Jordan, Day 4 (part 1)

Wednesday, Nov. 19

Lunar landscape where little can thrive

Today Petra is over.  There are some other things I could see, if I were more agile and quite a bit crazier, all entailing scrambling up rock faces. But this will do.
       Fakhrey comes to pick me up after breakfast and we take the long and winding road back.
       First, the castle of my people:  Castle Schopbach (well, Showbak... or Shoubak... or Shawbak depending on which sign you read).  Actually it was Saladdin’s castle, says Fakhrey.  (Research after the fact says it was a Crusader castle built by Baldwin I of Jerusalem in 1115 to guard the road from Egypt to Damascus and, after many sieges, only fell to Saladdin in 1189.  But it’s Fakhrey’s country and Saladdin was there last, so... )  Not too much left, but a helluva view.
 

    A young man with a pale kitten gives me my ticket (1 JD) and asks me to sign the visitor’s book.  Mine is the only name on the page.  He is alone in a small room with a cot, and American music playing to break the silence.  There’s also a guard on patrol farther along the parapet, and later I hear men’s laughter from behind a closed door. Aside from that, no one else is here but me.

       As I tend to snoop around, I happen upon a room near the invisible laughing men.  The catacombs.  In it are dozens of artifacts all gathered together in the shadows.  One is already in a crate - to go where?

Frieze ready for shipment

       After the castle, it’s mile after mile of arid, eroded djebel mountains scarred by dried up wadis, all the way down to the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on the planet at 1,391 ft (424 m) below sea level.  All along the south end are factories - cement, potash, bromine, salt - and evaporation ponds.  Farther north, it’s spas for the rich:  Crowne Plaza, Kempinski, Hyatt... In between are fields irrigated with rainwater caught in depressions lined with black plastic. The fields are owned by Jordanians but the field hands are Egyptians.  They come because one Jordanian dinar buys them 6 Egyptian pounds, says Fakhrey.  (Turns out it actually buys 10!)  Some of what they pick is sold warm off the vine at roadside stands by women or teen-agers.

Salt pans

     Halfway up the coast the checkpoints start.  Three in all.  I’m even asked for my passport the first time.  There was a listening station up in the hills - to listen to Israel, I’m told.  I’m sure there's a similar listening post across the border, to listen to Jordan.  Israel also doesn’t allow boats on the Dead Sea, Fakhrey adds.  Not that there would be fishing boats anyway; there’s nothing to fish.  I always was told it was the Dead Sea because there’s no river flowing out of it, but Fakhrey is right:  the salt content is too high for living creatures.  Except, maybe, a few microbes.  I can see the salt encrusted all along the cliff, and marks on the shore reveal how much lower the water level is now than it once was.  Evidently the Dead Sea is 1 meter lower every year, both due to evaporation and to the lake bed dropping because the rift underlying it grows deeper.  It reminds me of the Aral Sea’s plight but less drastic... for the moment.  If we wait too long, the Dead Sea will disappear.  Some experts say by the year 2050.

      Our last stop before Madaba is Mt. Nebo (1 JD, “for services”).  Fakhrey told me you can see all the way back to the Dead Sea and beyond.  But not today.  Maybe I look the wrong way.  Or maybe it’s the heat haze.  It’s said this is where Moses - Musa - died, looking out over the Promised Land which he would never reach.  I have the view to myself, one tour group leaving as I walked in and a second just arriving as I leave.
        After a stop at a museum Fakrey thought I should see - a sort of Henry Ford Museum without Henry Ford’s dollars - we arrive back in Madaba.

The road to Mt. Nebo

Jordan, Day 3 (part 2)

Tuesday, November 18 (cont)

The Deir Monastery

Musa

Abdullah and I meet up with Musa, whom we promised could take us up to the pièce de résistance, The Deir (the Monastery), with his donkeys.  My donkey’s name is Jack and he proves partial to walking up these 870 steps and slippery slopes on the ultimate edge of any precipice encountered.  I know he knows what he’s doing, and that he’s sure-footed, but...  Abdullah asks over his shoulder if I’m scared and I admit I am a bit, but Musa tries to stay between Jack and the void, although he doesn’t always succeed.  Once we safely reach the top - well, almost the top - Musa praises me for being a good rider - all those lessons at summer camp finally paid off. No one notices my white knuckles.  Musa did the climb on foot, then hopped on Jack and rode back down.  We’ll be walking back down, thank God!
       A few more dozen steps and we’ve reached the sky.  The trip up was well worth it.  The Deir is similar to the Khazneh in its facade and its urn feature, but much bigger.  Plus it’s not recessed into the stone like the Khazneh, but rather juts out from the surrounding rock face.  In fact a huge part of the mountain was simply chiseled off, piece by piece and by hand, and carted away.  That left a courtyard that was probably enclosed by a sort of covered colonnade.  Every monastery needs a courtyard for its rituals.

       It was also worth it to come up here for the view.  Looking out to the west over range after range of mountains - granite and sandstone - I see a heat haze hanging over the desert sands beyond, punctuated only by the dark green of a palm grove.
       Again, someone has carted water all the way up here.  This time it’s a young man with long black curls who serves us mint tea under a Bedouin tent. Both provide refreshing coolness in the noon-day sun.
       Sand on stone is slippery but I make it back down - this time on foot - availing myself gratefully of Abdullah’s hand offered when needed.  He’s assessed my skill level by now, and seems happy with my stamina, but perhaps mildly chagrined by being slowed down by my picture-taking.  We pass the Welsh lady in the pink blouse whom we passed as we started up the hill.  It’s taken her a long while to get to the top; her friend’s knees are not doing well.  My own ache by the time we reach the bottom.

Abdullah

After a light buffet lunch on the terrace of the restaurant, in the shadow of some welcome trees, Abdullah surprises me by announcing he’s cutting me loose and heading off.  By then, it’s past 2 o’clock and we’ve been together, through thick and thin, up down and around, for almost seven hours, so he’s put in his full day, although I’m sad to lose his company.  He gives me his e-mail address, to stay in touch, which I will.
       He sets me on the road back along the colonnade, and I look over my shoulder a few times to wave good-bye until he disappears behind a hill.  I happen upon Pink Welsh Lady for the third time and we walk and talk until her friend’s legs give out and they take a break.  I continue on...  past the children selling postcards, past the amphitheater, truly on my own in Petra for the first time, to the Khazneh where horsecart Number 5 (groan) will carry me back up the Siq to the entrance.

Temenos Gate with Royal Tombs in background

       My time in Petra is over.  Back to the hotel for a beautiful sunset from the rooftop terrace, then dinner and sleep.  Fakhrey will be back to collect what’s left of me tomorrow morning.

Jordan, Day 3 (part 1)

Tuesday, Nov. 18

Up early to meet Abdullah for the full day that I talked him into yesterday. Otherwise he wouldn’t be working today.  He’s had his turn for the week, but he’s such a good guide and we get along so well that he’ll trade with the colleague next in line.  Work is scarce for everyone, he says, and more so the French-speaking guides than the English-speaking ones.  Before me, he hadn’t worked in ten days.  The situation in Syria and Iraq, and especially the beheadings, has scared off the hordes of tourists that Jordan’s economy relies on.*
       We’re almost the first ones through the gate, and Abdullah opts to fast-track us to the Khazneh by horsecart (groan!) so we can have more time for things we didn’t see yesterday.  After that point, we have the place totally to ourselves.  No one else in sight as we scramble up some barely visible - or even non-existent - stairs to the Royal Tombs.  The rock colors are amazing, especially with the sun out today.  Abdullah pulls the same trick as yesterday, a trick I’ve used myself at Mont Saint Michel in France:  attracting attention to one thing and then saying, “Now turn around.”  This time the “turn around” is to see the amphitheater from above.  Yesterday I was a bit disappointed because it didn’t look like much from below, but from here it’s magnificent!  Row after row of seats waiting for the spectators, the stage just needing a good dusting off before the actors start their play. Somehow the gaping holes of the tombs high above look as if they’re meant for some projectors to light the whole set.

The amphitheater, from above

Silk Tomb

  Abdullah escorts me from tomb to tomb, each with different decorations but the same majesty.  All are empty.  At least up here you can go inside them. In one, the stone is ribboned with different shades of red, pink, yellow and even blue, so much so that they call it The Silk Tomb.  In another, we play the game of spotting animals or faces in the natural rock colors.  I find a whale, a frog and a goat; Abdullah finds a pretty woman.
  As we pass, we’re constantly called out to by Bedouin women with souvenir stands.  They trudge all the way up here each morning carrying bags of souvenirs to sell.  Plus water to make mint tea.  One woman offers us a cup and we accept.  I end up buying something - which was her plan from the start, but I knew that.  She tells me of a “friend” she has in France and to prove it proudly shows me the friend’s business card.  She allows me to have my photo taken with her but asks several times not to post it on the Internet.  I promise I won’t.  She makes me think of my friend Kari back home who is a ophthalmology O.R. nurse and travels to places like Haiti and Peru to operate on people.  She and her team could easily correct the extreme extropia of this smiling woman’s left eye, which looks almost behind her as the other stares into my soul.  But that recourse lies beyond her Bedouin universe.  When asked later, Abdullah says that feature doesn’t make her a poor choice for marriage in their culture, and I’m glad.

  The next stop is the Byzantine Church down another road.  Covered by a white tent to protect all the mosaics - many intact - being studied jointly with North American archeologists, it looks like just another Bedouin home from the cliffs above.  But when we get inside, past the deep well that once supplied water for baptisms, a multitude of tessera animals greet us, and faces staring up at us... all things the Iconoclasts would have ripped up and scattered to the winds if the sand hadn’t covered them and kept them safe.**
  Then it’s past a palace and the Temple of the Winged Lions down below, and finally the blockhouse Qasr el Bint with its barrel arch still standing in spite of repeated earthquakes over the millennia.  Once thought, because of its grandiose silhouette, to be the palace of the Pharaoh’s daughter, and thus the name, it’s really a temple to Dushara, the supreme god of the Nabataeans.

Temple and palace

Corinthian Tomb

*Note:  This was written in mid-November, well before the Jordanian pilot was shot down and executed, and before the Jordanian Air Force flew reprisal raids. Things can only have gotten worse since then.

**Note: Since I wrote this, several Assyrian ruins in Iraq have been demolished, including Nimrod and Nineveh, which makes me fear even more for the mosaics of this church, now that their existence is no longer a secret.