Sands of Time

Crossing the cruelest terrain in Transjordan, Bedouin-style, one writer discovers another face of nature—and the nature of being free.

The south end of Wadi Rum village, the tourist gateway to the desert, bristles with activity. Busy jeeps burdened by vest-clad Westerners groan by in military columns. Loose herds of sweating, red-faced hikers trudge through their powdery mechanized wake led by a single Bedouin in a dust-crusted dishdasha. They’ll follow a typical route that takes in sites like Lawrence’s Spring, Khazali Canyon and the Burdah Arch and night will find them comfortably bedded down in tourist camps with toilets, mattresses and sometimes even a shower. A much smaller group of more hardcore travelers will set out on adrenaline-fuelled climbing excursions up the nearly limitless routes that thread far too many mountains to count. Almost none will venture to the farther limits of the sandy wastes. None, but me and my photographer.

In an effort to connect with this special region of the earth, Jason and I set out with Raad Abou M’aitik, a 22-year old Bedouin of the Howeitat tribe. Having long ago succumbed to an obsession with deserts, my goal for the trip is to pick up enough camel skills to do a desert crossing entirely on my own.

The mode of transport (camel) is essential. The speed of a jeep has a way of compressing perceptions, of distorting the landscape and leaving you with little more than snapshot images, a “highlight reel” of fragmented memories. Hiking is better, but the rigors of a forced march are too often accompanied by the tunnel vision of exhaustion. The camel’s pace is the truest means of unlocking the mysteries of the desert. It allows the land to unfurl before you in all the fullness of its glory, and in its own time.

It wouldn’t be long before Raad would put my burgeoning camel skills to the test.

“Raad, how long before we stop seeing tourists?” I ask.

“One day, maybe two. Then nothing,” he replies. “Where we’re going we probably won’t even see Bedouin.”

The Bedouin are perhaps the most famous of the world’s desert-dwelling nomads. They captured the imagination of 18th century European Romantics, who created an entire legend around the exotic east of the Arabian Nights, of harems filled with veiled women and of heroic caravan-raiding sheiks. Such tales were embellished by the reports of intrepid travelers like Lady Hester Stanhope and Charles Doughty. The reputation of the Bedouin as “masters of the desert” was solidified by explorers like Sir Richard Francis Burton, Colonel T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) and Wilfred Thesiger, who traveled among them and experienced the most desperate rigors of desert travel.

Those stories had fuelled my dreams. I wanted to experience in some small way what men like Thesiger saw, to travel as the Bedouin always had and to learn whatever desert skills they still had to offer.

Our travels will take us well beyond the southern limits of the Wadi Rum Protected Area, where we will turn slightly east to venture off of all available maps. It will also be a journey to the roots of Jordanian society.

Jordan is somewhat unique in that it was founded by nomads and comparatively recently. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was only established in 1946. Until then it had always been a marginal zone, sectionally coveted by its neighbors but fully occupied by none.

Referred to as Transjordan, the territory was crisscrossed by trade routes that transported the goods of the world. The cultures that surrounded it spilled over its borders and were assimilated by bits and pieces at different times, but Transjordan was never unified or entirely annexed.

The region saw the waxing and waning of a succession of what I refer to as “linear” civilizations—cultures whose worldview accorded with the straight line of history, of progress from one state to another: Biblical peoples like the Edomites and the Ammonites; the Nabataeans of Petra; the Romans; the Muslim dynasties of the Umayyads and the Abbasids; the Crusaders with their corrupted ideals and castles of stone; and finally the Ottomans.

Throughout all of these long centuries the nomadic Bedouin continued to exist on the desert fringes. They inhabited a different worldview, one predicated on timelessness, circularity and oral tradition. The First World War changed all of that. With the encouragement of the British who were fighting the Ottoman Turks, the Arab Revolt led by Bedouin chieftains Faisal and Abdullah ended Turkish rule, ushering in a period as a British protectorate followed by independence in 1946. The cyclical worldview of the nomads was brought into sudden contact with the linear worldview of the region’s successive histories, melding to produce a culture that is unique in the Middle East.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.