The track down to the monuments, he noted with an English country gentleman’s fine sense of bathos, ran though ‘limestone downs and coombs … like the country about Bath’; but from there, among the red sandstone cliffs, he could make out the palatial columns and cornices of the Nabataean city. Burckhardt must have been faced with the same intriguing panorama when he scrambled over the track years before.
At closer quarters it was a world of contradictions: grandiose two-storey facades which fronted nothing but plain, uncarved caves, hacked out of the rock face; a town where the houses had vanished and only the empty tombs in the rock remained.
It was initially courage, resourcefulness and good luck that had brought Burckhardt there; then learning and intelligence that made him realize that the ruins were indeed those of the fabled city of Petra. He had been alerted to their existence in the Wadi Mousa by the casual talk of local people, as he travelled south towards Maan and, disguised as a Muslim traveller from India, he had decided to risk his life by trying to see them for himself. It was much the same decision as Doughty would have taken – except that Burckhardt had his disguise and a story he had concocted about a vow to sacrifice a goat at the nearby Tomb of Aaron to explain his presence. Doughty made no pretences: he simply told the curious, occasionally hostile villagers that he wanted to see the ruins.
Perhaps it was the red tarboosh that persuaded the Arabs to let him through: despite its crumbling power, the Ottoman empire still wielded considerable influence in the region, and the hat may have reinforced Doughty’s own claim to have powerful friends. However vehemently the villagers protested their independence, they would have been unwilling to try to outface the authority of the Dowla, the Ottoman government. But, after a night spent in caves in the rocky face on the outskirts of Petra, there were still other locals to stand in the way: one group of four with a gun grabbed the bridle of Doughty’s mule, and refused to let him through unless they were given money; another goatherd, looking after his flocks with his wife, warned him to keep off the mountain slopes, for fear of attack. Fifty armed men, the Arab warned, would not be enough to protect him against the angry villagers if he tried to climb out of the valley.
In the valley-bottom, though, they found the long, deep cleft through the rocks known as the Siq, a natural passage-way through groves of wild olives to the carvings – and at the end of it, the Khasneh, the so-called Treasure House of the Pharaoh, the most perfect of the monuments. It was no disappointment: its ‘sculptured columns and cornices are pure lines of a crystalline beauty without blemish, whereupon the golden sun looks from above, and Nature has painted that sand-rock ruddy with iron-rust’.32
Ignoring the villagers’ warnings, they climbed out of the valley to the cold mountainside, and found a place to stay for the night in a bedu encampment, where they were entertained with music and singing (enough, said Doughty ungratefully, to ‘move our yawning or laughter’) before spending another day at the monuments. Leaving his mule at the Treasure House, Doughty set off with another local guide to explore the carvings and inscriptions until, as the sun set, the anxious young Arab urged him to leave. It was not clear whether he was more afraid of the marauding bedu or of the angry spirits of Petra. His plan was to spend the night back at his own village, where Doughty had been entertained three nights before – but when the villagers there heard the sound of the mule’s hoofs on the rocky track, they poured out of their houses to drive them away. No unbeliever should enter the place, they shouted – and the man who had tried to bring him was reviled as ‘Abu Nasrany’, father of Christians. They were forced back up into the hills, back to the bedu encampment they had left earlier.
Doughty did not seem to care what happened to his guide. For him, the attack by the villagers was little more than an exciting interlude, an introduction to the unpredictable hostility of the tribesmen. But the visit to Petra had given a fresh dimension to his travels. While the mosquito huts of Sinai spoke of a primitive people struggling to survive, these grandiose carvings – reduced now to ‘night-stalls of the nomads’ flocks and blackened with the herdsmen’s fires’33 – were the remnants of a long-vanished prosperous race of builders, traders and merchants. It was there, in the shadows of ‘that wild abysmal place which is desolate Petra’,34 that Doughty’s dreams of discovering another civilization were born.
During the long nights on the mountainside above Petra the villagers had let slip details of just such another civilization. There were, they said, similar sites further south down the Hadj road, on the way to Mecca. It was the first mention Doughty had heard of a second Petra – and it had come to him in much the same casual way as had Burckhardt’s initial information about the first one. At first the villagers were unwilling to talk about the sites, particularly to a curious European Christian, but they assumed that Doughty had arrived from the south, and must already know about them.
There were several separate sites, known as Medain Salih – the cities of Salih, a Muslim prophet, who was said to have destroyed them and their inhabitants because of their wickedness. Each one was hewn from the solid rock like Petra. Doughty’s immediate thought was that he might be the first European to document those remains.
And in Maan there was more to be learned: a secretary named Mahmud – ‘a literate person who had been there oftentimes’ – told him about the inscriptions and the carved birds on the massive stone facades. ‘With those words, Mahmud was the father of my painful travels in Arabia,’ he noted later.35
The cities were well within the reach of a determined traveller – some ten days’ travel, according to the people whom Doughty asked. He wanted to set off south at once to see whether the stories he had heard were accurate – attracted, initially at least, by the possibility that the ruined cities might be connected with the stories of the Old Testament. ‘I mused at that time it would be some wonder of Moses’ Beduish nation [of] Midian,’ he wrote some years later. ‘For those inscriptions which might yield fruit to our Biblical studies, I thought it not too much to adventure my life.’36
Other stories of the Arabian hinterland that may well have been intended to warn him off simply increased his fascination – stories of a cruel and powerful prince, who ruled over his desert kingdom as both tyrant and lawgiver. ‘All the next land of wilderness was ruled by one Ibn Rashid, a mighty prince of Beduin blood, who lorded it over the tribes … I thought I had as lief see his Beduin court, and visit some new David or Robin Hood, as come threading these months past all the horrid mountain mass of Sinai,’ he said later.37 Here, surely, there would be more to fire his imagination than he had found in Europe.
But his first attempts to join the pilgrimage that might start his journey there were rebuffed: the Ottoman governor of Maan, well aware that he might be held responsible if anything were to happen to this headstrong European in the harsh country of the desert bedu, forbade townsmen and travellers alike to help him find a way down the Pilgrim Road.
The only way of reaching Medain Salih, the governor said, would be to accompany the Hadj caravan from Damascus – a suggestion which was clearly a way of fobbing off this importunate Christian.
The governor’s caution was understandable: from his point of view, it was the worst possible time to have a European Christian who claimed the highest political connections setting out on such a dangerous and unpredictable venture. Within the past few months tension had been growing throughout the Ottomans’ Balkan possessions, and both the Russian Tsar and the western powers were making threatening noises about the need to protect the Sultan’s non-Muslim subjects from the excesses of