More than a month has elapsed since my family and I walked past the massive Djinn blocks, the Obelisk Tomb and the “Abdomanchos” inscription to enter As Siq, the narrow gorge nature carved over many millenia to conceal Petra, the rose city, the Nabatean capital, UNESCO World Heritage site, from inattentive passers-by. In the Siq the light changes by the minute, illuminating various rock surfaces as the angle of the sun shifts, sending light bouncing off the sides of the canyon like the sounds of horses, donkeys and tourists.

The Siq also hides the secret of the city, of its existence. The ingenious water channels and pipes built into the walls on each side of it were the city’s lifeline, its blood, its access to the most precious resource for all life, water, channeled from the springs of Wadi Musa. This secret will have been too easily severed by enemies, and thus brought the city’s downfall, that and earthquakes.

The winding longitudinal crack
in the immense rock wall
conceals the city from sight.
This isn’t the first sign to the city
it isn’t even a sign.
It’s a lost path
that infiltrates a mountain’s gash.

Amjad Nasser, Petra: The Concealed Rose

We’re following the footsteps of millions of visitors (nearly eight hundred thousand in 2017), and of the Swiss traveler/geographer Johann Burckhardt who in 1812, passing himself as Ibrahim bin Abdullah to avoid antagonizing the locals who wished to keep the city hidden from foreigners, was responsible for the modern discovery of Petra. This is what he saw when he reached the end of the ‘gloomy and almost subterraneous’ Siq:

An excavated mausoleum came in view, the situation and beauty of which are calculated to make an extraordinary impression upon the traveller, after having traversed for nearly half an hour such a gloomy and almost subterraneous passage as I have described.

JOHANN BURCKHARDT, TRAVELS IN SYRIA AND THE HOLY LAND, P.418–431,
FROM HTTPS://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/JOHANN_LUDWIG_BURCKHARDT

The mausoleum in question is Al-Khazneh (The Treasury), and “extraordinary impression” is a mild way to describe the feeling you get when you first catch sight of it. For me, the whole experience was a sensory overload; the sheer beauty, the awe at the human accomplishment, the din of guides attempting to convey the grandeur of it all in a cacophony of languages, the bedouins offering camel rides, photo ops and a hike to ‘the best secret view in the city’. I had watched youtubes and read travelers’ blogs but nothing could have prepared me for this, and even now, I just don’t have the words. So instead of spewing out yet another awed description, I’ll quote the poet again:

We will read about you in more than one language.

And bring along an expert guide in antiques

or a magician specialized in astronomy and amulets.

We will use sound probes, infrared eyes, carbon dating,

We will join excavation circles, join rhetoric and curiosity, and distribute the

tasks.

But we won’t make headway into the camouflaged hide

of your name, body and story.

AMJAD NASSER, PETRA: THE CONCEALED ROSE

We are still learning about the history of Petra, still unearthing its mysteries, but the story of the city is elusive and still being written; the story of its people, its fig trees, its monumental tombs carved into rose sandstone cliffs, its deep canyons and peaks, its ancient trading routes, its theatre, its treasures, its light, its “stop and shop” souvenir stalls, “everything is one dinar.” The deeper we marched into the city the more lost I felt. We passed the Street of Facades, the Royal Tombs, the Colonnaded Street, the Greek Temple, Qusar al-Bint, and finally Ad-Deir, the Monastery. What to make of all this? The best I could do is point a camera at what I saw on the way back to the car, and hope to return someday, perhaps in another life as a bedouin, or a camel–I like the camel idea, they’re pretty chill. In the meantime I’ll once again refer to the poet (always a good idea to refer to poets):

…Thus we can say to Burckhardt or Ibrahim bin Abdullah as we leave him here: Thank you. Not because you discovered this secret beauty, but because it shook you in a manner you couldn’t bear, and you started talking as if you were hallucinating or reciting poetry. Another narrator would take over. I mean, hallucinate like a poet. He could be any one of us, we the visitors of this intentionally concealed city. In reality, we are in no need of an author or a poet. Anyone who enters the city would speak the same words. Tone might differ, but speech is one. Because it isn’t the speech of man, but that of the present-lost carved out of a mountain’s rib, a female rib, in fact. It isn’t necessary to wear imagination like an ornament. What’s one’s need for it here?

AMJAD NASSER, PETRA: THE CONCEALED ROSE