Quest into the Unknown by Tony Howard

Author:Tony Howard [Tony Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911342847
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2019-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

– CHAPTER 39 –

Exploring Jordan – Petra’s Secret Canyon

Once back home, I rapidly sent off numerous colour slides to the tourism ministry, with a report on Wadi Rum and its climbing and adventure tourism potential, suggesting a guidebook would be useful but would need a couple more trips to complete. We were invited back the following autumn. I embarked on a lecture tour promoting Wadi Rum, which I felt I owed to the Bedouin and the tourism ministry. Wilf Colonna, the French lad I’d met in Morocco and who was climbing with us in England at the time, came along to one and was hooked. He had previously passed through Amman airport on his way to Thailand and seen pictures of Wadi Rum and always wondered about it. He was keen to join us on our visit in the autumn, and the tourism ministry were happy to have him along.

It was a year since our first visit to Petra on our way to Wadi Rum, but our memories of it were still vivid. Emerging from the cool cavernous depths of the siq, the canyon that descends into the fabled ‘rose-red city’, the rock-hewn tomb of the Treasury dominates the exit. Beyond it and a second ravine, stairways worn like those of Gormenghast ‘by ritual’s footsteps, ankle deep in time’ carve their way up to the High Place of Sacrifice. Here, 2,500 years ago, or so it is said, priests and victims raised their eyes in fervour and fear to the blazing sun and the gods. Below, the canyon widens out, passing through the heart of this once-forgotten city to an area long since devastated by earthquakes, which brought the death knell to an already dying Nabataean culture. As I write this, thirty years on from our first visit, archaeologists have been busy revealing numerous buildings including an ancient church with a mosaic floor, but back then the only sounds echoing in the ruins were those of the ravens and the Bedouin. Further on, beyond the Roman colonnades, the surrounding cliffs close again and the well-worn paths of the tourists end. The shadows of high mountains with tombs and castles on their tops draw closer and the dry bed of the wadi leaves the city, to pass through pink-flowered oleander bushes. Beyond, it finally disappears into the shadowy unseen recesses of the lower canyon.

We had looked down there one hot afternoon in late September the previous year, wondering where it went and if it could be followed. We wondered about the possibilities of ascending this ‘secret canyon’ into Petra. No one in Jordan could give us any information and the map obtained for us by the Ministry of Tourism from the military-controlled geographical department revealed little other than a narrow and tortuous ravine descending between steep mountain walls, eventually opening out past the Bedouin village and police post of Bir Madhkur to the inhospitable desert beyond. Here the Great Rift Valley, cleaving its way north to the Red Sea and beyond

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