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.