By Theophilus Kwek

Nobody in Jordan so much as mentions the word 'Gaza', but the war leaves its traces everywhere. "With everything that is going on…", says Bianca, who comes to meet my wife Cherie and I outside her office in the Wadi Rum Protected Area with a pot of sweet tea. There isn't a second part to her sentence, only a rueful spreading of hands. "First we had Covid-19, then this. The last few years have been very hard". 

The office is a well-proportioned, single-storey dwelling that doubles up as Bianca's home. In the yard stands an outhouse containing the guest toilets, which are immaculately maintained, and directly in the shadow of the main building is a table lined with long benches. As far as Bianca is concerned, Wadi Rum Nomads is open for business. It is an enterprise into which she has poured the last nine years of her life, after meeting its owner and founder Fawaz backpacking in the desert. "I just want everyone to find their little spark here, like I did".

We are soon joined at the table by Carl, a sunburnt Englishman in a blue fleece sweater and hiking pants. Then Will, who is thirty-two and wears a pair of laced sneakers, arrives with his dad in tow, jauntily shaking hands with everyone and greeting Bianca in her native Dutch. Just five. As someone who has never enjoyed group tours, I am relieved – though I imagine this can't be good for business.

Bianca shrugs. "In the peak season, when thousands of tourists come, the desert dies a little bit. You see lots of trash, and the green goes away. But in the quiet years, it heals".

During the pandemic, when weeks would go by without any visitors, a family of desert foxes had made their home in the company's campsite. Wolves had even been spotted at the edge of the village, though they hadn't been seen in Wadi Rum for years. "I am always pushing for the government to limit the number of tourists. It is not easy. But this year, with what's happening…" Bianca spreads her hands again. "The numbers might be just right".

The tour that we have all signed up for – months ago, in mine and Cherie's case, and just days before, in Carl's – promises to take us to ten locations in the desert, including a rock arch I am certain I have seen on someone else's Instagram. After a night in a faux Bedouin camp run by the company, there is an option to experience a one-hour camel ride before we return to the office, with its clean toilets and WiFi connection. "Life is not a checklist," Bianca warns, "so I don't want anybody counting the stops like a photo tour. It's our job to manage the timing, and give you the best experience. Your job is to let us do our job."   

There are nods and chuckles all around. We are determined to be good guests, and not, if we can help it, like the tourists who have come before. After all, we have travelled all this way, at a time when others have kept their distance. If there are any deserving of even some of the magic Bianca describes, well, who better than we?

Our first stop is a rock split down the middle, so precisely it seems almost artificial. Pulling up in the shade of an overhang, our guide Hamed waves us down from the open-top vehicle. I try not to think about the fine grains of sand pooling in my shoes as I jog after him, towards what looks like a doorway in the rock. "Here is very old writing," he says, gesturing at the inner face of the gully, "two thousand, three thousand year".

The opening is wide enough for one person at a time to shimmy along a ledge several feet above the ground, to where rainwater has pooled, ice-cold, in a shady nook. Though it is too dark to see, I imagine there must be a channel by which it trickles to the earth outside, since tufts of grass have sprung up like a line of crumbs leading away from the gully's entrance. Nearby, the pale candelabra of an olive tree emerges from a crack in another, smaller, rock, as if lighting the path to this small oasis.

If there is a story here, it has already been carved centuries ago into the stone. A woman – or really, a stick figure with wider hips – is giving birth, her legs etched at an unnatural angle. In her right hand is what appears to be a wriggling snake, and not far away, two male figures look warily on. Hamed is quick to interpret. The Nabateans who once passed through the desert would kill snakes to protect their newborns, he explains. "Even now, we Bedouin take poison from the snake, mix with milk, give it to the baby."

"Like – " he searches for the word, "like a vaccine". We murmur appreciatively.

Behind him, scratched haphazardly across the rock, are two Arabic names linked by a heart, the work of thoughtless tourists or bored Bedouin teens. Hamed himself is only twenty-three, with a full, unguarded grin to show for it. When Cherie's hat is peeled off by the wind en route to the next location, he halts the four-wheel drive with a gentlemanly wave, then rolls the engine teasingly when she tries to climb back on. Within the hour, we feel we know him well enough to trust the rest of the day into his hands, if only because all questions about our route and lunch plans are met with that same impish smile. "Surprise!" declares Hamed.

We settle laughing into the frayed cushions, and the desert whips itself into our hair.

II.

A common fixture at each landmark is what can best be described as a large cloth booth, supported by metal posts and strewn generously with an assortment of red camel-hair rugs. Some boast a selection of tourist wares, same-ish at every stop, while others offer coffee of a gravelly Arabic variety at a dinar or two for a cup. Nearly all have a pot of tea permanently on the boil, served free of charge in small glasses like tiny beer mugs.

After clambering up our fourth rock formation – or is it our fifth? – we succumb to the lure of a piping hot brew, recognising in our fellow travellers the increasingly vacant look of under-caffeinated urbanites. Admittedly, I am first to cave. What does me in is not the aroma wafting from the stove, or even the unnaturally malleable cat that slinks up to Cherie on a bench inside the tabernacle. It is the promise of fifteen minutes under the thick red shade, and the gnawing questions I have about my desert companions. 

Will, I've already guessed, isn't quite the outdoor junkie he seems at first. Hamed's best attempts to persuade him to snowboard down a six-storey dune are consistently rebuffed, and though he's once made it as far as Singapore, the most exciting thing he did there was sneak into the infinity pool at Marina Bay Sands. Carl, despite his salaryman's pallor, has clocked a more rugged travel resumé, and regales us on the drive with a tale of being woken by a stampede of wild horses while camping in the mountains above Almaty.

But stories of adventures past only take us so far, at least until the coarse-grained coffee, which exactly no-one appears to enjoy, unlocks something in the group.

"He went for an operation last year," Will says, apropos of nothing – I decide this must be a Dutch thing – and tilts his coffee mug towards his father, who is examining the trinkets on display with ardent curiosity. "He had part of his lung removed. He's seventy-five. Had cancer twice. I thought I'd better travel with him while I still can".

It's hard to tell if the slew of revelations is too sudden for Carl's British sensibilities, as Will barely gives him time to settle in. "Here on your own? What's the story?"

Some hemming and hawing. "It's a bit complicated".

"Oh, complicated how?" Will is persistent, or oblivious. 

"It's hard for my partner to take time off, with school runs and everything. I mean, I don't – we don't – have kids. Her kid, with her ex-husband. He still – they still live with him".

There's no way Will lets Carl off easy now, and the rest of the story comes tumbling into the open. Though his partner and her kid had moved in with him initially, Carl's bachelor pad was far too small for the three of them, and anywhere more spacious was prohibitively expensive. So they'd moved back in with her ex, at least for the time being. "But you know, it's London". Carl throws up his hands then brings them back down on his thighs, a little too quickly. "We'll just have to work around this till something comes along".

"Shit," says Will, somewhat chastened. "That's tough, man".

We sit companionably for a while, a sort of spell broken. Outside, a pair of camels ambles up to the tent, kneeling slowly as two American tourists dismount, haggling all the while with their guide in exaggeratedly slow voices. I remember what Hamed says about these gentle creatures: the majority live till twenty-five or thirty at the most, no more than a generation by human reckoning. Some are quick enough on their feet to be fielded in Bedouin races before the age of ten, but by fifteen they are well into their prime. Most have a few good years left to ferry goods or tourists before they lose their strength.

At Hamed's signal, we drain our mugs as best we can and climb back into the vehicle. The road ahead skirts through a mesh of tyre tracks at the edge of the village, where a small knot of older camels stands unsaddled in an enclosure, picking at the ground. Will is right, I think – how lucky to be here while we still can.

By midday, the sun threatens to bake the desert a monochromatic yellow, punctuated by rocks the size of shopping malls. Some are pudding-shaped, with elephantine protrusions like swollen fingers after a bath. Others are more severe, edged by cliffs rising vertiginously from rubble left by a destructive rainstorm.

Each has a name. Being able to recognise them, Hamed tells us, is critical for survival in the desert. His own family is pitched close to the Saudi border, exact location decided by the needs of their hundred-strong herd of sheep and goats. Their camels, though equally voracious, are less picky and will readily chomp through desert brush. Whenever guests turn up at Wadi Rum Nomads, Hamed drives unaided through the valley, stays with the group for a day or two, then returns to the family camp, gathering as many helpful pieces of gossip along the way as he can from cousins who also work in the village. The desert itself is otherwise his only guide.

Apart from names inspired by the landforms' shapes, like 'Mushroom Rock', others seem idiosyncratic at first, an inside joke shared only by the most intrepid tourists and their guides. 'Lawrence's House' is the moniker given to an old sandstone dwelling, likely of Nabatean origin, that has long fallen into disrepair. Though parts of Lawrence of Arabia were shot on location here in 1962 – as were a slate of recent productions, from Rogue One to the Dune movies – there is no evidence its namesake hero ever slept in this house.

But this hardly matters. Myths great and small haunt the desert, which through the eyes of so many travellers has achieved a celluloid glory of its own.

Ten years ago, midway through summer school at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I had found myself riding into the desert on a four-wheel drive for the first time, though Wadi Rum Nomads, like most other tour companies in the village, hadn't existed then. Far from being part of the programme, I'd fallen in with a handful of Harvard kids for a weekend of sightseeing in Jordan, touted convincingly by a guide outside our student hostel.

If we were being honest, half the attraction must have been getting out of Jerusalem for a couple of days. Weeks before we arrived, three Israeli teenagers had been abducted near Bethlehem. Though no-one claimed immediate responsibility for the kidnappings, crowds took to the streets, and Israel soon began a campaign of widespread searches and arrests across the West Bank called 'Operation Brother's Keeper'. Glued to TVs in the university's common rooms, we saw protestors cramming the alleyways of the Old City where tourists had roamed just hours before. Our braver classmates ventured out to join the peaceful, if undeniably angry, demonstrations that were being staged in neighbourhoods close to the campus.

Eventually, it became clear that things were about to get a lot worse. I made plans to fly out of Tel Aviv on 17th July – the same afternoon, as it turned out, that Israel would expand its low-intensity exchange of rocket fire with Gaza Strip militants into a full ground offensive. But in the tense, early days before that, with the conflict just shy of escalation, any opportunity to escape the tinderbox of the capital was welcome. Travelling south by bus to the seaside town of Eilat, we crossed over in forty-degree heat to Aqaba on the Jordanian side, from which Wadi Rum, and the desert adventure of our tourist brochures, was only a stone's throw away.  

My photographs from that weekend are brightly, almost guilelessly lit, our tanned and oversaturated faces red in the dusty air. Here we are in our t-shirts, victorious on an outcrop; there putting our palms against a massive boulder, leaning like the Tower of Pisa. Desert stretching harmlessly on all sides. In one picture – now my favourite – we are climbing down a rocky slope late in the afternoon, picking our steps with all the innocent intensity of solving a maths puzzle. The stone is solid and reassuring, radiating the kept heat of the day.

Though we soon lose contact after the excursion, promises to stay in touch swiftly forgotten amid the rush to leave Jerusalem, I can imagine everyone's faces again as I see them now. Each alive with a different expression, but none with fear.

Close to five thirty, Hamed drives us to a trail between two immense blocks of yellow stone, which Carl immediately christens a "third-division canyon". Hamed makes no secret of the fact that he is only doing so because we are too early for sunset, and there are few other ways to entertain a gaggle of bored tourists in the desert. "One more canyon," he says with a serious bow and wink. "It is a gift from me to you".

The path begins easily enough, winding between shocks of desert flowers. But soon we are confronted by a scrum of rock, stones fallen every which way across a narrowing gap between two slopes. Our faint trail of shoe- and camel hoof-prints peters away on the granite surface. "Are we absolutely sure this is the way up?" I venture, as we haul ourselves over a sofa-shaped boulder. "Hamed did say there would be some climbing involved, but…"

"There's no real way to tell if this is what he meant," Will finishes my sentence.

We survey the jumble of stones ahead, an unfriendly morass. Even the path behind us has all but disappeared, leaving no real way to retrace our steps. The valley seems unnaturally quiet, locked in its own shade, with the sky overhead blazing a solid and impassive blue, apart from two barely-discernible cloud trails just beginning to take on their evening hues. It's no wonder the ancient peoples of the Levant all imagined a harsh Creator, I think to myself, if this is the sort of terrain they knew. Eerie landforms hulking in the afternoon heat, and in every direction the same steep, dry cliffs.

All too easily, reminders of the desert's inhospitality come flooding to mind. A child-sized sandal half-buried in the sand, flung from a passing jeep. The wily viper from the Nabatean carving, suddenly menacing. And near where we had lunch, a real-life relic from an Indiana Jones movie: a jawbone picked clean, its molars still gleaming.

It's Cherie who spots the arrow first, painted high on the rock. Behind a sharp protrusion, we find a sandy furrow just inches across winding upwards, and doubling back slightly in the direction from which we came. But what alternative do we have? We follow this shadow of a path up a flight of shallow footholds in the stone and soon a path reappears, clear and well-trodden, further up the hillside from where we were. Visible now, a short distance ahead, are Hamed and Will's dad, who has wisely opted out of all our more strenuous hikes, as well as the comforting bulk of the white four-wheel drive with its engine loitering. 

Given the stern blaze it has inflicted throughout the day, the sun's disappearance is surprisingly fuss-free. Without haste or spectacle, it slips behind dunes on the opposite side of the valley – at almost the same moment that the upturned crescent of a new moon appears in the west. The sky bruises, a ripe fig settling into a bowl of syrup. It is only when we tear our eyes from the horizon that we realise our own faces have turned a deep pomegranate, the colour of light reflected off darkening sand onto sun-baked cheeks.

The bats are the first to emerge, or at least that is what we think they are. Child-like screeches echo off the rock behind us, and the creatures that dart briefly into view seem less like the finches we've glimpsed throughout the day than indecisive wraiths, tumbling in play. Before we manage to ask Hamed about them, the desert begins to shake itself into motion, the flat plain of the Wadi crumpling like a sheet with the tips of distant hills folded into tall corners. Imprinted clearly in the daylight, the tracks left by our four-wheel drive are nowhere to be found. Instead, the sand begins to ripple like water, the tops of each wave catching the last rays of sun and throwing long shadows over the troughs.

I squeeze my eyes shut again and again, hoping to gain some purchase on the encroaching night. But each time they open, it is to an almost totally new vista – the tableau of mere seconds ago having been eclipsed by the latest tricks of the light. It is beautiful, of course, and yet feels like betrayal. Something has erased the desert we have come to know, full of dunes that have worn our feet and rocks that have cut our hands, replacing it with this shifting simulacrum, living and magnificent, creasing like the hide of an antediluvian sea monster.

It is the first time I have seen a place so utterly transformed by sunset, or "Instagram hour" as Will refers laconically to it. Already an alien landscape by day, it resembles another planet by night, as if all we have experienced so far is merely one changeable layer of what is really there. "We are all living, at most, half of a life", writes Gabrielle Zevin in her hit novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, where Sadie searches for her lost friend by retracing their route from hours earlier and finds it completely unfamiliar – a different city altogether, just inches beneath the skin of this one. With the scene before us changing by the minute, it feels like we have barely scratched the surface of this life.

Hamed himself is a different person at dusk. "Yalla, yalla – " he urges us back into the four-wheel drive just ten minutes after sunset, an edge in his voice as he worries about getting us back to camp while there is still a hint of daylight left. But there is also exuberance, as the Ramadhan fast he has endured all day finally relents. As he climbs back into the driver's seat, he offers us the last of his precious box of dates, which are mouthwatering even if we have had the benefit of bottled water throughout the day. Beams from distant vehicles pierce the night like lighthouses, skimming the surface of the desert. Behind us sand, still warmed by the sun, flies up in ghostly clouds, dancing across the wide wake of our tyres.

Later, by the communal fire, Hamed's cousin Rakan will tell us how the old Bedouin heartland once stretched far beyond the edge of Wadi Rum, across the lines left in the sand by colonial administrators in the waning years of empire. His forebears would have known "no Saudi, no Jordan, no Palestine", he says, making an expansive arc with his hands that flickers even larger across the roof of the tent.

But for now, a more solid dark folds over the desert, barren only to the unaccustomed eye. Somewhere in the dust of our four-wheel drive, we are learning to leave our own tracks in the earth – invisible till the morning arrives, and even then, written over with the tracks of unseen others, and the creatures of the night.

The names of my fellow travellers have been changed.

_____