PETRA NEW YEAR 1994 - day 1
text by Pink Oboe, pictures from Angus McIntyre's Petra Site. Includes dozens of beautiful images and a clickable map of the city.
preamble - day 1 - day 2 - day 3
Bassem had told us that there was to be no alarm call in the morning and that we were at leisure until a meeting in the lobby at 12 o'clock. We both awoke at about nine o'clock and I padded to the window and looked out. We overlooked another hotel called the Sunset (a lovely sign on the road proclaimed it as "Your next home"). In the middle distance was a strange looking building surrounded by eucalyptus trees. Odd souls on horses were making their way down the road. In the distance were range on range of hills and mountains, one of which had a little white building upon it. We were to discover that this was Aaron's tomb. The day had dawned bright and sunny and I could not wait to get out and explore.
One or two like-minded souls were about and we breakfasted upon yoghurt over which had been poured olive oil. It sounds strange but tasted delicious. Orange juice was available, pitta bread, which was the only bread we were to see in the whole trip, and two large army size mess tins containing rather solid scrambled egg and a similar mess tin of extremely hard boiled eggs. With the joys of travel we were remarkably sharp set and had a large breakfast. While we ate we noted the sunshine, which streamed down through the windows. We also noted the horses and riders, which were making their way down the road. At this stage we did not know where we were in respect to Petra.
I decided that we should explore if only to determine what was in the vicinity. We set off down the road and within five minutes found ourselves wandering down towards a gathering of Bedouin horsemen who seemed to be assembling themselves for some event. They occupied a dried up Wadi with a sort of disorderly irregular cavalry air that must have been known to Lawrence. As we walked towards them, we passed a gate, which was made with pre-cast concrete blocks held together with very positively pink cement. Someone was taking the "Rose Red City" very seriously. We walked down towards a series of covered stalls with tourists vaguely hanging around but more than anything this wonderful feeling of disorganized irregular cavalry. We stood and surveyed the scene and soon attracted the attention of an English speaking Bedouin.
"Did we want a horse?"
Well, not quite at this moment.
"Did we want to visit the Brooke Hospital"
At this time we did not even know what the Brooke Hospital was. In fact it is a charitable institution set up by a remarkable English lady called Brooke after the First World War in Egypt. The military actions against the Turks had been heavily cavalry based. In 1920 there were large numbers of ex-Army horses being subjected to all sorts of indignities at the hands of their new native owners. The Brooke was set up to provide veterinary services, education and a monitoring service. They had come to Petra only recently. One of our books commented upon the appalling state of the Bedouin horses used to convey the tourists down the Siq, the narrow entrance gorge. Not so now as the Brooke has set new standards. We learned that all the tourists disappeared in 1991 during the Gulf crisis. More than three hundred horses were at risk because the Bedouin had no income to feed them. Fifteen died before the Brooke stepped in and provided fifteen pounds a month to keep the horses alive while the war lasted and the Bedouin were deprived of income.
We thanked our guide but said that we had only limited time as we had to be back by noon. He said that we could walk down the Siq if we wished. We were not aware that we had somehow by-passed the official way in and had avoided paying. Oh dear, what a shame, never mind. We set off down the track, which was a mixture of sand, loose stones and bedrock. It was about ten o'clock in the morning so the majority of the traffic was headed down towards the Siq. Rather worried looking punters on the horses hung on like grim death while their handlers, some young boys but others wizened campaigners dressed in old Army greatcoats with woolen long johns showing underneath them, conveyed the mounted tourists along on a loose leash. Many of the older Bedouin had the stocky build of King Hussein. The horses looked remarkably well with their shaggy winter coats seeming rather out of place in the mid-70s temperatures.
Along the left side of the track there appeared a dried up Wadi. This was Wadi Musa, Moses Wadi, and was fed by the spring, which provided the water when Moses struck the rock while the tribes of Israel were wandering in the wilderness. Allegedly. This showed signs of recent rain with sun baked patches of mud in the watercourse. Even with the signs of recent rain, the track rapidly became dusty and very rocky. With the gentle descent of the path which wound left and right we saw the first signs of ancient monuments. These were large cubes of rock standing proud of their rocky surroundings. These were our first introduction to God Blocks. The ancients represented certain of their Gods by such large blocks of stone. These particular ones may also have been tombs with holes cut in their tops through which the bodies were lowered. These Gods were also represented by excised pictures showing rectangular sections of stone. These were generally found not far from water.
Further on the left we passed the Obelisk tomb and the Bab El Siq Triclinium but more of them anon. We had read something about these in our guide by Iain Browning but were more interested in the sight, sound and general experience of the moment this stage.
At the entrance to the Siq, which is a narrow gorge formed originally by an earthquake splitting the mountain down a fault line, we paused. The guide described a dam that had been built at the entrance to the Siq to divert water from the Wadi. This was something of a misnomer because what we really found was a bridge, which led the track over the Wadi and directed the water when in flood through the original tunnel made by the Nabateans. This was relatively recent and had been precipitated by the unfortunate demise of 23 tourists who had been drowned in a flash flood, which swept down the Siq in 1963.
At this point the Gorge became quite steep. An early drawing by David Roberts shows that the Gorge here has a ceremonial arch across it. This fell down in the last few years of the nineteenth century but the buttresses are still visible. Rosemary hesitated at the top of the Siq not wishing to spoil the experience when we made the trip with the guide. I wanted to go on and eventually persuaded her that we could walk down to the Treasury, the monument at the bottom of the Siq, and still return with plenty of time to meet the twelve o'clock deadline at the hotel.
The track rapidly becomes quite steep with the Siq winding back and forth becoming as narrow as two or three metres in places while in others widening to 20 or so. Old stretches of block Roman pavement appeared at a metre or two higher than the existing level. Mind bogglingly beautiful rock formations appeared wrought by rain, wind and sun. Straggling patches of green, succulents of various kinds, found a precarious existence on rocky ledges.
Down and down we went, the dust hanging in the air and catching at our throats. Several souls wandered through the Siq clutching plastic buckets and shovels. Their task was to scoop up the odd spatterings or enormous piles of horse manure but that which remained still managed to add to the pungency of the approach. The gorge narrowed to a point where one almost felt that you could touch both sides. In fact once or twice we needed to retreat from the path to allow a party of horses through. The down traffic was reasonably sedate with the slightly worried looking punters sitting astride their temporary steeds. However, at this hour, the upstream traffic was often wildly ridden horses driven at the gallop by young Bedouin lads. We later learned that the horses are shod with complete steel plates to prevent their hooves being damaged by the stones. However these shoes provide little in the way of traction and the horses skid and dance over the stones and have great difficulty in braking rapidly.
At the bottom of the Siq we suddenly could see the Khasneh, the Treasury, through a rent in the
rock. At that time of day it was already in shadow but even so the expectation of films like Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade was exceeded. While we marvelled at the colour, the incredibly detailed
carving, all of which have survived since 100 AD, we noticed the untidy groups of horses and their
handlers. Most of the Bedouin sat crosslegged, others tried to sell small glass tubes of coloured sand,
rather like at Alum bay. The tubes contained such things as patterns, pictures of camels and people's
names.
Outside the Khasneh was an extremely bored camel. Various people tried to sell us trinkets but without a vast amount of pressure. The Jordanians are not a loud and aggressive people. They speak quietly and with dignity. I wandered up the steps and into the chamber of the Treasury and photographed the coloured ceilings and walls: great bands of colour in the sandstone.
It was getting on for time to return. Most of the traffic was still going down the peculiarly termed Outer Siq, which is really the Inner Siq. This was the way to the main part of the city. However, we needed to go back and I decided to see how much the horse ride would be. We hovered near the horses waiting for an approach but were ignored. Eventually we got a bite from a Gentleman who was gathering several horses and their young handlers for the return. Ten dinars for two horses. At a dinar to the pound that was fairly steep for a mile and a half journey. I countered with eight and faced a barrage of bluster. We turned towards the Siq. The horses followed and eight was agreed. The only problem now was that we had to mount away from the mounting blocks. Also Rosemary was not wearing her culottes but a rather flowing pleated dress. She managed admirably. A middle-aged gentleman led my horse, a youth Rosemary's.
We set off up the steep slope of the Siq. The horse and handler were soon puffing. We had chosen the way to travel back up the Siq well! Back past the raised blocks of the Roman pavement, finally climbing out into the open area. I paid with two fives and felt mean afterwards to have demanded the two dinars change.
Then we walked back up the road, pausing to buy postcards and stamps but also frankincense and myrrh from bottles and the aromatic amber that Rosemary used to have in a little wooden box from India. Petra used to have the monopoly of the incense trade particularly as it was at a crossroad in the east/west, north/south caravan routes.
Back to retrieve our passports at the hotel and to book up for the afternoon's excursion to Beida. We lunched on Amstel beer brewed locally and pitta bread sandwiches, watching horses and donkeys pass down the road outside. A patch of desert opposite the hotel had become a green garden under olive trees. Spit in the desert and it blooms.
There was still an hour or so before the excursion so we wandered back down the hill, perhaps two or three hundred yards, to the Visitor Centre and peered at the ancient tomb that had been subsumed by the Government Rest House. Stalls containing all sorts of tee shirts, head-dresses and tourist tat stood in two lines. There was still no great pressure to buy.
Rosemary wanted a head dress which was a sensible idea both to protect our heads from the sun and to act as a dust mask when we got to the lower parts of the Siq. We stopped at a stall selling items from the handicapped of Jordan. Rosemary tried on a head dress made from white gauze(Gaza is not far away and is the origin of the term). Once she was suited, I had to choose. Palestinian? Syrian? Jordanian? The gentleman explained that each of the colour combinations had a national affiliation. White was general Arab and by connotation Saudi. I chose Jordanian as a courtesy to our hosts. We were shown how to put them on and wore them back to the hotel.
It was time for the excursion. A few minutes before the appointed time, we showed ourselves dressed in our new head dresses. Bassem was standing by the door counting us out and asked whether we minded him adjusting our head dresses. We readily agreed. We then climbed on to the packed coach. There was a spontaneous outburst of applause! As we made our way to the rear some ladies in front of us asked if we were in a Nativity play. I said that we had lost the donkey.
The coach wound down the few hundred yards to the visitor centre then off to Beida. We stopped at a view over part of the valley containing Petra. Rock formations below us looked like a terrace of trolls peering out watching some Neolithic football match that only we could not see. A small column on the hillside commemorated an American archaeologist who had asked to be buried overlooking Petra. A new village nearby housed the Bedouin who had been displaced from Petra itself. The Bedouin have occupied the site for 50 to 60 years so are relative newcomers. The dwellings were provided by the Jordanian Government, very basic, but did have running water and electricity. Small children ran around the single storey buildings and the odd camel stood tethered as though the house was still a black goat's wool tent.
We saw such a tent, still very much occupied, as we passed further on. Our aim, under Bassem's guidance, was a Neolithic village site near Beida. This had been excavated in the 50s and 60s and had been shown to be one of the earliest sites of agriculture in the world---7,000 BC, i.e. contemporary with the earliest parts of Jericho.
We left the bus and walked slowly down a dusty track. A very old lady sat by the road spinning by hand with nothing more than a distaff. A very but only recently dead wolf? lay by the track. Onward, past a Bedouin family living in a cave with a swarm of small children some of whom joined the party to beg and get in the way.
The site was fenced in guarded by an ancient Bedouin in uniform standing rather forlornly by a pile of pottery and trinkets at the gate. There never seemed any enjoinder to stop anyone picking up pieces of pot. Bassem later said that it was not illegal to take away such artefacts but it was illegal for the Bedouin to sell them. Bassem took us into the site and explained the development of the houses from round to square. The settlement, like Jericho had perished in flames, leaving a layer of ash discernible in the excavation. Rosemary found a perfect arrow head chipped from flint although flint is not indigenous there. On our return to the bus, we passed a small patch of ground sprouting winter wheat, an exact reminder of the transition from hunter/gatherer to farmer all those years ago.
As we passed the Bedouin family one of the ladies in the party reached down and placed a 100 fils coin in the hands of each of the smallest children. I distributed sweets and the odd coin to the older kids which was not a particularly clever thing to do as it only encourages their begging. On the other hand not a lot of benefit from tourism reaches down to this level unless some of it rubs off in this fashion.
We walked around the corner to Little Petra, which was apparently even recently used as a good pull up for caravans. Ancient cisterns still hold water all the year around and the caves have provided a place out of the sun and rain for centuries. The narrow Siq faced west and the cool wind blowing through the narrow defile caused it to be named "Siq Al Barid", the cold Siq. A small Arab boy bowled a hoop through the Siq oblivious to time and the magnificence of the ancient monuments.
