Saint Catherine sits high in the Sinai interior, a hush of granite and thin clear air some 1,600 metres above the sea. This is the roof of the peninsula, a mountain sanctuary where faith and rock have been bound together for fifteen centuries. The Jabaliya Bedouin, descended from servants sent to guard the monastery, still tend orchards in the wadis and lead travellers along trails their families have walked for generations. The town itself is small and unhurried; the real grandeur is in the peaks that surround it, the silence between them, and a night sky so dark and crowded with stars it feels almost physical.

At the heart of it all stands St Catherine's Monastery, founded in the 6th century under the emperor Justinian and never once abandoned — the oldest continuously working Christian monastery on Earth. Within its fortified walls grows the Burning Bush of the Book of Exodus, and its library holds one of the world's greatest collections of early manuscripts and icons. Above rises Gebel Musa, the mountain of Moses, climbed before dawn by the camel path or the roughly 3,750 Steps of Repentance so you reach the summit as the sun breaks over a sea of bare peaks. Higher still is Mount St Catherine, the tallest mountain in all of Egypt.

The quietest pleasure here comes after dark, when the day-trippers have gone and the cold settles in. At camps like Sheikh Mousa and Fox, Bedouin hosts brew sweet tea over open fires and bake bread in the embers while the Milky Way wheels overhead in extraordinary clarity. A guided stargazing night, away from any electric light, is reason enough to make the journey. Wrap up warmly — even in summer the altitude pulls the temperature down sharply once the sun is gone, and the desert chill is part of the spell.