Where would you go?
I have long cherished a near-obsessive desire to see Petra, the rose-red city half as old as time. Last month, I am happy to say, I achieved this, along with my wife Emma, and a group of mainly Americans, all of whom were nice, and we duly assembled to be taken into the hidden stronghold. I don’t think I had understood, before then, that the city was built at the end of a long ravine, to make it easier to defend, I assume, so we travelled down the narrow, stone-lined crev-asse, until it suddenly opened out into a sort of wide square backed by the miracle of the building, in actual fact a tomb, but called the Treasury, which is the image we are all fam-iliar with. From then on, I was in a sort of trance as we swept by more tombs and rock dwellings and a Roman theatre (the Romans came later), culminating in a spectacular Roman road, lined with dazzlingly magnificent ruins of palaces and monasteries and such. This one day was worth the journey. It haunts me now.
