After they had prayed in the old churches of Babylon, tasted the delights of Cairo and clambered round the pyramids, Christian pilgrims prepared for the journey through the Sinai desert to St Catherine's monastery, the supreme point of their Egyptian itinerary. It was an arduous and dangerous enterprise, taking on average about 22 days for the round trip through extremes of heat and cold. Almost everyone who wrote of his experiences made an effort to capture in words the loneliness and desolation of the peninsula. Felix Fabri, a Dominican friar from Ulm who went on pilgrimage with a group of German nobles in 1483 from Jerusalem via Gaza to St Catherine's monastery, described the great desert as follows: ‘No village nor town… neither house nor dwelling, neither field nor garden, tree or grass, nothing but sandy earth burnt up by the great heat of the sun.’

But whether they were Christians making for Sinai or Muslims on the 40-day pilgrimage to Mecca, the privations were much the same. Often travelling in darkness to avoid the sun's heat, they plodded on through the silence of the night under brilliant starlight which glittered in the velvet skies. Dawns rose coldly, sometimes in the teeth of bitter winds, which at the height of noon became stiflingly hot, whipping up clouds of choking sand that shrivelled the skin, dimmed the vision and parched the throat. Sometimes furious whirlwinds blackened the skies and scattered the camp fires, shuffling the sands about like running water so that newly filled ravines became deep traps for man and beast. ‘When a man finds himself there and the wind rises he can consider his journey at an end, because so great is the motion and the cloud of that sand that any man would be suffocated therein.’ Cleanliness was almost impossible and vermin pervaded the body. No one, however noble, was exempt. Felix Fabri spoke from experience: ‘Woe to those who wear long hair, for they carry with them a refuge and preserve of lice… and worse woe also to those who are too lazy to cleanse themselves at night, for at every moment [the lice] will multiply into enormous numbers.’