Jungle of Stone Page 11

  Fortress at Aqaba.

  Stephens had taken the precaution of carrying only the amount of money that he calculated would be needed for his journey, including generous payments to the sheik and his entourage for their services and the hire of their camels. But on his departure from Aqaba, Stephens sensed for the first time that he may have miscalculated. Because of the largesse of the two Frenchmen who traveled to Petra nine years earlier and generously “showered” the Bedouin of Aqaba with gold, Stephens received only scowls when he had Paolo sprinkle small amounts of goodwill cash among the inhabitants. His bigger concern, however, was the sheik, who had brought provisions for ten days’ journey for ten men, six camels, and two horses. The cost of the camels had been settled in Cairo but the sheik had put off how much “baksheesh,” or payment for services, he expected personally, and they never arrived at an amount. It proved a constant irritant during the expedition as the sheik repeatedly attempted to pry from Paolo just how much money Stephens was carrying and what he planned to pay.

  The desert air the first night helped revive Stephens. The next day they traveled north through an immense valley, forbidding and empty with barren mountains on each side. But the weather was perfect and Stephens was rapturous about his horse. “If anything connected with my journey in the East could throw me into ecstasies, it would be the recollection of that horse,” he wrote. “Mounted on the back of my Arabian, I felt a lightness of frame and an elasticity of spirit that I could not have believed possible in my actual state of health.” Each day Stephens grew stronger.

  Every report Stephens had received about the Bedouin in the area, including the sheik’s own tribe, had been harrowing. Burckhardt, who journeyed as an Arab and spoke Arabic flawlessly, said the route was “the most dangerous he had ever traveled.” He described how those who guarded Petra had even robbed him of the rags that covered his wounded ankles. Four Englishmen who explored Petra in 1818 reported that in the year before their visit thirty Muslim pilgrims had been murdered at the ruins. Stephens’s own escort was reputed to be one of the “most lawless tribes of a lawless race.” He described them as “by far the wildest and fiercest-looking of all I had yet seen; dark eyes, glowing with a fire approaching to ferocity; figures thin and shrunken, though sinewy; chests standing out, and ribs projecting from the skin, like those of a skeleton.” The sheik was dressed in a red silk gown like Stephens with a scarlet cloak, and he carried pistols, a curved sword, and a twelve-foot spear with steel points at both ends.

  Bedouin near Petra.

  Stephens did not have to wait long to discover the risk he had taken. The second night out, as they camped around a fire, his party was attacked by two men. “Hardly had they reached my men, before all drew their swords, and began cutting away at each other with all their might.” He could not, he wrote, but “admire the boldness of the fellows, two men walking up deliberately and drawing upon ten. The sheik, who had been absent at the moment, sprang in among them, and knocking up their swords with his long spear, while his scarlet cloak fell from his shoulders, his dark face reddened, and his black eyes glowed in the firelight, with a voice that drowned the clatter of their weapons, roared out a volley of Arabic gutturals which made them drop their points and apparently silenced them with shame.” Stephens was stunned when only a short time later one of the attackers was helping to bind the wounds of the sheik’s brother. Then they all sat down together to share pipes and coffee.

  It took several more days through empty desert before they entered the mountain approaches to Petra. Throughout, the sheik constantly harped on the dangers of the route, his friendship and loyalty to Stephens “from the first moment he saw me,” and his willingness to sacrifice his life for him. “I suspected him of exaggerating the dangers of the road to enhance the value of his services,” Stephens said. As they veered off the main route toward Petra, the sheik explained to Stephens that he would need plenty of money to buy off the hostile Bedouin tribe living near the ruins’ entrance. It could cost Stephens thirty to forty dollars if there were only thirty to forty of them, the sheik said. But there might be two or three hundred and Stephens should give him his purse so that the sheik could go ahead and pacify them with baksheesh. Stephens, already disgusted with the sheik’s constant harassment about money, refused. That night there was a showdown in Stephens’s tent. He explained that he had brought a specific sum and all of it was intended for the sheik and his men at the end of the journey, and that if the sheik scattered money along the way it would have to come out of his pay. “He was evidently startled,” Stephens wrote, “and expressed his surprise that a howaga, or gentleman, should have a bottom to his pocket, but promised to economize in the future.”

  The next morning the sheik left half his men to guard their baggage and tents, while he took Stephens, Paolo, and the rest around the base of Mount Hor, the mountain that held the tomb of Moses’s brother, Aaron, on its summit. The sheik’s plan, though he did not disclose it to Stephens, was to enter Petra through the back door. After Stephens’s warning the night before, the sheik had no intention of sharing his baksheesh with the Bedouin guarding the main, and far more dramatic, entrance into Petra. Instead, Stephens and the sheik, riding in advance on their horses, ascended for some time a steep stony path and eventually came to a series of tombs cut into the sides of the rock walls. They stood finally at the alternate, unguarded entrance to Petra, a stunning city carved out of rock in the second century B.C. by the Nabateans. For hundreds of years it had served as the principal crossroad for trading caravans coming up from the Red Sea, a stronghold protected by stone cliffs forming a natural mountain fortress. And for centuries, Petra’s wealth and magnificence had made it an attractive target. In A.D. 106 it fell to the Romans. Hadrian later made it a provincial capital. Christian sects flourished for a time, but eventually it fell into ruins following the Arabian conquests in the seventh century. It lay abandoned and desolate, slowly collapsing under the effects of earthquakes and erosion.

  Descending into the main valley that formed the central part of the city, Stephens stared in wonder at the temples, the elaborate façades of dwellings and public buildings, the burial grounds, stairways, and perfectly columned porticos, all cut directly into surrounding rock walls. He was disappointed, however, that he had not entered through the narrow gorge that had been described by earlier explorers as the main pathway into Petra. He asked if this was the only way in and the sheik insisted it was. After riding through the length of the city, however, Stephens spied the entrance he had read about, and he set out on foot through what appeared no more than a long vertical crack in a rock wall located across from a fabulous temple. The narrow defile, hardly wide enough for two horses, wound in serpentine fashion through the spectacular gorge, its vertical sides nearly touching above and casting the passage in deep shadows. On each side were the doorways of tombs. “Wild fig-trees, oleanders and ivy were growing out of the rocky sides of the cliffs hundreds of feet above our heads; the eagle was screaming above us,” he wrote. After he had gone almost a mile through the twisting corridor, the sheik and his men came running up the deep ravine after him, shouting “El Arab, el Arab!” Stephens finally realized what the sheik had done, and that up ahead, if he had gone much farther, he would have come out upon the dreaded Wadi Musa tribe, which lived just outside the entrance and considered Petra their private property.

  When he turned and hurried back to reenter Petra, he saw through the crack in the narrow canyon walls the dramatic scene others had described so vividly: the astonishing façade of the temple opposite, cut deeply into the rose-colored rock. As he emerged from the passageway, across the small open space stood Al Khazneh, as it was called by the Arabs, or the Treasury, its portico framed by Corinthian columns and richly ornamented with classical figures. Rising more than one hundred and thirty feet, the façade was decorated with eagles, equestrian groups, and winged statues, all chiseled out of the rose rock with such precision it looked brand-new. The sight took Stephens’
s breath away. “Entering by this narrow defile,” he wrote, “with the feelings roused by its extraordinary and romantic wildness and beauty, the first view of that superb façade must produce an effect which could never pass away.”

  Al Khazneh (“The Treasury”) in Petra. Illustration by Léon de Laborde, reproduced in Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land.

  Stephens knew he had a single day at most to take it all in. The sheik warned they could not spend the night in the ruins without great risk to their lives. “I hurried from place to place, utterly insensible to physical fatigue,” Stephens wrote. “I clambered up broken staircases and among the ruins of streets; and, looking into one excavation, passed on to another and another, and made the whole circuit of the desolate city.” He and Paolo finally came to rest at a huge amphitheater carved into the mountainside and capable of holding an audience of thousands. “I could have lingered for days on the steps of that theater, for I never was at a place where such a crowd of associations pressed upon my mind.” But the warm light of the sinking sun was already bathing the canyon’s wall, and the cliffs above glowed with “veins of white, blue, red, purple, and sometimes scarlet and light orange, running through it like rainbows . . . a peculiarity and beauty that I never saw elsewhere.” The sheik hovered impatiently in the background, insisting they leave “while there was still time.” Stephens mounted his Arabian and they galloped through the ruins, rising up to the high pass where they had entered. It was already dark when they found themselves just outside the valley, facing the initial range of tombs they had encountered. They selected an empty one to make their bed for the night and Stephens threw himself on the floor exhausted. “I had just completed one of the most interesting days in my life,” he wrote, “for the singular character of the city, and the uncommon beauty of its ruins.”

  Tomb at Petra.

  Days later they entered Hebron, the southern outpost of Palestine and one of the world’s oldest cities. Stephens had clambered over the ruins of Petra, then climbed Mount Hor to Aaron’s tomb, endured more encounters with the Bedouin of the desert, and, most important, had survived the curse of the prophets, convinced he was the first non-Arab to completely traverse the full length of Idumea since God laid waste to its once-fertile valleys.

  Now he had only to survive the sheik and his men. Hebron, a whitewashed town located on a hillside in the heart of Judea, was the place where the sheik’s contract with Stephens ended. The city was under the rigid control of the Turks and because of it, its population was largely disarmed. Stephens agreed to secure the protection of the governor for the sheik and his men, who as outlaw Bedouin of the desert were reluctant to enter. They proceeded nonetheless, and in dramatic fashion, with the sheik leading the way. “Leaving the baggage camels at the gate,” wrote Stephens, “with our horses and dromedaries on full gallop, we dashed through the narrow street up to the door of the citadel, and in no very modest tones demanded an audience with the governor.” Although Turks and Arabs, Stephens noted, are “proverbial for their indifference,” their entrance had created such a sensation that “men stopped in the midst of their business; the lazy groups in the cafes sprang up, and the workmen threw down their tools to run out and stare at us. It was a strange and startling occurrence to see a party of lawless Bedouins coming in from the desert, armed to the teeth, and riding boldly up to the gates of the citadel.”

  Although outraged by their intrusion, the governor fortunately was ill and, seeing a Westerner, asked if Stephens could supply him with some medicine. “I was quite equal to the governor’s case, for I saw that he had merely half-killed himself with eating, and wanted clearing out,” Stephens recalled. “I had with me emetics and cathartics that I well knew were capable of clearing out a whole regiment.” Stephens and his wild entourage were then taken to the Jewish quarter, where he was warmly welcomed by the rabbi of Hebron. “I shall never forget the kindness with which, as a stranger and Christian, I was received by the Jews in the capital of their ancient kingdom.”

  The final showdown with the sheik, however, could no longer be put off. All along the route from Aqaba to Hebron, the sheik had hounded him about money, and now Stephens offered him all that he had, holding back only enough to get to Beirut, where a letter of credit awaited him. “The sheik and his whole suite had been following close at my heels, through the narrow lanes and streets, up to the very doors of the synagogue,” Stephens wrote. “And their swarthy figures, their clattering swords, and grim visages prevented my seeing the face of many a Hebrew maiden. I expected a scene with them at parting, and I was not disappointed.” When he laid out on a table the agreed price for the camels and separately the baksheesh for each of them, they appeared so stunned that “not one of them touched it, but all looked at the money and at me alternately, without speaking a word (it was about ten times as much as I would have had to pay for the same service anywhere else).”

  They were furious. Stephens argued that he had paid them extravagantly and had also given them all of his tent and camp equipment, his arms and ammunition. He took some comfort knowing that he now had the protection of the Turkish governor, whereas in the desert he would have been totally at their mercy. “As I rose the sheik fell,” Stephens wrote, “and when I began working myself into a passion at his exorbitant demand, he fell to begging a dollar, or two, in such moving terms that I could not resist.” Finally the sheik was reduced to begging for the clothes off Stephens’s back. Stephens refused. The sheik became so outraged he took the money Stephens had offered and threw in it onto the floor, raving that no foreigner would ever traverse his country again, and rushed out of the room.

  Of course, it was not over. A short time later the sheik and his brother were back. Both sides were remorseful. Stephens conceded he would part with his merchant costume, and the sheik said all he wanted was to be Stephens’s friend and protector—and a letter of recommendation to any other Westerners who might want to visit Petra. The next day they settled up. Stephens gave him the money, the clothing, the letter, and “pretty much everything I had except my European clothes, completing my present with a double barreled gun, rather given to bursting, which I gave to the sheik’s brother.” The sheik kissed Stephens on both sides of his face, declared he loved him as much as his own brother, said that if Stephens returned and converted to Islam he would give him four of the most beautiful girls from his tribe for wives, and then he was gone. “I looked after them as long as they continued in sight,” Stephens recalled, “listened till I heard the last clattering of their armor, and I never saw nor do I wish to see them again.”

  Stephens suffered several more bouts of illness as he crisscrossed the Holy Land. He visited the River Jordan and took a boat out onto the Dead Sea. In Jerusalem he got around the city using the map published a year earlier by an artist named “F. Catherwood,” whose name he recognized had been carved, along with others, on monuments along the Nile. Sometime in late April Stephens reached Beirut. “My travels in the East were abruptly terminated,” he wrote. “After lying ten days under the attendance of an old Italian quack, with a blue frock-coat and great frog button, who frightened me to death every time he approached my bedside, I got on board the first vessel bound for sea, and sailed for Alexandria.” From there he went to Genoa, traveled up to London, and finally, later that summer, crossed the Atlantic.

  In New York, when his first book came out it created an immediate sensation. The two-volume work, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, was released in September 1837, only a year after Stephens’s return. The work met with uniformly gushing reviews and was so popular that within a year it went through ten editions, including two in England. “These volumes are amongst the most agreeable of travels that we have ever read,” wrote the Monthly Review in London. “Nor is it possible to arrive at their conclusion without desiring that another such pair by the same hand were within reach for instant consultation. He has eminently distinguished his na
rrative by impressing upon every such object the feelings which they excited in him, conferring upon them the vividness and freshness which enable the reader to accompany him with an ardour, if not equal, at least akin, to that which the writer partook of in his own person. We do not perceive any striving after effect, or any sort of exaggeration.”39

  The success of the publication was an unprecedented achievement for an American author, a feat all the more astounding because the book came out at the start of one of the worst economic depressions since America’s founding.40 In other ways, the New York City that Stephens left in 1834 was not the city he returned to two years later. On a freezing December night in 1835, about the time he was stepping ashore in Egypt, a fire raged through lower Manhattan that was so fierce its glow could be seen as far away as New Haven, Connecticut, and Philadelphia. It roared across the city’s commercial district, only blocks from where Stephens had grown up, consuming fifty-two acres of buildings from Broad Street to the East River and from Coenties Slip in the south to Wall Street in the north, destroying almost everything in its path. It burned for two days, and it took two weeks before its last embers were put out. It was the greatest urban fire since the conflagration that burned London in 1666 and Moscow in 1812. When the blaze ended, 674 buildings had been destroyed. Twenty-three of New York’s twenty-five fire insurance companies went bankrupt.