http://www.canaan-online.com/israeli_negev_p/925.htm ...This is where the open vistas remain, the realm of quietude where the great race does not intrude. It knows nothing of the continuous, hectic pace of change in our world. It is a landscape designed in tranquility over millions of years, a landscape with no interest in changing... 'Skyline-Negev' is the eighth in the Skyline series, a series that depicts various aspects of the country's panoramas in photographs taken mostly from the air. Like two other books in the series, 'Skyline-Golan' - describing the landscapes of the Golan, and 'Desert's Edge' - presenting the southern Negev, this book is also a landscape portrait of an area, in this instance the central and northern Negev. The areas of the Negev that are included in this book extend from Nakhal Shikma in the north to Nakhal Faran in the south, from the Dead Sea in the east to the Gaza Strip and the Sinai border in the west (the areas south of Faran appeared in the book 'Desert's Edge'). Aerial photos afford a wide-angle view obtainable only from on high. Instead of focusing on people, they offers a broad spatial view of vistas that go beyond daily human life as we know it. The helicopter provides us with the remarkable opportunity to travel without borders, to tour to a different beat without the constraints of paved roads or trodden paths. We invite you to join us as we journey southward to the diverse areas of the Negev. Our tour begins in the Western Negev, traverses the Negev mountains & eastern Ramon towards the Wilderness of Zin, continues to the Negev ridges, returning northward through the Beer-Sheva-Arad Valley. Between the chapters of this book are five enter-acts offering short interludes in our experience of panoramas and flight. These intermissions contain five articles on diverse aspects of the Negev landscapes: the human, geological, archeological and tourist aspects, as well as the experience of trekking through desert terrain. Taken together, these form a comprehensive mosaic of the landscape. At a time that most open countryside has disappeared under the cloaks of concrete and cement that we have been commanded to wear as part of the Zionist vision, what is left to us is the Negev, the last preserve of open spaces in a densely packed and crowded country. This is where the open vistas remain, the realm of quietude where the great race to be bigger and better does not intrude. It knows nothing of the continuous, hectic pace of change in our world. It is a landscape shaped in tranquility over millions of years through processes that proceed to a different beat, whose values are different, and which probably has no interest in changing. *Photography - Duby Tal Piloting

• published: 11 Jan 2011
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