Some five kilometers east of the border the Jordanian road runs south to Aqaba. I’ll have to cross it carefully. Then, if I cover twenty kilometers during the night, I can reach the junction of Wadi Musa and Wadi Sil-el-Ba’a, where the ravine narrows to a deep gorge, by daybreak. I’ll have to hole up there among the rocks, or in some cave if I can find one, and kill the day. Then, Friday night, I’ll work my way up the gorge. After about two kilometers it swings almost ninety degrees to the south, and from there it’s a pretty steep climb of some eight more kilometers to the outskirts of Petra. On Saturday morning I’ll catch the sunrise there and maybe find out what this is all about. I wonder if Michal would have come with me. No. Don’t kid yourself.

What’s to see in Petra? According to Azariah Alon in this booklet, Petra is not, as was previously thought, the biblical Rock of Edom against which the prophets Jeremiah and Obadiah vented their wrath. I suppose Alon knows what he’s talking about, but personally I don’t give a damn. It could be the Rock of Chad for all I care. Petra means “rock” in Latin. And it happened to be the capital of the same Nabateans who lived in the Negev in the cities of Shivta and Ovda. A tribe of merchants, warriors, builders, farmers, and highwaymen. In short, a tribe just like us. Their king was called Haritat. They built Petra at the junction of the ancient road from Damascus to Arabia and the Darb-es-Sultan, the trade route from the desert to Gaza, Sinai, and Egypt. It was carved from the rock of a deep crater at the upper end of the wadi. Whole temples, palaces, royal tombs, and the great sanctuary called ed-Deir by the Arabs. All of this, it says here, has been standing unmarked by the tooth of time for two millennia. I like that: “the tooth of time.” Desolate and without a human presence. Like my life. Save for the generations of grave robbers who ransacked its red palaces. And looted only to die. For the past fourteen hundred years Petra has been uninhabited. Except for the prowling fox and the night bird and the Bedouin of the Atallah tribe, who roam the area and make a living from herding and brigandage.

As he read still further, Yonatan’s eye was caught by a line of English poetry that cast a strange spell over him:

A rose-red city, half as old as time.

He repeated the words over and over to himself, moving his lips silently, only to have his wife Rimona appear, lying cold and naked on the snowy sheets of their bed in the pale light of a summer moon that was turning corpse-white in the window. With a sad shake of his head, he went on reading.