The Scorpion’s Bite

by Aileen G. Baron

  “Here it turns north again.” Gideon indicated a curve on the map. “Pass Jebel Quweira and the remains of a Roman fort. The track forks here at Ras An Naqb.” He pointed to the spot. “There’s a steep slope and a wadi on the right fork. Take the fork to the left.” He leaned back with a wistful smile. “That’s Nabatean country.”

  Lily wondered how she could go off to Petra without Gideon. He was the expert on the Nabateans.

  “From there, it’s a straight shot to Wadi Musa.” Gideon looked inquiringly at Jalil. “You need this map? Can she take it with her?” When Jalil nodded, Gideon reached into a pocket for his pen, and began to ink in the route. “You’ll pass two villages on the way. Here.” He circled two small spots on the map with his pen. “And here.”

  ***

  The drive along the hard packed desert pavement took less time than Lily had imagined. By early afternoon, she had reached Wadi Musa, the Valley of Moses, just east of Petra.

  In the midst of stark desert crags, a little brook, derived from numerous springs, ran through a narrow ravine with a small village of mud-brick houses. According to tradition, this was the place where Moses smote the rock to bring forth water for parched Israelites on their way to the Promised Land after they fled Egypt. Now the copious water from the springs of Moses irrigated terraced fields planted with grapes, figs, and olives.

  Lily stopped next to a large house near the entrance to the village where Gideon had told her someone would be waiting. Behind the mud-brick wall that encircled the compound, she saw outbuildings and a courtyard with sway-backed horses buzzing with flies and tied to a hitching post.

  After a few moments, an older Bedouin emerged from the house, threw horse blankets stiff with sweat on two of the horses, saddled them, attached some lengths of frayed rope as rudimentary bridles, and came smiling toward her.

  He bowed with an elaborate gesture, sweeping his cloak behind him with one hand, extending the other toward her in greeting.

  His long hangdog face was framed by patches of hair that were neither beard nor stubble, his dark eyes looked as if they were on the verge of tears. A faint mustache quivered above his upper lip. His face had all the discreet pathos of a basset hound.

  “Ahlen we Sahlen,” he said. “You are most welcome.” He glanced at the Buick and back at her. “Abu Huniak said you will be wanting a horse to take you through the Siq.”

  He went back to the horses and led out the saddled pair, Arabians who had seen better days. Their unwashed coats, sore with bare spots, had an acrid stench, their once-proud tails were sagging, and their long Arabian faces were sad and menacing.

  The Bedouin cupped his hands for her to mount and gave her a boost. She landed with an ungainly bounce in the saddle. He mounted the other Arabian and reached for her makeshift bridle to lead her into the Siq, a cleft in the earth created by some long-ago earthquake.

  “Ismi Awadh el Bdoul,” he said as they passed through the Bab es-Siq into the shade of the canyon. “Shu ismik? What is your name?”

  Lily nodded. “Ismi Lily.”

  They rode past the spare remains of a monumental arch hewn out of the living rock by the Nabateans that once had topped the entrance to the Siq. Around a curve, they came upon three massive carved blocks that stood in front of the facade of a rock-cut tomb, and Awadh began to sing.

  “Careful when we pass here,” Awadh sang. “Those blocks were carved by djinn.” His nasal voice sang out as he said in a tuneless song, “No one knows what they will do. Djinn are fiery spirits, older than beasts. They are smokeless fire, like electricity. Very dangerous. They can burn your soul.” He reached into a sack on his belt for some worry beads, and kept on singing. “I can take care of them. The djinn, they are afraid of song.”

  The horses plodded on, weary under the weight of their riders, the sound of their hoofs echoing off the cliff walls, past a tomb carved into the rock then around a bend as the Siq began to narrow.

  Some votive niches were hewn into the rock. Dwarfed by the high walls of the Siq, Lily looked up. The sides leaned toward each other like an enormous corbelled arch, blocking out the light.

  The remains of water channels that had brought water into Petra from the spring at Wadi Musa were cut into the sidewalls. As they clomped through the narrow winding gorge, claustrophobic within its towering walls, Lily noticed the faint deposits left from the levels of water that had run through the Siq during countless winters.

  Sometimes water poured through the Siq in a roaring flash flood when a desert torrent raged. Lily recalled the story of Madame X who was drowned in the Siq during a sudden downpour. No one knew who she was, and now she was buried in one of the tombs of the Iron Age cemetery on the grounds of the École Biblique in Jerusalem next to Pere Vincente.

  Would there be a flash flood today, and would she be buried there in Jerusalem, next to Madame X, as Madame Y, in The Tomb of the Unknown Tourists?

  “Are there flash floods here often?” she asked Awadh.

  “No, never.” He kicked his horse to speed it up and gave a pull on Lily’s rope. “Only sometimes.”

  The Siq seemed to go on forever, darker and narrower, in some places with room for only one horse at a time. Awadh handed her the rope that served as a bridle for her horse and let her lead as the horses trudged further and further. At last, around a twist in the narrow chasm, Lily saw a shaft of bright yellow sunlight.

  Awadh hung back and smiled.

  And then, around the next bend, at the end of the narrow cleft of the Siq, she saw it and took in her breath.

  There, in front of her, rosy-bright in the afternoon sun, cut into the living rock of red sandstone was the Khazneh, the magnificent rose-pink Khazneh el-Far’un—the Pharaoh’s treasury.

  Rising to the sky, with steps leading to a columned portico, and a second story above, it looked like a Roman temple. It was a tomb fit for a king, rich and powerful, perhaps the tomb of Aretas IV Philopatris, King of the Nabateans and friend of the people.

  And on the top of the Khazneh with its cornice on either side was a huge urn carved in the rock above the central tholos. The Bedouin thought it held the treasure of the Pharaohs.

  Chapter Five

  Inside the valley, Awadh dismounted. He held the rope on Lily’s horse with one hand and reached for her elbow with the other in a clumsy attempt to help her alight.

  “You see there?” He pointed to the urn carved into the rock of the Khazneh. “The great pharaoh of Egypt hid his treasure there.”

  Lily stared at the legendary Khazneh, at the urn pockmarked with rifle shots, at the Bedouin standing in front of it, dwarfed by its monumental columns, and started toward it. It was like walking in a dream.

  Awadh was talking to her, but she didn’t hear him.

  She had seen the painting by David Roberts, who immortalized the Romantic Arab for Queen Victoria, where Bedouin in colorful clothing lolled on the steps or pointed rifles at the urn, waiting for it to break open like a piñata and shower them with gold. Now the Kazneh stood before her, elegant in its classic carvings, its floral capitals, while Awadh droned on and she ignored him.

  Finally his voice roused her from her reverie. “When you finish here,” he was saying, “say to anyone ‘Bukrah al mishmish,’ and he will come get me.”

  He leaned forward, waiting for an answer.

  “What does that mean, bukrah al mishmish?”

  He tied the horses to a hitching post across from the Khazneh, hobbled them, sloshed some water into a tin watering trough.

  “Does it mean anything?” she asked, and turned to look at the Kazneh once more.

  “Nothing,” he shrugged. “Nothing at all.” His words hung in the air as he turned and started to walk up the valley.

  Lily followed him for a while along the Street of the Façades that was lined with monumental rock-hewn tombs, some with false fronts like temples, some with crenellated decoration and a simple gabled door, some with engaged co
lumns and crow-step decoration.

  A strange roseate aura was reflected from the pink limestone of the surrounding rock. Lily was spellbound by the mystique of Petra. She thought of the quixotic early nineteenth-century explorers who, disguised as Arab pilgrims, rediscovered this hidden place for God and country.

  Here and there, she saw footholds carved into the rock next to the tombs for climbing the cliffs or for holding scaffolding. Gideon had told her that the elaborate facades had been carved from the top down.

  Up ahead, she saw Awadh near the remains of the Roman theatre where the valley curved to the right and rose to where the city began.

  Someday, when she had more time, she would come back and explore the city. She would climb to the High Place, visit the temple of the god Dushara that the Bedouin called the Palace of the Pharaoh’s Daughter. She would walk along the colonnaded Paved Street built for Hadrian’s visit in 130 C.E. Before Hadrian, in 106 C.E., the Emperor Trajan had absorbed Nabatea into the Roman Empire, swallowed it whole like a snake ingesting its prey.

  As Awadh trudged along toward the eastern bank of tombs, he passed a gang of adolescents, unwashed and scrawny, who seemed to be playing a rough sort of game. One of them had a soccer ball, which he would bounce and toss with both hands at one of the other boys.

  They shouted something at Awadh as he passed. He shook his fist at them, shouted back, and continued up the valley past the theatre.

  The one with the ball threw it at Awadh. It landed in the middle of his back, hard enough to knock him off balance. He didn’t turn around. He staggered, squared his shoulders with an effort, and kept walking toward the elaborate set of tombs beyond the theatre. Lily watched him until he was out of sight and around the bend in the path to the city, and the adolescents disappeared into the ruins of the theatre, laughing.

  As she walked along Lily pictured ancient Petra with the noise of workmen busy chiseling the great facades, cutting into the rock to hollow out interiors. She visualized the funerary processions, lines of camels stepping in somber pageant along the valley. She imagined what it would have been like then: the early Nabateans using Petra as hideaway for a nomadic Hole in the Wall Gang, and later, when the Nabateans were the proud rulers of the desert and its caravans, with Petra as their capital, a city with gardens and burbling fountains.

  And here in this valley, in these rock-cut tombs that looked like temples, they buried their dead.

  What were they like, these ancient Nabateans? Were they the descendants of the Edomites? Were they like the Saudis, with white kafiyas and flowing white cloaks?

  She had read about them in Roman histories. It was rumored that they were cruel and avaricious, that they had captured Judeans as they fled from a burning Jerusalem and slit the captives up the belly to see if they had escaped with hidden treasure.

  ***

  A child, a girl about five years old, sat in the path in front of her. With one hand, the child scratched at a tousled mop of black curls; with the other she drew stick figures in the rosy dust. Her faded dress was streaked with the pink dust of the path. A smear of clay-colored mud smudged her cheek. She looked up at Lily with doe’s eyes, smiled with tiny pearl-like teeth, stood up and smiled again.

  Lily began to go around her. The child moved to the side as Lily moved to the side, back again when Lily moved back, threw out her arms and laughed. Lily took both of the child’s hands and the girl tossed her head, giggling, her curls bouncing as they moved back and forth, swaying, dancing, laughing.

  When Lily stopped, out of breath, she took off her hat and jammed it playfully on the child’s head. The girl posed, this way and that, hands on hips.

  As Lily was about to take back the hat, she remembered how the tiny disheveled girl scratched her head, and thought of head-lice. She tilted the hat on the child’s head, and stood back to admire it.

  “Beautiful,” Lily said. “Kawais, jameel,” and tapped the hat to set it more carefully on the child’s head.

  “Keep the hat.” She patted it again, and waved goodbye. “Ma’a sa’alama.”

  The girl understood that the hat was a gift and ran off, smiling, skipping, calling “Abou, abou,” holding the hat in place as she ran.

  Lily continued walking up the valley toward the theatre, passing the tombs hewn into the colored rock, with crow-stepped crenellations, with cornices and pediments reflecting the bright tints in the sun. In some places, she noticed the holes pecked into the rock for scaffolding for the workmen who had carved the tombs.

  And crushed underfoot along the way, the ceramic remnants of the Nabatean funerary feasts, sherds of fine eggshell-thin ware, deep red, decorated with orange, or red, or dark purple-black paint depicting leaves and fronds and feathers, or tendrils and vines.

  She got as far as the remains of the monumental theatre, hewn into the cliff and the face of damaged tombs. The curved tiers of the amphitheatre must have held over five thousand people.

  The gang of boys that had harassed Awadh erupted out of the theatre toward her, hooting, shouting in Arabic, their leader bouncing the ball.

  Lily backed up, apprehensive, then turned and rushed back down the valley where she felt safer.

  She reached the Kazneh, climbed the steps to the colonnaded portico, and held onto one of the columns, panting. When she caught her breath, she checked the rooms on either side of the portico. They were empty.

  Calmer, she went up more steps to the entrance to the central chamber and into the dark interior.

  There was little there—open niches on each of the sidewalls to hold sarcophagi, a more elaborate one on the back wall, and an unpleasant musty smell. Nothing here to protect her.

  When she came out, the gang of scruffy teenagers stood on the steps and blocked her way.

  There were five of them. The one with the soccer ball bounced it once. The others fanned out in a semi-circle, cutting off any escape.

  “Hello, habibi.” The boy leered and bounced the ball again.

  They moved up the steps, closing in like a pack on the hunt. The leader gave her a quick smile with rotted teeth.

  She shrank into the doorway of the Kazneh.

  He bounced the ball, creating a sharp retort against the rock, and moved up. She caught the stench of him—the sour breath, the fusty clothes—and she backed away into the darkness of the tomb.

  Chapter Six

  A rapid string of guttural Arabic, an array of curses, stopped her stalkers. The words bounced off the walls from behind them, freezing the ruffians in place.

  The leader flared his nostrils, tossed his head, and flung the soccer ball at the next boy. The sharp retort of a rifle firing into the air startled him and the ball bounced down the steps into the road. Without turning, the boys stepped back and scurried after the ball, bending low to grab it.

  A Bedouin holding a rifle stood in the road, his face distorted in anger. He started shooting at the dirt in front of the ball, chasing it up the valley. The boys ran after it, past the theatre, around the bend in the road, out of sight.

  The Bedouin slung the rifle onto his shoulder by the strap, started up the steps toward Lily, and bowed with a flourish of his cloak and a grand sweep of his hand.

  Her champion. Who is this man? “Thank you for rescuing me.”

  “You are our guest. I am called Adan el Bdoul.” He smiled at her.

  “Awadh, the man with the horses, is your father?”

  “My uncle. We are all el Bdoul here. The desert belongs to the Bedouin, and Petra belongs to el Bdoul.”

  “Even the boys who threatened me?”

  “Those boys are worthless as a cracked cup. They mean nothing.” He shrugged and held out his hands, palms up. “You are the guest of el Bdoul of Petra. No one snarls at a guest but a dog.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “You should keep your head covered. Your hair glints golden in the sun, brings out the dogs.”

  She raised her hand to her head self-consciously. “You
live here?”

  “I have a three cave apartment.” He laughed with a proud toss of his head. “One for a guest room, one for a bedroom, one for a kitchen. Come, let me show you.”

  He led the way up the valley along the Street of the Façades past the rock-cut tombs on the west side, past the theatre, to the part of the valley where the tombs were arranged to the east.

  “You played with my daughter,” he told her. “You danced with her and gave her a hat.”

  “It was nothing,” Lily said.

  “It made her happy.”

  He entered a doorway decorated with a pediment and carved pilasters. “Come in, come in,” he called to her and waved his arm past the pilasters toward the dark interior.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness after the bright glare of the valley sun. Inside was cool—the air tinged with an odor of wet moldy stone, smoke, and spiced coffee.

  A bench covered with several layers of red-striped coarsely woven cloth ran around the inside walls. Three loculi, places for ancient sarcophagi, were cut into the walls above the bench and stacked with coarse rugs and cushions covered with cloth striped and dyed the same deep red.

  The dirt floor was swept clean. In the center was a hearth with a blackened coffee pot beside it.

  “Sit, sit,” Adan said.

  He took two of the cushions and placed them on the ground near the hearth. Lily sat with her feet folded beneath her, remembering Gideon’s admonition not to insult a Bedouin by showing the bottom of her feet.

  Adan lit the fire and nestled the coffee pot into it. Like Jalil, he boiled the coffee up three times, taking it off the fire and tapping the side of the pot each time. He poured the finished coffee into small cups and handed Lily the first cup, the one with the most foam.

  “What does bukrah al mishmish mean?” she asked.

  Adan began to laugh. “Awadh told you that?”