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City of the Dead
Once a legendary lost city, Jordan's Petra is now an impressive tourist attraction.

By Tom Huntington

Border crossings always offer the potential for trouble. Especially Allenby Bridge, on the border between Israel and Jordan. Although the two countries have reasonably friendly relations, this was, after all, the Middle East. A few weeks earlier, at a peace park on Israel/Jordan border, a Jordanian soldier went berserk and killed several Israeli schoolgirls. (And a few days after I crossed the border at Allenby Bridge, a Jordanian woman armed with a .22 pistol wounded some Israeli border guards at the crossing.)

Sure enough, we met a snag. I was traveling with a group of journalists. After spending a few days in Israel we were on our way to visit the ancient city of Petra in southern Jordan. At the border we were going to switch from our Israeli bus to a Jordanian one. An easy enough transition, one would think, but somehow the Jordanians received a wrong head count before our arrival, and that short-circuited the bureaucratic machinery. (To make things even more difficult, the extra head belonged to an Israeli citizen, an employee of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism on the trip with us.) While we were waiting to get it sorted out, I wandered into the Jordanian border control building and bought a cup of coffee and—I couldn't resist—a Ding Dong. American junk food, it appears, is universal.

Jean Louis Burckhardt never ate Ding Dongs. The Swiss explorer who rediscovered Petra in 1812, Burckhardt was a classic nineteenth-century adventurer, the kind of man who would spend years polishing his disguise as an Arab so he could pass unnoticed through the Middle East, a land not always hospitable to curious Europeans. Under contract to the African Association, a private group of wealthy men in Britain who sponsored exploration, Burckhardt planned to cross the Sahara and seek the source of the River Niger. He first perfected his traveling persona as an Arab trader named Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abd Allah, then set off from Damascus toward Cairo. On the way he decided to take a look inside the Wadi Mousa (the Valley of Moses) in hilly region north of the Red Sea, rumored to contain the ancient ruins of a lost city. Burckhardt told his reluctant guide that he had promised to sacrifice a goat at the tomb of the prophet Aaron, which lay on a mountaintop inside the valley. Although his guide grew increasingly suspicious of his charge's interest in the archeological wonders, Burckhardt's ruse allowed him to become the first European to see Petra in a millennium.

I wandered into the Jordanian border control building and bought a cup of coffee and—I couldn't resist—a Ding Dong. American junk food, it appears, is universal.

I had wanted to see Petra ever since I first read about it. It sounded like something from an Arabian Nights fantasy, and Burckhardt's dramatic rediscovery added just the perfect romantic touch. After threading through the rocks along a narrow fissure called the Siq, he found a city of elaborate tombs carved from the cliffs. Decorated with columns, statues and painstakingly carved ornamentation, the palace-like tombs were like silent sentinels guarding the past.

It seems no work of Man's creative hand,

By labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;

But from the rock as if by magic grown,

Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

So wrote poet Dean Burgon in "Petra," the poem that christened this lost place as "a rose-red city half as old as time." It's no wonder that when the makers of the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; went looking for a place for their hero to find the Holy Grail, they picked Petra.

By the time our bureaucratic snafu was cleared up and we were on the road to Petra, our group had increased by one—a member of the Jordanian Tourist Police. It was a new Jordanian policy. Following the schoolgirls' shooting, Jordan's King Hussein had ruled that any tour group with Israelis would have to have a Jordanian bodyguard. Our guard kept to himself in the back of the bus, smoking, reading newspapers, and sleeping, a natty briefcase always by his side. Later I learned that the briefcase contained his automatic weapon. Jordan was seeking to increase tourist traffic, and King Hussein, I was told, didn't think all the machine-gun-toting Tourist Police helped, so he had them conceal their weapons in briefcases.

Historic travel in the Middle East certainly has a unique air about it.

Once past the border we climbed up a long winding road out of the Jordan Valley—part of the huge Rift Valley that runs from Africa to Israel along the fault line where two great continental plates are drifting apart. Once out of the surprisingly green valley we headed south through a much drier landscape. Often we saw flocks of sheep and goats being herded alongside the road and an occasional dust devil whirling across the desert floor. This was Lawrence of Arabia country, as demonstrated by a sign telling the distance to Aquaba, the city on the Red Sea that Lawrence and his troops captured during World War I after making an arduous trek across the desert to approach it, undetected, from behind. The railroad that ran from one side of the desert to the other, like a textbook example of artistic perspective, was the one that Lawrence's Arab army kept sabotaging.

Finally we began to approach Petra, and the road, until now so straight and flat, started to twist and turn as it descended into the valley of the Wadi Mousa. It was time to explore Petra.