Seven Wonders (31 page)
Sentiment, tradition, habit—cleansed in fire. Every last trace of the parchment, her aunt, and Jendari’s childhood self was gone in a flash of devouring flame.
Jack clung to the saddle of his temperamental mount, his entire world reduced to a sliver of two blindingly bright inches as he tried to stay focused on the three camels loping across the stone path a few yards in front of him. Even at such a close distance, he could barely make out the men atop the camels, their long, white cotton Arabian thobes blending into the fierce eddies of white-hot sand that swirled up from the desert floor. It wasn’t Jack’s first time on a camel, but the conditions were more challenging than he’d ever experienced before—and growing steadily worse by the minute. He didn’t dare try to adjust the kaffiyeh that hung down low over his forehead. Even one hand off the reins might tempt the camel to shift off the narrow path, and Jack wasn’t certain he’d ever find his way back.
In retrospect, he’d probably let his machismo get in the way when Magda Al Muhammed, the leader of the small Bedouin troop, had offered to tether him to one of the lead camels for the forty-minute trek. Magda hadn’t given Andy and Sloane a choice—and they were now clinging for dear life to a shared mount a few feet to Jack’s right, guided along by Magda’s cousin, who couldn’t have been older than fourteen.
It had taken Jack the first kilometer to get used to the jerky, bouncing
motion of the ride as the camel picked its way across the sand-swept stone path on long, spindly legs. Both Sloane and Andy had turned green by the time they’d passed the outer tombs—mostly outcroppings of rock, polished smooth by two thousand years of dry desert wind—but only Andy had kept up a steady cadence of complaints, which had eventually prompted Magda to offer him a roll of chewable Dramamine pills from a pouch hanging next to the curved sheath of his ceremonial Bedouin scimitar. Magda’s brother-in-law, who was riding point for the brief crossing, had laughed so hard he’d nearly fallen out of his saddle.
It wasn’t until the wind had started to pick up and the sand had started to swirl that Jack’s camel had begun to buck and tug against the leather reins every time he’d tried to correct the animal’s direction. Jack had realized he was more passenger than driver, and now he was pretty much at the mercy of the one-ton beast. Thankfully, for the time being, the animal seemed content to follow the three Bedouin tribesmen, who had no trouble navigating the stone path by feel alone.
“The Siq is just ahead,” Magda called back, his accented voice a hiss within the wind, “But we should move faster,
sadeke
. Another ten minutes and the storm will be upon us.”
With that, the three lead camels quickened their pace, and Jack felt his own ride jerk forward into a mild trot. His fingers went white against the reins. He wished he’d had a few days to reacclimate himself to the desert before seeking out Magda and his clansmen, but after the events at Chichen Itza and Machu Picchu, he’d wanted to avoid any sort of delay. He might have been able to ignore a single robbery attempt; but two attempts in two days meant that they were being stalked. Sooner or later, whoever was after them was going to try again.
Which meant they needed to move quickly—and as unnoticed as possible.
Jack leaned forward into the saddle, his camel lurching over a pile of
rocks that partially covered the path ahead. He could feel the wind yanking at his own long white thobe, similar in style to the light cotton robes worn by the three Bedouin. The kaffiyeh —checkered in red and white—covered everything but his eyes, and even if Jack hadn’t been riding through the beginnings of what appeared to be an epic sandstorm, he was indistinguishable from the rest of Magda’s clan. Andy was likewise covered, head to toe, in white; Sloane’s thobe was a deep blue, as befitted a woman of the Bedul, Magda’s tribe; instead of a kaffiyeh, her head was covered in a tassled veil, adorned with a single, polished blue stone above her eyes.
Magda’s generosity in providing them with both transport and the clothing was admirable—and not unexpected. Nomads who had spent the past few thousand years traversing what was arguably the harshest environment on Earth, the Bedouins had developed a sophisticated culture that revolved around tenants of loyalty and hospitality. Even complete strangers were treated like members of the tribe—given food, water, clothing, whatever the Sheik and his family could spare.
And Jack wasn’t a stranger to the Bedul, though Magda’s use of the honorific
sadeke
—friend—was more evidence of the Sheik’s generosity. Jack had only met Magda twice, when he had been studying a rival clan that shared water rights to the system of natural wells that ran along the base of this section of the Wadi Araba, a desert valley that stretched from the base of the mountain Jebel al-Madhbah to the shores of the Dead Sea. Even so, when Jack and his team had arrived twelve hours before at the Sheik’s village—little more than a circle of large, black tents made of sewn goat hides, strung in front of the entrances to cave-like, deserted tombs—Magda had immediately agreed to provide everything Jack needed for the short journey. He’d even offered himself, his cousin, and his brother-in-law as personal guides, though he’d suggested that they wait until after the predicted sandstorm passed. But Jack had seen the sandstorm as another bit of luck. As long as they had reached their destination before the worst of the storm hit, it was
only going to make what he was planning easier.
Once the pictogram on the broken pottery from Chichen Itza had pointed to the Colosseum, where Sloane had already recovered one of the snake segments, Jack had assumed that Petra, the next chronological Wonder among the seven, would be the penultimate stop on their journey. With that in mind, they’d begun scouring the photos Sloane had taken in the hypogeum, searching for the next pictogram. To assist them, Dashia had enlarged all the photos using a computer at the resort in Cancun’s business center, then devised a simple image recognition program to seek out any snakelike markings.
After the program was engaged, it hadn’t taken them long to locate what they were looking for: The seven-segmented snake had been carved directly into Cleopatra’s headdress, right above the Egyptian queen’s eyes. It had taken Dashia another few clicks on the computer to enhance the tiny image next to the sixth segment on the snake:
At first, Jack thought he was looking at some sort of oblong barrel, slightly off-kilter, covered in spots; but then he’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t a barrel at all, but a pockmarked urn, with two curved handles leaning slightly backward and to the left. That’s when Jack had known for certain—their next stop was a two-thousand-year-old ancient city, built into
the stone foothills of a historic mountain in the Eastern desert of Jordan: Petra, the Rose City, with its famous façades carved directly into the stone cliffs that had once been home to a lost and mysterious desert civilization, the Nabataeans.
“Up ahead!” Jack heard Magda shout. “Into the Siq!”
Jack squinted through the brightness and saw the base of the mountain looming up in front of them—and there, right down the center, a crack shaped like a lightning bolt, ripping right through the solid stone. The Siq—literally a shaft or gorge naturally occurring in the stone that ran for more than a kilometer through the mountain of Jebel al-Madhbah—was the main entrance to the Rose City, and could not have appeared ahead of them at a more opportune moment. The wind howled behind them, and Jack felt himself suddenly pelted and buffeted by sand on all sides. Magda and his camels surged forward, and Jack fell flat against his saddle, his legs tight against his animal’s heaving sides. He felt spikes of pain move up from his ankle where the water snake had bit him. The antivenom he’d given himself in the parking lot at Chichen Itza had saved him from the worst effects of the bite, but he still had twin fang marks that he’d carry with him for the rest of his life. Then again, they were no worse than the check-shaped scar beneath his second rib from the scorpion-tail-tipped fighting stick of a Yanomami chieftain. He ignored the pain, clinging to the animal, completely blind from the sweeping waves of sand, praying that Andy and Sloane were still on their camel—
And then suddenly, the wind died down to a steady breeze, and the camel slowed back to a trot. Jack lifted himself off the saddle and looked around; they were inside the Siq, the high, red-tinted sandstone rising on either side as far as he could see. The ground was loosely paved in well-worn cobblestones marked by hoof prints, thousands of years of sandals and shoes, and even the ancient scars of chariot wheels, and the sound of the camels’ hooves echoed through the air. Jack could still hear the vicious
winds whipping up the desert outside, but within the mountain, they were protected from the worst of the sandstorm.
“I think I swallowed an entire sandbox.” Andy coughed as his and Sloane’s camel drew close to Jack’s. “Moses spent forty days out there? I barely lasted forty minutes.”
Jack unwrapped the lower part of his kaffiyeh, now that his mount had settled into a controllable rhythm behind the three Bedouins. He noted the white streaks riding up the reddish sandstone of the walls, and the rough traces of erosion from two millennia of wind and the odd flash flood. The Siq was staggeringly beautiful, and Jack could imagine what sort of miracle it must have looked like to the ancient peoples who used it as a thoroughfare to the capital city of the Nabataeans—and to even earlier desert wanders, perhaps even Moses himself, as Andy had intimated. To this day, Jordanian guidebooks still referred to the area as the Valley of Moses; as the legend went, Moses had traveled this way when he’d left Egypt with the Israelites on his journey to his promised land.
The history of this place was even more overwhelming than its staggering beauty. Jack shifted his gaze to Magda and his tribesmen, still wrapped up in their kaffiyehs and thobes. To them, this place wasn’t just history, it was home; the Bedul were one of the oldest Bedouin clans in Jordan, and the only people on Earth who actually still lived in one of the great Wonders of the World. In the eighties, the Jordanian government had taken great pains to try and relocated the nomadic inhabitants out of what was rapidly becoming the country’s most popular tourist attraction—they’d even built an entire modern village, Um Seihoum, to house the thousand or so remaining Bedul—but Magda and his clan had resisted, and still resided in the outer tombs of Petra, raising their camels and tending their sheep as they had since Moses’ time.
“Luckily for him,” Jack said, “Moses didn’t have to share a camel with you. With all the noise you’ve been making, I’d imagine he’d have turned
right around and headed back to Egypt.”
Usually, Dashia would have joined in to help tear Andy down a notch, but she was safely ensconced in one of the Bedul’s black tents, using a satellite phone to begin making arrangements for their next journey after Petra, the last and final Wonder of the World. Sloane wasn’t interested in the banter; she was looking at a row of carved niches that had now appeared on the red-and-white streaked walls of the narrow Siq. Most of the niches contained cubic stones, lined up in rows of three.
“The Nabataean gods,” Jack told her, his voice echoing through the gorge. “Although most ancient and modern cultures have gods they represent in human or animal form, the Nabataeans used square and rectangular stones.”
“Not very imaginative,” Andy said.
“Quite the contrary. It takes a pretty sophisticated imagination to see a god in a block of stone.”
The Siq took a hard turn to the left, narrowing to only a few meters across. Then another shift to the right. The wind was barely a whistle now, though Jack could only imagine the powerful storm tearing through the desert behind them. Usually, the Siq was crowded with tourists, making the journey to Petra on horseback, by carriage, or on foot. Because of the storm, the Jordanian guards who patrolled the site were turning people back. Of course, nobody told the Bedul where to go; this was their desert. Jack’s timing couldn’t have been more fortunate.
After the next turn, they passed another carving, this one more elaborate: an obelisk, standing on a large stone block. Again, faceless, but there were winding grooves around the obelisk’s sides. At first glance, it looked like more erosion, but Jack had seen the image before.
“This is the main goddess of Petra—Al Uzza. She’s the matron of power and fertility, and was supposedly a fierce defender of the nomadic people. Those grooves are supposed to represent vegetation, vines running down a
single desert tree.”
Sloane raised her eyebrows. Jack nodded.
“It doesn’t matter where we go,” he said. “We always seem to end up back where we started. The Nabataeans were desert nomads who left behind no literature or inscriptions of any kind. Their gods were featureless blocks of stone. And yet even they left references to a spiritual tree. But it gets even more interesting.”