At the beginning of the last century, John Lewis Burckhardt, an intrepid Swiss traveler, reached the ghost city disguised as an Arab. Looking down from a precipitous height, he caught sight all at once of the red shrines that time forgot and was staggered by their awesome majesty. For a full hour he stood there, a man turned to stone. Later he described in detail the enormous columns carved with mysterious glyphs, the stone galleries climbing one above the other in the torrid air like catwalks, the Greco-Roman auditorium built by the Emperor Hadrian, the palaces, the fortifications, the arcades, the temples, the tombs, and all of them rose-red. Oleander bushes blazed among the ruins. Whole forests of them grew in the gorge that wound up to the site. At sunrise and sunset the vaults and archways and sculpted rock flared upward in tongues of red, purple, and vermilion flame.

Half-awake, Yonatan sought to picture the magically moribund world that awaited him. The steep steps cut into the mountainside, the great staircase ascending almost two hundred meters above the city to the sanctuary of ed-Deir, its walls surmounted by Medusa heads. And still other stairs leading up to the Mount of Sacrifice, with its pool for collecting the blood of the victims, on either side of which, lifting skyward, were two colossal monoliths carved in the shape of human phalluses, the remnants of a vanished orgiastic cult. An unearthly dread, so the booklet reported, overcame all those who dared to climb the mount and look down on the nightmarish ruins below. Here and there among the mounds of debris the visitor to Petra might encounter human skulls and thighbones, even whole skeletons, bleached by the sun and preserved by the dryness and heat in a state of polished perfection. Even in the empty passageways of Petra the oleanders grow. Solitary lizards slither over the forsaken ground and jackals wail into the night.

Once upon a time myrrh and frankincense scented this valley. Its priests and priestesses lifted their voices in sacred hymns. Lewd pagan revels and human sacrifices took place side by side. Orchards, vineyards, and gardens, winepresses and threshing grounds, ringed the city. The desert gods dwelt in perfect peace with Baal, Aphrodite, and Apollo. Until all was struck down. The ancient gods perished utterly. Man turned to dry bone. An angry, wrathful Jehovah, as always, had the last laugh. Who is it that cometh from Edom, in crimsoned garments from Bosra? It is the God of the burning bush, of the fiery wilderness, Who has come to spread the stillness of death.

For fourteen hundred years the ghost city of Petra was not mentioned in a single known document. Only in recent times had a few moonstruck adventurers tried reaching it across the hostile border. A few had made it safely back. Nearly ten had died in the attempt. The Atallah Bedouin were a notoriously bloodthirsty lot.