One might expect the desert near Eilat to be a predictable affair of dust and silence. However, as you crest the ridge at Nahal Qedar, you are met with a sight so utterly absurd that it feels as though Nature has been playing an exceptionally large game of marbles.
Scattered across the valley floor are hundreds of limestone spheres, looking for all the world like a bumper crop of gargantuan potatoes left to dry in the sun. The locals, with a directness I find rather charming, call them “Bulbuses” – Arabic for potato. But to my eyes, they look more like the forgotten eggs of some prehistoric ostrich with a penchant for masonry.
At a distance, they appear quite manageable, perhaps the size of a prize-winning turnip. But approach one – as you can see in the photograph – and you realize you are dealing with a boulder of considerable dignity, some measuring over a meter in diameter. One does not simply pocket a Bulbus; one pays it his respects.
The genesis of these stony spheres is a marvel of chemical theater. Some eighty million years ago, when the Tethys Ocean held sway over this land, a stray fish or a wayward crab would expire and sink into the oxygen-starved seabed. There, a peculiar alchemy began. Minerals crystallized around the organic remains, layer by layer, much like a pearl forming around a grain of sand, but with a fossilized fish as its morbid heart.
Millions of years of erosion have since stripped away the softer rock, leaving these “armored” spheres perched on the surface. Walking among them feels like trespassing in a giant’s larder. They are magnificent, silent sentinels of a lost ocean. And while the temptation to roll one home is great, they belong precisely where they are – baking under the desert sun, keeping their 80-million-year-old secrets intact.
