a tidy ramp of it up to the fortress walls. They then rolled a tower up the ramp and breeched the fortress walls. Unbeknown to them the Jews had formed a pact, the men had killed the women and children (except for 3 who hid in the water cisterns) and then drew lots to kill each other until the last fell on his own sword. To find this was a bit of a surprise and has since been hailed as a example of Jewish greatness. Until a few years ago anyway when it was discovered that the particular Jews in question were unusually radical and had been going round murdering everyone in the nearby towns and villages for not being Jewish enough. There was a film starring Peter O'Toole called- errrr, Masada which I will be looking out for if I ever get to a Blockbuster again.
We took the cable car up as temperatures hit the high 30's and tagged onto one of the many guided tours in various languages for each part we went to. There were massive store rooms, plunge pools, original frescos on the walls of senior officer's houses and the palace itself was built on a clifftop where it caught a gorgeous breeze most of the day. We killed a good few hours there and walked back down the dusty steps (7000 odd) to the visitor centre and over priced ice cream.
Dana drove back (I have to say she was a excellent driver) and I confess to nodding off a bit.We went out for dinner, I was determined to pay but not for the first time or the last did it get into an awkward contest when Dan would not let me- I'm still thinking of a way to make it up to them.