Open Writing

With a five day holiday break for Eid – the celebration of the end of the Ramadan fast – my husband and I decide to drive to Jordan via the ancient Nabataean settlement of Medain Saleh in the west of Saudi Arabia.

On the road early Tuesday morning, we drive through flat, uninteresting expanses of desert for ten hours and stay in a small, basic hotel in one of the nondescript towns that dot the highway.

The following day we arrive at the gates of Medain Saleh where we are promptly stopped by local police. We are told we require a special permit to enter and, upon enquiring how we might get this permit, are told it is available through the Department of Antiquities – in Riyadh.

Luckily, after a lot of persuasion from my husband, the ‘gate police’ eventually relent and let us pass.

Medain Saleh was built and inhabited before Petra in Jordan, over 2000 years ago, and was once a bustling village of mud-walled houses in the centre of the hollowed-out rock tombs. The first thing that strikes me is the site’s similarity to Petra, which we visited three years earlier.

However, the sheer distance between the eighty monumental tombs is much greater and far more open than that of Petra. There is no way you could see everything on foot in one day and be out by sunset as required.

We wander through the first few sandstone tombs with their smooth facades reaching from fifteen to fifty feet high. Intricate three-dimensional carvings of eagles and winged lions, once beautiful, aloof and defiant, have kept watch over the burial tombs for two thousand years, though are now headless and without wings.

Ancient Nabataean inscriptions naming the owners of the tombs and their families are barely legible above the doors and have been translated into English and Arabic.

I explore the interior of the tombs. They are all similar inside with crude slots carved out of the soft rock for long-ago corpses to lie in eternal rest. It is cool and still in the shadowy interior and a carpet of soft sand traces my footsteps and those who have passed before me.

Outside, the midday sun is ferocious in its intensity and I watch another four-wheel-drive vehicle pounding its way across the scrubby desert towards a monument in the distance.

We make our way to the outer boundary to the site of the Hejaz railway built on the orders of the Caliph of Turkey and completed in 1908. This is the site where T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – led the Arabs to defeat the Turks during WW1.

Brave beyond compare, Lawrence’s guerrilla warfare undermined Germany's Ottoman ally by blowing up sections of the Hejaz railway which, for a short time, carried Muslim pilgrims from Syria and Jordan to Islam’s holiest sites in Saudi Arabia.

We wander through the workshop museum in Medain Saleh, marvel at an original engine in very good, non-working condition, and walk alongside the rows of sandstone buildings. The tracks of the line have long since been removed for scrap metal but the embankment, troop garrisons and water towers remain.

I sit near the embankment in the stillness of the desert and imagine Lawrence and his band of Bedouin Arabs placing explosives beneath the tracks under the cover of darkness.

Following the railway line towards Jordan, I see derailed, rusting locomotives and wagons sitting forlornly, broken and forgotten in the harsh desert sun.

We arrive at the Jordanian border several hours later and are there for ninety minutes – my son and I waiting in the car – while my (Iraqi) husband is interrogated by the Intelligence Services.

“Why do you visit Jordan? How long for? What is your occupation? How long did you live in Yemen….and New Zealand? What does your wife do? How did you meet?....”

I was starting to get concerned when I saw other cars come and go and still no sign of my husband. It was only then that I remembered we went through a similar procedure at Amman Airport in 2002.

Eventually, the Intelligence Services decide Amer is of no national threat to them – or anyone else - and let us pass. He gets off lightly – anyone who has watched the movie saw that Lawrence suffered a far worse fate at the hands of the Turks.

We eventually arrive at Aqaba late in the evening. Driving down the mountainside the lights of the town sparkle on the surface of the darkened waters. Directly opposite and almost near enough to reach out and touch is the Israeli/Palestine city of Eilat bordering the hills of Egypt.

I hoped to stay at the Movenpick Resort, an attractive, modern resort complex with its own private beach. However, as it was the Eid and we had not booked, there was no vacancy. We try the Intercontinental down the road before taking the last available room at the Radisson Hotel next to it (due to cancellation), which also boasts a small private beach.

Enjoying the luxury of a comfortable room and soft bed, my thoughts again turn to Lawrence and his band of men who had no such amenities when they arrived in Aqaba in 1917, after taking the town without firing a shot.

The next morning we make the hour’s drive to Wadi Rum, famous as the main camp of Lawrence. He was an honorary member of the local Bedouin tribe, the Huweitat, who claim to be descended from the Prophet Muhammed, and Lawrence led many raids with them.

Inhabited for at least three millennia, the sandstone's many crevices and alcoves bear inscriptions in Thamuydic, Safaitic, Nabataean, Greek and Arabic. Hunting scenes and religious symbols can be seen, as well as ancient ‘doodles’, possibly by the travellers who used to pass through Wadi Rum laden with spices, frankincense and myrrh.

However, times have changed and the Bedouin have had to change with them. The Bedouin are now tourist-oriented, taking camel rides and tours of the wadi in their pickup trucks.

The bare rocks of the Rum valleys are imposing, rising high into the sky from a bed of soft red sand. The sand is interlaced with tracks of the many vehicles coming to explore this maze of valleys.

The seven pillars of wisdom is the first landmark past the information centre, jutting defiantly into the sky and providing a muse for Lawrence, who wrote: “I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars. To earn you Freedom the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me, When we came” (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926).

Sadly, Lawrence only lived for nine years after publishing his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He was a keen motorcyclist and owned seven George Brough motorcycles – the fastest in the United Kingdom. He died after losing control of his machine while avoiding two children on bikes.

After surviving the bloody and brutal battles of desert warfare, a great hero of the twentieth century was lost to us.

Here, T.E. Lawrence has the final word.

“Many men would take the death sentence without a whimper, to escape the life sentence which fate carries in her other hand.”