Free The Masada Faktor by Naomi Litvin Page B

pleasure. Then I slid my panties off and he was down south sucking on my clitoris.
     
    I felt an orgasm blasting through my body and then more vertigo as the darkness enveloped me. I think I passed out for only a few minutes. When I awoke my panties and shorts were on me and he was gone. I went into the shoe store and bought the Paez shoes.
     

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
    I t was time for me to go to Masada, which was built by King Herod in the ancient Roman East style. It is the most complete, surviving, ancient Rome siege system on the planet. The Jewish freedom fighters of Masada had the last fortification there against the Romans.
     
    The fall of the Second Temple period in 70 CE, was a critical point that marked the catastrophic end of the Judean kingdom. The tragedy of Masada was marked by the Jews’ decision to commit mass suicide, rather than be subjected to rape and murder or slavery by the Romans. The Jewish struggle against oppression became a symbol that all people would relate to.
     
    I was upset about going to Masada alone, as I thought I had a date to meet Saul, a good online and telephone friend for many years. We had established that we would be in Israel concurrently and we were to finally meet. I told Saul I was going to Masada for the first time.
     
    Saul had agreed to meet me and I felt a little buzz of anticipation that possibly he and I would hit it off. I was still open to a relationship and Saul was Jewish and seemed so masculine and caring. But then I received an email at the last moment canceling. Fine, I thought, I can do this alone.
     
    It was 7:00 A.M. on Friday and I hoped to be back in Tel Aviv before sundown for Shabbat . The tour company was thirty minutes late picking me up from the Dan Hotel on Hayarkon and Frishman. I had chosen to go with a group for safety reasons. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t pick me up at all. I was feeling a familiar negativity and musing about Murphy’s Law.
     
    Yes, if anything can go wrong, it will, especially after my broken computer, cracked camera viewing screen, smart phone problems, three moves, and to top it off, $10,000 lost between banks in California and Haifa, due to a wire transfer snafu. I thought, yeah, the old military slang acronym was appropriate here. Situation Normal: All Fouled Up. How the hell could I be documenting my time in the Middle East without a computer?
     
    I heard my name being yelled in a loud accented voice, and spotted the large tour bus across the street. Climbing up into the bus I saw a variety of typical tourists interspersed among the half empty bus. I chose a window seat in the second row. I closed my eyes and felt the sun coming in and out of the clouds as it created a light show behind my eyelids.
     
    It was to be a cloudy, hot, and humid day at the Dead Sea. 39 Celsius. I still didn’t know the metric conversions, chiding myself for not paying attention to those lessons in high school, and honestly not remembering it ever being taught. I checked my smart phone for the conversion and saw that it was to be over 102 degrees Fahrenheit.
     
    While ruminating this information, the tour guide began his dramatically obnoxious monologue in Spanish, as I now realized that the folks on my bus were from South America. A few of us were Anglos, so he repeated the information in English. I was expecting a big headache from this annoyance.
     
    Masada is on a plateau on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea, which is also known as the Salt Sea. It is located near the beautiful Ein Gedi oasis which was discovered over 5,000 years ago.
     
    After about an hour we began ascending the Judean Mountains via Jerusalem and at the altitude of about 2,600 feet we needed to stop at a few more hotels to pick up some additional tourists. Then we would descend to the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth at 1,300 feet.
     
    The guide explained that 280 million trees were planted in between the rocks in Israel in the last