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