Inland, a two-hour-plus drive up into the Sinai mountains, sits St Catherine's, one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monasteries in the world, founded in the sixth century by the emperor Justinian around the site traditionally identified as the biblical Burning Bush. Behind its fortress walls it guards an extraordinary library of ancient manuscripts, second only to the Vatican's, and a collection of early icons that survived the ages, and a living bush said to descend from the original still grows in the courtyard. Above it rises Mount Sinai, Jebel Musa, where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments. The classic pilgrimage is to climb it before dawn, by the camel path or the steep Steps of Repentance, to watch the sunrise from the 2,285-metre summit. It is a long, early, physically demanding excursion, usually starting in the middle of the night, and the monastery keeps limited hours, so trips are tightly timed.
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