All the buildings of this city of ghosts have elaborate façades, but within they are simple and austere. The magnitude and beauty of them even now strikes one with awe. How much more they must have meant to beauty-worshipers in the days when the city pulsed with life! Most of the stone is rose-colored when the sun falls upon it, and shot with blue and porphyry. The deserted streets are rich with laurels and oleanders, whose hues seem copied from the rock itself. In fact, the only inhabitants of this rose-red city for hundreds of years have been the countless millions of brilliant wild flowers that flourish in the cracks of the hundreds of former palaces and temples and wind themselves around half-ruined columns. Petra’s mighty men and beautiful women have passed on to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns. It is indeed a scene to impress one with evanescence of all life.
The worldly hopes men set their hearts upon
Turn ashes, or they prosper,
And anon like snow upon the desert’s dusty face
Lighting a little hour or two—are gone.
In the center of the city, surrounded on all sides by temples and palaces and tombs, is a great amphitheater, cut out of the base of the same mountain that leads to the great high place of sacrifice. Tiers and tiers of seats face the mountain avenues of tombs. The diameter of the stage is 120 feet, and the theater is the one symbol of life and mirth in all this mysterious deserted city. The laughter and cheers of thousands once rang here across this hollow cemetery of ancient hopes and ambitions. Here thousands of years ago the Irvings and Carusos of that bygone age performed and received the plaudits of their admiring thousands. Where now are all the gay throngs who occupied these tiers on feast-days and watched the games? The lizards are crawling over the exquisitely colored seats to-night, and the only sounds that have been heard in the theater for centuries have been the desolate howls of jackals. Little did the ancient Edomites or Nabatæans imagine that a people called Americans from an unknown continent would one day wander among the ruins of their proud city.
It seems no work of man’s creative hand
By labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown;
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone.
All rosy-red, as if the blush of dawn
That first beheld it were not yet withdrawn.
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe
Which man deemed old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime;
A rose-red city, half as old as Time.1
The presence of Egyptian architecture and symbols indicates that Petra must have been built by a race that had come in contact with the culture of the peoples who carved the Sphinx and piled up the pyramids. Even the desert traditions of nomenclature support the belief that Petra was at some time identified with Egypt. The nomads believe that these rocks were carved by Jinn, under the order of one of the Pharaohs, and not only are they certain that the great urn on El Khazneh contains the wealth of the old Egyptian tyrants but they believe that they actually lived in Petra and call a ruined temple down in the valley Kasra Firaun, the Palace of Pharaoh. But nobody knows when or by whom Petra was built. Some think that it had its beginning long before the time of Abraham and was an old city when the Israelites fled from Egyptian bondage.
As we stand there amid the ruins of this forgotten city, we are reminded that
When you and I behind the veil are passed,
Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last,
Which of our coming and departure heeds,
As the seven seas shall heed a pebble cast.
The region around Petra was known as Mount Seir in the time of Abraham, and it is said that Esau, with his followers, came to this country after he had lost his birthright. We read in the Old Testament about Petra. It is called Sela, which is Hebrew for rock. It is believed that when the children of Israel were wandering in the Wilderness they came upon Petra and asked for permission to enter and rest. But the people of Petra refused, and Israel’s prophets predicted its desolation. Obadiah accused it of being proud and haughty, saying: “Though thou mount on high as the eagle, and though thy nest he set among the stars, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.” In the time of Isaiah it was a proud and voluptuous city, of which the stern old Jew predicted destruction.
The Nabatæans, an ancient Arab tribe, conquered Edom, and by 100 B. C. had created a powerful kingdom extending north to Damascus, west to Gaza in Palestine, and far into Central Arabia. Lawrence told me that the Nabatæans were great pirates who sailed down the African coast and made devastating raids on the Sudan. They had reached a high stage of civilization, did beautiful glass-work, made fine cloth, and modeled pottery. They frequently visited Rome and Constantinople. Both King Solomon and the queen of Sheba had employed the Nabatæans, who rivaled even the Palmyrians in organizing a rich caravan trade and made Petra their principal commercial center in Arabia. Antigonus visited Petra in 301 B.C. and found there large quantities of frankincense, myrrh, and silver.
The Greeks, knowing of this fortress city impregnable in its mountains, were the first to name it Petra, which means rock. Tradition says that Alexander the Great conquered all the then known world and wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. But tradition is wrong. Here is one city that Alexander the Great failed to conquer. Diodurus Siculus tells us that Alexander considered Petra of such importance that he sent Demetrius with an army to capture it. Demetrius tried to force his way into it by the same narrow defile through which we entered. But the inhabitants shut themselves up in their mountain fastness and successfully defied both siege and assault. Although the city refused itself to the visitor who came with the sword, it welcomed him who came with the olive-branch.
As the capital of the Nabatæans, it rose to its zenith in the second century before Christ. Greek geographers of those days called the land of Edom by the name “Arabia Petræa.” Under Aretas III, surnamed Philhellene or friend of the Greeks, the first royal coins were struck, and Petra assumed many of the aspects of Greek culture. Even in the golden age of Rome when Augustus sat on the throne of the Cæsars the fame of this far-away city had reached Europe. It was a Mecca for tourists from all over the world, and it must have had a population of several hundred thousand souls. It was a seat of arts and learning to which the Praxiteleses, the Michelangelos, and the Leonardo da Vincis of that day repaired. Its hospitality was a byword among the ancients. It opened its doors to the early Christians, who were permitted to have their houses of worship there side by side with the temples of Baal, Apollo, and Aphrodite. Petra was to this part of Asia what Rome was to the Romans and Athens to the Greeks. In A.D. 105 one of Trajan’s generals conquered Petra and created the Roman province of Arabia Petræa, but the city continued to flourish as a trade-center under the strong peace of Rome. In those days Petra was the focusing-point on the caravan routes from the interior of Arabia, Persia, and India to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. It was a great safe-deposit of fabulous wealth, fortressed by frowning cliffs. Both Strabo and Pliny described it as a great city. But when Roman power waned, the Romanized Nabatæans were unable to withstand the desert hordes. The caravan trade was diverted through other channels; Petra declined in importance and ultimately was forgotten. In the twelfth century the Crusaders, under Baldwin I, sent an expedition through the locality and built many castles; they were expelled by Saladin.
There are many indications that Petra was a pleasant and pleasure-loving city. Its wealthier classes must have lived in luxury such as even the luxurious East has not known in many centuries. With its concert-halls, its circuses, its mystic groves, its priests and priestesses of many sensual religions, its wealth of flowers, its brilliant sunshine, and its delightful climate, it must have been at the same time the Paris and the Riviera of Asia Minor. But, except for its immortal sculpture and the few casual tributes to it by writers from alien lands, it has not left a single record of its
manner of living, or handed down the name of a single one of its Homers or its Horaces.
Rose-red there lies, and vivid in the sun,
A magic city, hid in Araby;
Of her no ancient legend has been spun,
And all her past the silent years have won
To the deep coffers of antiquity.
About her brooding stillness there blow
The scarlet windflowers, as a carpet flung
Upon the stones. And oleanders grow
Where, in the night, the mourning jackals go
A-prowl through temples of a god unsung.
And so she stands, and centuries have kept
Her olden secret, tragic or sublime;
Without her gates, what tides of men have swept,
Within her portals, race of kings have slept?
This “rose-red city, half as old as Time.”
Was there no poet’s voice to chant her pride.
To clarion her magic down the years?
No warrior famed, to set her valourous stride?
No splendid lovers who for love’s sake died,
Gifting to song their passion and their tears?
Was there no storied woman’s golden face
To glimmer down unnumbered years to come?
No prophet’s vision to foretell her place,
Mysterious city of forgotten race?
Only her beauty speaks, and it is dumb.
And so she stands, while Time holds jealously
Her olden secret, tragic or sublime;
Her sorrows, joys, her strength, her frailty
Are in the coffers of antiquity,
This “rose-red city, half as old as Time.”2
A little more than a century ago, John Lewis Burckhardt, a Swiss traveler, who had heard rumors of a great city of rock, lying far out on the fringe of the Arabian Desert, penetrated the gorge and found once more this wonderful old city of Petra, which had not been mentioned in any literary record since A.D. 536. In the century or more since Burckhardt wrote of his discovery of the rock city in a letter from Cairo, only a comparatively few travelers and archaeologists from the West have visited Petra. The danger of violence from Bedouin nomads was so great that not many had the zeal to attempt it. The lion and the lizard kept the court where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep, until Lawrence brought his fighting Bedouins into this city of tombs and empty palaces.
1 By Dean Burgon (fellow of Oriel and afterward vicar of St Mary’s), prize poem, Newdegate, 1845.
2 Mona Mackay, Christchurch, New Zealand.
CHAPTER XIX
A BEDOUIN BATTLE IN A CITY OF GHOSTS
THE possession of Petra is necessary to the holding of Akaba, the most important strategical point on the west coast of Arabia, where the great fleets of King Solomon rode at anchor three thousand years ago. But Lawrence’s battle was the first fought in Petra in the last seven hundred years. The Crusaders, with their flashing spears and pennants blazoned with the coats of arms of half the medieval barons of Europe, were the last warriors to clank in armor through the ribbon-like gorge. Lawrence, the archaeologist, garbed in Arab kit, had wandered over this country before the war and knew every foot of the region from the driest water-hole to the most dilapidated column in Petra. After he had forced the Turks to surrender at Akaba, he was determined to capture all the approaches to the high plateau which begins fifty miles inland from the head of the gulf of Akaba and crosses Arabia to the Persian Gulf. At the same time the Turks realized that they must either recapture Akaba or reconcile themselves to the loss of all Holy Arabia. So they brought ten thousand fresh troops from Syria and stationed them at the various strategical positions on this plateau. But Lawrence was certain that the Turks would never be able to retake Akaba, because there is only one feasible avenue of approach for an army by land to that ancient seaport—down the Wadi Ithm. To be sure, he had marched his own irregular army through the same gorge a few weeks before, but he had caught the Turks napping and swept down on Akaba before they were aware of their danger. He had no intention of giving the Turks a similar opportunity. The Wadi Ithm is one of the most formidable passes in the world for an armed force to enter; it is as difficult of accesses as the famous Khyber Pass between India and Afghanistan. It penetrates the barren volcanic range called King Solomon’s Mountains, which extends along the eastern shore of the Gulf of Akaba and rises a sheer five thousand feet on either side of the pass. An invading army, if attacked from the tops of the peaks crowning its sides, would have no protection. Lawrence would have annihilated any Turkish force attempting to advance on Akaba through the Wadi Ithm.
From July until the middle of September, 1917, the Turks were quiet. Then they made several reconnaissances around Petra in an effort to dupe Lawrence and the Arabs into believing they were going to attack Petra, although their real intention was to advance direct on Akaba. The last of these three reconnaissances was a gloomy affair for the Turks; Lawrence and his men cut off and wiped out one hundred of the scouting-party.
Fifteen miles northeast of Petra an old Crusader castle frowns down on the desert from a steep hill of white chalk. It is known as Shobek. Baldwin I, king of Jerusalem, built a great wall all the way around the crest of the mountain in the days of the Crusaders. Both the castle and the modern Arab village are within the wall, and the only approach to the summit is up a winding precipitous trail. Shobek was still in the hands of the Turks, but Lawrence’s spies brought him word that the garrison was made up entirely of Syrians, all men of Arabian blood, m sympathy with the new Nationalist movement. So Lawrence sent Malud and ten of his lieutenants to Shobek by night, followed by Shereef Abd el Mu’in and two hundred Bedouins.
The Syrians in a body transferred their allegiance to him. Next morning the combined Syrian and Arabian forces descended the chalk mountain and destroyed three hundred rails on a side-line of the Damascus-Medina Railway, near Aneiza. They also tried to capture the terminus of this spur, where seven hundred Armenian wood-cutters, Whom they wanted to rescue, were at work. But this time the Turks had erected such strong fortifications around the terminus that, although the Arabs and Syrian deserters took the Turkish outposts, they were unable to capture the main positions. The Turks, badly frightened, sent couriers to Maan and Abu el Lissal asking for reinforcements. By weakening their garrison at Abu el Lissal the Turks played directly into Lawrence’s hands, for as soon as the Turkish reserves arrived Lawrence called his men back to Petra from the railway.
After the desertion of the entire Shobek garrison and Lawrence’s bold sortie against the railway terminus, Djemal Pasha, commander-in-chief of the Turkish armies in Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, decided, against the advice of Field-Marshal von Falkenhayn, then German generalissimo in the Near East, that before he could hope to recapture Gueirra and Akaba it would be necessary to retake Petra. Djemal transferred a crack cavalry regiment, an infantry brigade, and several organizations of light artillery from Palestine down the Hedjaz Railway to Maan. This was a clever strategic coup for Lawrence. First, the Germans and Turks had to diminish their forces opposing Allenby in the Holy Land. Secondly, they were walking into the trap which had been set for them; because it was Lawrence’s belief that if a battle were fought by his irregular Bedouin troops in the mountain fastnesses of ancient Edom, the superior mobility of his army would eventually enable him to defeat any division of methodically trained regulars in the world.
Malud Bey, Lawrence’s first in command at the battle of Petra, was one of the most interesting figures of the Arabian revolt, as well as one of the most picturesque. He wore very high purple-topped Kafir boots—like Jack the Giant-Killer must have worn; also spurs that jangled musically as he strode about, a long medieval sword, and a long mustachio, which he tugged like the villain of a melodrama. But there was no more charming and gallant officer in the whole Arabian army. He was the son of a Bedouin sheik and a Circassian concubine and from boyhood had been an ardent Arab Nationalist. He made a thorough study of mod
ern military science in order that some day he might help to overthrow the Turk, and he even went so far as to spend three years studying at the Turkish Staff College before they discovered his revolutionary leanings and expelled him. Then he went into the desert and became secretary to Ibn Rashid, one of the potentates of Central Arabia. There Malud participated in scores of raids and earned such a reputation as a fighter that the Turks forgave him his past sins and invited him to return and join their cavalry. At the outbreak of the World War he was raised to the rank of captain, but he was later court-martialed and imprisoned for taking part in a conspiracy against the sultan. After his release he fought the British in Mesopotamia and was captured by them near Basra. Eventually he was allowed to join Feisal. He was wounded in every single engagement in which he took part, because he was so foolhardy that he would not hesitate to charge the Turkish army by himself.
Djemal Pasha selected Maan, the most important station on the Hedjaz Railway between the Dead Sea of Medina, as the starting-point for three columns comprising over seven thousand men, several units of light artillery, and a squadron of German aëroplanes. One column made the Crusaders’ castle at Shobek its base; another came up from the south by the way of Abu el Lissal and Busta; and the third moved direct from Maan on the east. The Turks directed the movements of their columns so that they would all converge on Petra on October 21.
In the meantime Lawrence and his Bedouins were comfortably and safely lodged in the ancient capital of the Nabatæans, behind those mighty rocky ramparts which had defied the armies of Alexander the Great. For the first time in many centuries the silent avenues throbbed with life. Camp-fires were lighted on the old altars of the gods; and sentinels stationed on the ancient great high places watched for the coming of the Turks. In the vast echoing chambers of the tombs the Arabs sat around in circles until late at night, telling interminable stories and singing old chants of epic battles. Lawrence himself occupied princely headquarters, the Temple of Isis (El Khazneh), the rose-tinted palace at the entrance of the gorge. If he wished he could have used his archaeological imagination and repeopled the gloomy hall with the vision of handmaidens of Isis dancing before the shrine of their goddess.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 17