In 1973, Bedouin lived in a few of Petra’s higher caves. I met some of them and, like any other tourist, took pictures. They gave me coffee and talked politics. The only visitors disturbing their tranquillity, apart from me, were Jordanian schoolchildren on a day trip. The only people who demanded money were the young men who hired horses. They had told me – what did I know aged twenty-two? – that I was required to enter Petra on horseback. So it was that I had my first glimpse of Al-Khazaneh – the so-called Pharaoh’s Treasury – at the end of a long gorge called the Siq, on horseback. Burkhardt entered on a noble Bedouin steed, but mine was a nag who looked so hungry I should have carried her.
Jordan had used the interval of nearly thirty years between my two visits to effect ‘improvements’. At the Visitors’ Centre near the Bab Al Siq a ticket seller charged ten Jordanian dinars for entry. At a tollgate, I showed my ticket, as if in a cinema, and walked in. The horse hirers were still there, but government officials watched to guarantee they did not cheat the few foreign visitors. This time, I walked. The route was the same but the path had been paved and provided with little waste-baskets bearing the logo ‘Edico’. Workers in Edico uniforms swept the path, and signs in English explained everything. ‘Al Siq,’ the first read, ‘is 1207 metres long and 3 to 16 metres wide. It is a natural gorge of spectacular geological formation, which the Nabataeans widened in parts by carving out the rock …’ No one needed a sign to tell him the gorge was spectacular. It was like reading in the Louvre ‘Beautiful painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile by the Italian Leonardo da Vinci’.
I overtook a family that I assumed were Americans from the Midwest. The father carried a baby on his chest and wore a ‘J + B Scotch’ T-shirt, Nike trainers and a baseball cap. His wife and daughter licked ice creams and wore blue jeans. But they were speaking Arabic. In 1973, Jordanian men did not wear baseball caps or carry babies. Jordanian women – when in Jordan – wore long dresses. Petra and its indigenous visitors were adapting or assimilating to the new global empire as the Nabataeans had to Greece and Rome. I rushed ahead of them lest anything come between me and my first sight through the narrow cleft at the end of Al Siq.
The gorge opened and up shot a magnificent tomb, mountain-high, that said, ‘Stranger, beat this.’ Invaders coming to Petra by this route would have entered single file, there to be cut down one at a time by Nabataean archers on the plaza of their king’s mausoleum. It was a good place to die, overwhelming in its beauty and surprise. I did not die but the new Coca-Cola kiosk and souvenir stands were killing me. Tour guides were explaining, perhaps for the thousandth time, that the treasury, Al-Khazaneh, was never a storehouse of gold and jewels but the burial place of a king. They did not explain why Jordan had permitted the desecration of this once-solitary shrine.
I sat on a bench, listening to guides and tourists, and looked at the tomb. A headless eagle – defaced, no doubt, by iconoclasts of one monotheism or another – sat poised to soar from the perch on which Nabataean sculptors had placed him a century before the Crucifixion. Then I wandered among Petra’s palaces and tombs and theatres. In 1973, when I had slept out at Nazal’s Camp, Bedouin lived all over Petra. Like Nazal’s Camp, the Bedouin had been removed. No longer in their caves along the ridges, they lived miles away and sent their children into the ruins to beg from tourists. Some of them sold coloured rocks. ‘No, thank you,’ an American woman with legs larger than her trousers said to a little Bedouin girl. ‘I think the rocks should stay in this place.’ She also thought her money should stay in her handbag.
The children approached me. When I gave a dinar to one of the boys, his sister said I had to give another one to her. Six or seven years old, they were determined entrepreneurs. Another child, who said her name was Rima and looked about ten, gave me a stone of the same rosy stripes as the Treasury. In English, she asked if I preferred to see the Monastery or the Bedouin camp where her family lived. We came to a tea shop, whose proprietor tried to sell me silver jewellery. When I declined, he said, ‘For your wife.’ No wife. ‘For your secretary?’ He chased Rima away, perhaps resenting the competition, and gave me a glass of tea.
An American family on camels trotted behind a camel herder. Some Russians – father, mother, daughter – asked the tea vendor for directions to the Monastery. I walked on to an amphitheatre. A goat grazed near the stage on which the Nabataeans had thrilled to the tragedies of Greece. Other tourists, people like me, shooed the goat aside and took pictures of themselves. Rima and the other children tried to make them buy stones. I should not have come back. The driver, asleep in his car near the Bab Al Siq, woke and drove me to an indifferent lunch at a restaurant near the Turkish bath. He asked if I had enjoyed Petra. I didn’t answer.
The best book in English on the Nabataeans – the book that made me appreciate their achievement – was The Lost Civilisation of Petra by an Israeli who had fought in court to erase the classification ‘Jew’ from his identity card. He was the father of Juwal Levy, the young man my son and I had met aboard the Nissos Kypros. Udi Levy was, although he did not know it, waiting at home in the Negev to show me the rest of the Nabataean empire.
Ancient Philadelphia
Amman was dark by the time we reached its outskirts. Thrown like a Bedouin blanket over a batch of hilltops, the city had outgrown the Circassian village where Prince Abdallah of the Hejaz pitched camp in March 1921. Abdallah had embarked on a quixotic mission to restore his brother Feisal’s throne in Damascus after France had massacred Feisal’s Arab army at the Maysaloun Pass and robbed the Arabs of their independent state. Abdallah’s adventure, if allowed to proceed, threatened war between Britain and France. Winston Churchill, by then colonial secretary, persuaded Abdallah to accept a principality to be called Transjordan with its capital in Amman. This involved compromises for Abdallah, who must have known the French would annihilate his Bedouin troops; for the Arabs of Greater Syria, a vast majority of whom had told the American King – Crane Commission of their desire for independence and unity; and for the Zionists, whose territorial ambitions included both banks of the Jordan. Until then, Britain and its Zionist protégés had called the country Eastern Palestine. Britain revised its League of Nations Mandate in 1922 to exclude the East Bank from the Balfour Declaration’s proposed ‘Jewish home’. It assumed responsibility for Prince Abdallah’s foreign policy and, under the able direction of General John Bagot Glubb, organized his army into the Arab Legion. Zionists who rejected the revision of the Mandate and insisted the future Israel comprise both banks of the River Jordan came to be called the Revisionists. Its leaders would be Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Yitzak Stern, Yitzak Shamir and, later, Ariel Sharon.
Jordan, removed from the Palestine Mandate, did not escape the Palestine problem. Half of the lighted hilltops of night-time Amman belonged to Palestinians, whose refugee camps were as much a part of the city, albeit poorer, as the East Bankers’ neighbourhoods. Jordan had fought three wars over Palestine. In 1948, Abdallah – who became king of independent Jordan in 1946 – captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In 1967, his grandson, King Hussein, lost Abdallah’s 1948 conquests. In both wars, Jordan absorbed refugees whom the Israeli army had expelled. Then came the third war. The refugees, led by Yasser Arafat, and the native Jordanians under King Hussein waged ferocious battles in 1970 and 1971. The Palestinians lost, and the Hashemite throne survived.
The city we entered had grown to include a million people on the hills where Abdallah had found about three thousand Circassian settlers and a few hundred Arabs. At one