FAREWELL TO PETRA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20610, 8 January 1929, Page 12

FAREWELL TO PETRA.

It was our last night in the ghost city. Somehow I-felt as if it was impatient for us to' be gone. The great blood-red tombs and temples, though' empty' of apparent lifje, seemed to shelter some influence that was only waiting - for our departure,to steal out and recapture the city. An: alien influence, for even the Bedouin tribes, descendants .of the Ishmaelites s that' succeeded the Edomites, shun Petra to-day. ; ' . Here and there I could hear the faint sound -of water, but the artificial means . of .supplying a.great city have long since been; destroyed.-. Mark Antony tossed it . as: .a. jewelled bauble to Cleopatra, who coveted the luxurious city in-its bizarre' . when she sighted it on her way y -to Syria. Herod fled to Petra from the \ Vengeance of Antigonus. Then the trade , route swerved to Palmyra, and the Nabateans, weakened by their long prosperity, bereftof Home’s ./.support, went to pieces. By a.d. 300 : Petra was de- > . serted,: and her / very site, forgotten. For a few brief weeks 'in 1917, the surrounding..country had. been alive/with . troops —Turkish, British, Arab—and on October ’2l the combined British and Arab army wiped out the Turkish forces in the ancient city that- had> known the passing of the Edomites, the Horites, the . Nabafseans, Greeks, and Romans. • '. Then again silence. To-night it looked a wickeu, unearthly .city, a city lost .to evil powers in the wastes of the desert.. The Hv# hills that • ring: Petra round'.seemed to erlace her in cruel embrace, as if she had been some captive .princess. 'On that last night i the place frightened me.'" I had been ex- , cited to come,' but I, was glad to go. The moonlight had;, blanched the tombs on their great' terrace facing our tents until they looked like a row of grinning, ivory-white skulls. Beyond the Emir’s pavilion- WOTe'-the fires lit ■by the' soldiers, and round which sat rings of hooded figures.. ,We could hear the pulsing of that disturbing barbaric music, the loud, passionate chanting of many voices. For the last time my- long, lean guard took me to my rock chamber. For the laat tirne I, looked put on the cup-like space ringed round by blood-red hills, which I, know now were honeycombed with tombs. For the' last time I saw the ' moon rise immense and golden behind those hills and Spill her’ light into rock corridors that led into mysterious recesses. By the next full moon I should be far from here, back in ordinary, conventional surroundings—Petra, with its . beauty and' horrorj would be only a memory.—Norah ■ Rowan Hamilton, “Both. Sides of the Jordan.”