From Amman

Aqaba is calm and modern and comfortable. There are lawned roundabouts, working banks, smiling Jordanians with bright blue eyes. The town’s white blocks are scattered thickly across the steep brown hills that curve around the blue bay. A giant red, green and white Jordanian flag tugs heavily at the lines of its pole, unfurling grandly across the sky. On the waterfront beneath, men laze around in swim shorts, smoking, and women in head scarves and ankle length black tobes bathe timidly in rubber rings, floating in the shallows.

　

In the morning I climb from the coast, into the wind, towards gleaming brown hills. The air rushes towards the sea, strengthening as it is funneled between two great walls of dark rock that overhang the road, and I push helplessly against it. For hours I am in the shadows of the shear granite embankments, the pedals faltering beneath my feet. The wheels turn more easily as the great masses of rock fall away into plains of light red dust. Here, the only remnants of the mountains are irregular outcrops, protruding from the sands like smashed teeth, visible for miles across the flats.

　

There is a camel galloping by the road, kicking up plumes of blood-orange dust as its heavy hooves pound the sands. The cameleer, in a frayed shemagh and flowing grey robes, waves from the saddle, and yells for me to speed up. I draw level and we begin to race. The camel tears forward, and the telephone wires and the ochre rocks and the grains of Jupiter sands, die away behind us. The camel’s strides start to shorten, its rider starts to smile and I leave them panting in the heat.

　

I ride on, past intermittent plain villages of low stone houses, and sprawling complexes of corrugated warehouses, full of containers and waiting trucks, towards higher land, up into sandstone hills, under the midday sun. The road climbs out from the plains, and the desert below becomes empty and vast; the little villages are swallowed up in the sands; the road behind narrows to a thread; the rocky outcrops fade like freckles on a retreating face, until, from the top, all I can see is a blank wilderness below.

　

I have no water and I stop at a police post to fill up the bottles. Three men sit in armchairs watching an Egyptian movie. They pull up a chair and give me tea, and when I get up to go, they pretend to arrest me until I have another glass. The King’s Highway branches from the main road here, rolling over dusty uplands, towards Petra. The hills are dry and sparsely vegetated; the only inhabitants Bedouin herdsmen. I see their camps from the road; long tents of heavy, hemp-like cloth sitting in the hollows, a beaten-up Mitsubishi buggy outside, and on the slopes around, men in red and white shemaghs shepherding their goats. As I near Petra the shallow hills condense into dark mounds of bare rock, shedding the scree and scrub that covered the land a little to the south. The sun is dropping from the rose horizon and I ride through a quiet little village, down a steep hill, to Wasi Musa, and the edge of the rock-hewn city.

　

I spend two days in Petra, amongst the palaces and monastery and tombs of the old Nabataean city. Rough cliffs of deep orange rock have been smoothed and Romanesque columns, stepped sills, winged statues, and terraces decorated with swirling patterns, have been sculpted into the facades; whole cliff faces carved as if they were blocks of wood.

The road gently rises and falls as I ride north to Dana. The village sits on the precipice to a deep sandstone gorge, strewn with pale boulders and thin pine-leafed trees. Many of the houses here are crumbling; their old stone walls collapsing onto the narrow cobbled alleys that wind up the little piece of hillside. I camp on the roof of a small hotel and when I wake the gorge below is filled with cloud. I continue north to Karak, descending into, and rising from, Wadi Hasa, a vast sand-walled canyon. Deep triangular creases are imprinted across the sandstone sides, casting thin veins of shadow, which splinter like tributaries on a map, across the valley walls. There are olive trees growing in the rocky soil between Bedouin encampments at its base. I climb for ten kilometres to where the land plateaus to the north, and reach the towering limestone walls of Karak’s citadel late in the afternoon.

Along the desert highway to Amman the land is more subdued. The tarmac is flat and straight; the only forms on the horizon smoking factories and stale roadside towns. The city is set on a cluster of hills; its slopes filled with wealthy villas; its steep roads thick with traffic.