The Desert Castle

by Isobel Chace

  ‘It was the Nabateans who carved the city of Petra out of the mountainside,’ Marion added dreamily. ‘I wonder who lived here?’

  ‘To get into Petra you have to go through the Syq, a narrow passage cut by water through the hills. Ibis is outside and vulnerable to attack Perhaps someone was buried here.’

  Lucasta shivered. ‘In here? What a horrid thought!’

  ‘Is it not?’ Pleased with her reaction, Gaston forgot his role as an authority on the subject and started telling ghost stories instead until Lucasta was wide-eyed with fright arid Marion called a halt.

  ‘Nobody is going to rattle their bones in here,’ she said firmly, ‘or anywhere else for that matter. Be quiet, Gaston!’

  He smiled gleefully at Lucasta’s white face. ‘She is a little naive too, no?’ he said to Marion. ‘Drinking in every word of the horrible events of the past. I’m sure she believes that the bloodthirsty Amaziah cast ten thousand Edomites to their death off the top of the mountain!’ He shook his head. ‘Not so. Not even the Israelites were as cruel as that! The Hebrew word alaf can be translated as “thousands”, or “families”, “clans’’ or “tents”—’

  ‘But some of them were killed?’ Lucasta interposed.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The Israelites and the Edomites hated each other. Even after David had claimed sanctuary with them when Saul was trying to end his life, he still sent his general Joab to do battle with them as soon as he came to the throne, and told his army to slaughter them to a man.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Lucasta breathed.

  ‘Your uncle, who else?’ he laughed at her.

  Lucasta smiled faintly, beginning to feel a little better. ‘I feel rather sorry for the poor Edomites,’ she said.

  Gaston chuckled. ‘They were good haters, but the Israelites were better! The Hebrews excelled in their Songs of Triumph and loved to dance on the graves of their enemies. When Jerusalem fell to Babylon and poor King Zedekiah of Judah was led away with all his people into captivity, the Edomites, who had had nothing to do with their defeat, sang a triumphant song of their own. “Down with it, down with it, even to the ground,” they sang, delighted that Jerusalem, that hated symbol of Judean tyranny, had been reduced to rubble. But the Jews remembered this humiliation over the years. In the 137th Psalm they called on God, “Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; how they said, Down with it, down with it, even to the ground”!’

  ‘Did Gregory tell you that too?’ Marion asked him, laughing.

  Gaston lifted his hands expressively. ‘It was not the end of the story. The Edomites moved northwards and became the Idumites and were completely absorbed by their old enemies. King Herod was of their blood, and it was held against him, but he was nevertheless the last of the temporal kings of the Jews.’

  ‘So Edom remained unloved until the end?’ Marion said sadly. ‘I hope the Nabateans fared better?’

  ‘You will see for yourself.’ Gaston promised her. ‘Mr. Randall says they had the seeds of greatness within them.’

  It was a highly satisfactory prospect to be setting out to see some of the towers that this ancient people had created, Marion thought. She was half in love with them already, if this cave was typical of their achievements.

  ‘What are we going to do this afternoon?’ she asked.

  ‘There are horses,’ Gaston told her, ‘but I have made enquiries and it is better to make one’s official visit in the morning, when one comes out of the Syq and there is the Khasneh, the Treasury, the most famous of all the buildings, with the sun on its face. We shall have plenty of time in the morning to do this, and a guide will come with us then and explain it all to us. This afternoon, I thought we might walk through the Syq by ourselves and maybe climb up to the High Place.’

  ‘Marion won’t want to do that,’ Lucasta decided for her. ‘You and I can go up to the top and tell her what it’s like afterwards.’

  ‘And what is Marion to do?’ Gaston asked her drily.

  Lucasta coloured guiltily. ‘But you don’t want to, do you, Marion? There must be other things to look at!’

  ‘I’ll find something,’ Marion reassured her. ‘If the hidden valley inside the hills stretches for ten square miles, I ought to be able to keep out of your way for an hour or so.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  The younger girl looked so hot and bothered that Marion took pity on her. ‘No, I don’t mind. I’ll have your company for the hike through the Syq, what more can I want?

  Lucasta smiled uncomfortably. ‘It’s a three-mile walk, there and back,’ she pointed out.

  Marion broke into delighted laughter. ‘I’ll try to keep up,’ she promised, ‘my ancient bones permitting!’

  ‘Oh, Marion, you know I didn’t mean that! You’re not old at all! But Gaston can’t carry both of us, can he?’

  ‘I should hope not!’ Marion agreed.

  The Syq was the strangest phenomenon she had ever seen. It was rough underfoot like walking along a dry river-bed which, Marion supposed, was what it really was. The sides towered upwards, perhaps as much as ten times the height of a man, so that only a slit of the sky could be seen if one craned one’s neck to look at it. No wonder Petra had beat a secret city for so many centuries. If this was the only entrance, the only surprise was that it had been found again at all.

  Most of the caves before the entrance of the Syq proper had never been lived in but only used as tombs. Compared to the best examples, they were rough and ready, without the decorated facades that were so much a feature of the main buildings. Only the “Djin” blocks, huge, carved lumps of rock, told of the stories that were to come, and the purpose of these blocks has long ago been forgotten.

  When it rained, Gaston told the girls, the Syq could fill with water in a matter of moments. In a flash-flood in the middle sixties, a party of about twenty French people had been drowned there, although they had been told it was dangerous to enter the Syq at that time. Afterwards, a dam had been built to protect the passage, and it was discovered that centuries before the Nabateans had done likewise and had carved a channel right through the mountainside to carry away the water. The same channel is used today.

  With the sun shining it was difficult to believe in such disasters. It was exciting enough to press on over the loose stone, trying not to feel completely dwarfed by the massive wall of rock on either side.

  Then came the most wonderful moment of all when they came within sight of the Khasneh, or Treasury. It did look pink, a rich salmon pink that was all the more effective after the dim gloom of the Syq itself. The classical facade was breathtakingly dramatic, cut into the rough stone and smoothed to look like the outside of a Roman building. Happily, its position has protected it from the winds that have worn away the embellishments of so much else in Petra, and the bit of the frontage which has come off worst is an urn on top of the monument which was long thought to contain fabulous riches. Many an Arab marksman has tried to shoot it away to release the gold that was reputed to be inside. The practice is now forbidden by law, but eyes filled with longing are still turned upwards. Such stories are hard to kill, and would anyone really want to?

  They came out into the sunshine and stood for a moment in the open space in front of the monument. There were no other buildings in sight and it was difficult to judge exactly how big the Khasneh really was. Marion thought she had read somewhere that it was a fraction smaller than the west front of Westminster Abbey, which would make it about ninety-two feet wide and a hundred and thirty feet to its highest point. Some men sat on the steps, hoping to sell souvenirs from their trays to the tourists who came past, but they paid little attention to the three visitors who had come on foot as they walked into the enormous, gloomy interior.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Lucasta, ‘how did they do it?’

  ‘In some ways it would be easier than building it up from the ground,’ Gaston told her. ‘They wouldn’t have had to face the problem of putting on a roof.’
/>   ‘But where did they begin?’ Lucasta insisted.

  Marion rubbed her fingers against one of the walls and found that the soft red stone came off easily, staining her skin the same red as it was itself. ‘They must have started at the top,’ she suggested. ‘I doubt it would hold scaffolding without falling away.’

  ‘I doubt it too,’ Gaston agreed.

  They came outside again and one of the men made a half-hearted attempt to show off his wares. Amongst the Bedouin jewellery and foreign coins, amongst them some modern British coins that had probably been dropped by a careless tourist, there was a small clay bottle with a rounded bottom that Marion thought might have been a Roman “ tear bottle,” in which the Romans are said to have caught their tears before they could fall to the ground. She was sorry that Gaston had refused the man so brusquely, for she would have liked to look at it When the Romans had taken over Petra they had already been in decline, but she had always thought “ tear bottles ” to be a romantic conception, and to have one casually offered to her was an opportunity which might never come again.

  The main part of the city was further into the valley, cut off from sight of the Syq by the wall of rock into which the Treasury had been cut. But once round the corner it was easy to see the layout of the main part of the city. There were the most famous monuments of the Nabatean Arabs, the Roman theatre, the Streets of Facades, the Roman colonnade street leading to the so-called Kasr el Bint and the museum, and down over to the right to the Christian area of the city, where the Byzantine faith had replaced the pagan gods of old until the caravans of traders had faded away and the citizens of Petra had moved after them, leaving the deserted city behind them to the occasional family of Bedouin who wandered into the Syq and took up residence in the monumental caves for a while. The memory of Petra faded from the rest of the world’s memory and it was left in secret isolation until John L. Burckhardt, a young Swiss working for the British Association for Promoting Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, of all unlikely institutions, was taken through the Syq by a somewhat irritable and suspicious guide on the excuse that he wished to sacrifice a goat on the very grave of Aaron, the brother of Moses, whom he knew to have been buried within the vicinity.

  The steps that led up to the acropolis, the High Place above the valley, were clearly marked, and Marion watched Lucasta with some amusement to see what she would do. But that young lady didn’t turn a hair.

  ‘We’ll be seeing you, Marion,’ she said. ‘Don’t get lost or anything, will you?’

  Marion’s eyes sparkled, but she said nothing, merely lifted an eyebrow as the other two began the long climb to the top. She was not entirely sorry to have some time to herself, to drink in the atmosphere of this place which she had always dreamed of visiting. It would be fun to tell Gregory all about it! But would he want to know? The hurt she had felt when he had refused pointblank to bring her here himself revisited her with a pain that was physical in its intensity. She wondered what he was doing in Beirut, but as that led immediately to Denise and the memory of the gratified possessiveness with which she had pulled Gregory’s arm about her, making sure that Marion had seen the gesture, and that was another forbidden subject on this day of days. Marion couldn’t help it if Gregory had taken up residence inside her, but she had no intention of allowing him to ruin Petra for her. She would try not to think about him at all and, if the dull ache inside her refused to go away, at least the imaginary ghost of Denise should not be allowed to gloat over her misery. Surely she had more pride than that?

  Looking up, Marion saw that the other two were already out of sight The only sound was of a chicken squawking somewhere in the distance. Away in the distance, a thin plume of blue smoke rose up Into the sky, betraying the presence of a Bedouin settlement Slowly but surely they were being moved out of their tents into solidly built houses, fulfilling their dreams of a more urban existence, with coffee-bars for the men and damp-proof dwellings for the women to gossip away their time to their hearts’ content. Their romantic-sounding existence, following their flocks as they grazed the edges of the desert, would come to an end. Their expectations of living more nearly as their neighbours did, already raised by what they had heard on their transistor radios, would finally be realised. When they were gone, Petra would be a ghost city indeed, with only the visit of tourists to bring it alive for a few moments every day.

  Marion chose to go up to the Urn Tomb which was not too far away. Some workmen were restoring the crypt below the monument and she could see them at intervals as she clambered up the steep steps. It was further than she had thought and the ground was rough and a few steps downright difficult to navigate, but at last she reached the top and came out on to a platform before the colonnade that guarded the entrance. Inside, she knew immediately that the Tomb had been used for Christian worship by the extra semi-domes that had been carved above where the altar would have been, but nothing could detract from the magnificence the original building. The swirling pattern of the ceiling, similar to the ringing of an ancient tree, had been blackened by smoke from the Bedouin fires, was even more splendid than that of Al Khan over which the Government Rest House is constructed. Marion sat down on a ledge that jutted out of the wall and allowed her eyes to roam over it, lovingly taking in every detail.

  She barely heard the arrival of an American party down below and it wasn’t until they trooped into the dim interior of the Urn Tomb itself that she began to listen to what they were saying. Their guide told them that the Tomb was sometimes known as the Royal Courts of Justice, and that it had been thought that the vaulted substructure had been the old dungeons, but they now knew this was not so. for the work now being done had disproved the theory.

  The Americans sat in groups, drinking the Coca-Cola that had been brought up for them. The guide himself, carefully dusting his well-polished shoes, sat down on the ledge beside Marion.

  ‘American too?’ he asked her.

  ‘British,’ she said.

  His face lit up and he pointed out through the columns to the flat-topped hill in the distance. ‘The British were up there,’ he told her. ‘Miss Diana Kirkbride was digging there. She borrowed a helicopter from the King to get her equipment up there. Here, she is known as the friend of the Bedouin. She is married now, I think.’

  Marion confirmed that she was now Mrs. Hans Helbaek.

  ‘She is a brave woman,’ the guide told her earnestly. ‘When tourists first came here, they sent the Desert Patrol to guard them, but the local men killed them all. Only everybody liked Miss Kirkbride.’ He pronounced it “Kirkebride.” ‘Are you married?’ he went on with the intimate interest of the Middle Eastern man.

  ‘No,’ Marion said. ‘Are you?’

  He nodded. ‘I have three children, but only one wife.’

  ‘But the Koran allows you more?’ Marion teased him.

  He smiled a shy smile. ‘But to marry more than one wife you must treat them all exactly the same. That is impossible. Nobody with any sense marries more than one wife nowadays.’

  Reflecting on the incident of the lipstick, Marion thought he was probably right. How could you love any two people in exactly the same way?

  ‘I must go down,’ she said. ‘My friends will be waiting for me.’ She searched for the right word to wish him goodbye and triumphantly found it. ‘B-khatirkum!’

  He grinned, pleased by the courtesy. ‘Ma-salami!’ He stood up and shook her warmly by the hand. ‘You are welcome in Petra,’ he added. ‘Ahlan was-sahlan.’

  ‘Ahlan bekum.’

  Marion was smiling to herself as she retraced her steps down to the bottom of the valley. She felt she had acquitted herself rather well. Gregory—But she would not think about Gregory! And why should he care if she had mastered a few basic phrases in Arabic? He didn’t care anything about her!

  She ran down the last few steps, catching right of Gaston and Lucasta waiting for her. The horses the Americans had ridden in on were huddled out of the wind and she had to
walk round them to get to the others.

  ‘Was it worth the climb?’ she asked them.

  Lucasta gave her a woeful look, very near to tears. ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Her face crumpled as her control broke. ‘I want to go home!’

  Marion supposed she must have spent more trying evenings in the past, but off-hand she couldn’t think of any. Gaston and Lucasta refused to address more than the most obvious courtesies to each other, maintaining a hurt silence off which her own remarks bounced straight back at her.

  ‘What happened, Lucasta?’ Marion asked, when the two girls were getting ready for bed.

  ‘Nothing!’ Lucasta insisted, but her woeful face gave her away. ‘He was horrible, Marion! He wanted—’ Her voice died away into silence and she sniffed pathetically into her handkerchief.

  Marion’s conscience smote her. ‘I should have come with you!’ she exclaimed.

  Lucasta shook her head. ‘He doesn’t love me!’

  ‘Of course he does!’

  ‘Not as I love him!’

  There was no answer to that. Marion pulled on her nightdress, bracing herself against the cold of the bedclothes. ‘I could have done with a hot water bottle,’ she said, hoping to change the subject.