One of the most colorful and romantic episodes of the war in the Land of the Arabian Nights was a battle fought in an ancient deserted city that had been asleep for a thousand years, only to wake to the booming of big guns and the spirited clash of Turks and Arabs. Here, among the immemorial and perfect ruins of a lost civilization, Lawrence the archÆologist and Lawrence the military genius merged in one. To the few travelers who have ventured into that hidden corner of the Arabian desert it is known as a “rose-red city, half as old as time,” carved out of the enchanted mountains of Edom. It lies deep in the wilderness of the desert, not far from Mount Hor, where the Israelites are believed to have buried their great leader, Aaron.

The battle took place on October 21, 1917, shortly after the fall of Akaba. It was important from a military standpoint because it definitely decided that the uprising against the Turks in Holy Arabia was to develop into an invasion of Syria, an affair of worldwide importance destined to revolutionize the history of the Near East. In this battle Lawrence and his Bedouins fought the Turks on the same mountain-tops from which Amaziah, king of Israel, hurled ten thousand of the inhabitants to the canons below. Lawrence successfully defended the city against the Turks in much the same way that the NabatÆans defended it against the armies of Alexander the Great three hundred years before Christ. He trapped the Turks in the same narrow gorge that resounded to the tramp of Trajan’s conquering legions two thousand years ago.

After hearing Lawrence’s enthusiastic description of the palaces carved out of the living rock, where he had camped with his Bedouins, I asked Emir Feisal if he would permit me to do a bit of exploring among the mountains of Edom. He not only granted the request but gave us a picked band of his wildest brigands as a body-guard to protect us from robbers and enemy patrols. From Akaba we trekked thirty-eight miles through the Wadi Ithm to one of Feisal’s outposts, at Gueirra. The Wadi Ithm is a narrow gorge hemmed in by jagged granite mountains crisscrossed with black lava veins from twenty to two hundred feet wide caused by volcanic eruption ages ago. This weird wadi pours out on to a mud plain which reminded us of the Bad Lands of Dakota and the high plateaus of Central Baluchistan. Here we occupied a deserted bell-tent for several days before continuing our trek across arid mountain ranges and sandy desert stretches. Up and up we went over a precipitous rocky zigzag trail, where our camels, time after time, stumbled to their knees. Reaching the summit of the Nagb, the camel-track led across a grassy plateau to the battle-field around the wells of Abu el Lissan. General Nuri Pasha, one of the commanders of Feisal’s army, turned out his troops to welcome us. We stopped a few minutes for coffee, and as I left the general’s tent he picked up the princely Persian lamb rug on which we had been sitting and threw it over my camel-saddle, insisting, in spite of all my protests, that I should take it along and use it as a cushion. He also lent me a hippopotamus-hide cane, presented to him by the king of Abyssinia, with which to guide my dromedary. A few miles beyond Abu el Lissan a courier from Feisal caught up with us and handed me a letter of introduction from the emir to his commander at Busta. The courier was a swarthy rascal, who looked like Captain Kidd, with his flashing black eyes and fierce upturned mustachios. His red head-cloth was embroidered with huge yellow flowers, and his robes flashed as many colors as Joseph’s coat. At his belt were a pearl-handled revolver and two wicked-looking daggers. To my amazement he spoke typical New York Bowery English and dropped such remarks as, “Say, cull, will youse slip me de can-opener?” He informed me that he had lived fourteen years in America as a machine-operator in a cigarette factory.

He was born in the mountains of Lebanon, and his real name was Hassan Khalil, but in New York he was plain Charley Kelly. At the outbreak of the World War, he was working for Thomas Cook & Son in Constantinople and was immediately conscripted into the Turkish army. At the second battle of Gaza he deserted and joined the Australian forces as an interpreter. After serving with the British in Egypt, he was finally transferred to the Hedjaz army. As soon as we became better acquainted, Charley told me he was not a Mohammedan, but an “R.C.,” which he explained in a whisper stood for Roman Catholic. But he begged me not to reveal his secret to any of the other members of the caravan, for he feared that he would be killed instantly by some of our over-zealous Moslem companions, should they discover his apostacy. Charley Kelly entertained us around the camp-fire with detective yarns. He had several Arabic translations of “Nick Carter” in his saddle-bags and said the Egyptians believe Nick Carter to be the actual head of the American Secret Service. According to Charley, “Nick Carter” is a best seller in Egypt, where his exploits are regarded as authentic history. If an Egyptian cannot read himself, he hires a public reader to entertain him with one of these detective tales. Another member of our column was a silent Egyptian with an immobile face that might have been chiseled out of stone. We dubbed him Rameses because he looked so much like the statues of that mighty potentate along the Nile. The rest of our picturesque body-guard was made up of Lawrence’s Bedouins. All these Beau Brummels used kohl-sticks under their eyebrows and rouge on their lips and cheeks. The prophet Mohammed is said to have remarked on one occasion that there were two things no true believer should ever lend to his brother—his kohl-stick and his wife.

Every morning Charley had to help Chase, who is a little man, mount his camel. Practically every camel Chase rode died in its tracks before the end of the journey. He was singled out as the special object of attraction by all the insects of the desert. Several mornings when we crawled out of our sleeping-bags we found scorpions and centipedes between Chase’s blankets. One morning Chase handed a treasured can of bacon to one of the members of our body-guard with instructions to cook him a breakfast that would remind him of home. But he ended by frying his own bacon. As soon as the can was opened the Bedouin cook dropped it in horror and backed off, aghast that his Moslem nostrils had been profaned with the aroma of unclean meat. Like all Mohammedans, Arabs will not use pork in any form. They cook their food in butter made from goat’s milk.

That day we passed a flock of white sheep, all of them fat as butter, with thick curly wool and cute little corkscrew horns. A Bedouin shepherd sat near-by on a lump of basalt strumming an ancient Arab love-song on his lute. Some of these uplands of the Hedjaz are carpeted with barely enough grass for sheep pasture, and a few of the more settled tribes tend flocks rather than breeding camels or horses. One schemer from Bagdad, hearing of the uprising in the Hedjaz, was far-sighted enough to realize that the Allies were bound to take an interest in the affair sooner or later and that British gold pieces would supplant the Turkish sovereigns which long had been the medium of exchange along the desert fringe. So, from lead gilded over, he made thousands of counterfeit British sovereigns, and as soon as the first gold began coming into the Hedjaz from Egypt, but before the Bedouins were familiar enough with it to detect the spurious from the genuine, he trekked across the country buying all the sheep he could find. Instead of the normal price of one pound for each animal, he offered two of his counterfeit pieces. Then before the Bedouins had time to get into Jeddah, Yenbo, and Wedj to spend their gold in the bazaars, the Bagdadi drove his sheep north to Palestine, and sold them at two pounds a head to the British army. When the hoax was discovered he had vanished into the blue.

Distances in Arabia are not gaged by miles but by water-holes. The night after our unfortunate bacon incident, just as we had finished putting up our pup-tent at “third water,” otherwise known as Busta, twenty Arab regulars came along mounted on Peruvian mules. The mules were camel-shy, and as soon as they saw our caravan they bolted at top speed in all directions, some of them bucking off their riders and disappearing into the mountains of Edom. These soldiers, who hailed from Mecca, sat up all night shouting and singing around our campfire and firing their rifles into the dark. The Turkish lines were only a few miles away, and I had a presentiment that a Turkish patrol would slip up during the confusion and put a finish to the hilarity by scuppering the lot of us. Nothing happened, however, and after trekking eighty miles across country without a single skirmish with the Turks to make the expedition more lively, we came out on the top of a high plateau.

Spreading off to the northwest before us were magnificent ridges of white and red sandstone. About twenty miles to the north lay the valley of the Dead Sea, and beyond, disappearing in purple and gray haze, the Central Arabian Desert. The peaks ahead were the sacred mountains of Edom. Our problem was to penetrate that massive range of sandstone before us. We descended from the high plateau into a valley twelve miles wide that narrowed to twelve feet, a mere defile through the mountain wall. Through this gorge, or sik, as it is called by the Arabs, our camels and horses scrambled over boulders and pushed their way through thousands of oleander-bushes, while the Arabs popped away with their pistols at the lizards creeping across the stones. As we wandered through this rent in the rock we marveled at its beautiful walls towering hundreds of feet above us, at times almost shutting out the sky.

Hassan Morgani, one of our Bedouins, who wore a purple jacket trimmed in green and a pair of cavalry boots that he had taken from a dead Turkish officer, told us that the gorge was the Wadi Musa, the Valley of Moses. Charley Kelly confirmed this with the assertion that it was here that Moses brought the water gushing from the rock. To-day every Arab family in this region has its little Moses. Through the narrow gorge a brook plunged in and out among the great boulders, the oleanders, and the wild fig-trees. High above, the sun warmed the tops of slender cathedral rocks to a wonderful rose red.

After pushing our way through the gorge for more than an hour, we suddenly rounded the last bend and stood breathless and speechless. There, in front of us, many miles from any sign of civilized habitation, deep in the heart of the Arabian Desert, was one of the most bewildering sights ever revealed to the eye of man—a temple, a delicate and limpid rose, carved like a cameo from a solid mountain wall. It was even more beautiful than the Temple of Theseus at Athens or the Forum at Rome. After trekking nearly a hundred miles across the desert, to come suddenly face to face with such a marvelous structure fairly took our breath away. It was the first indication we had that we had at last reached the mysterious city of Petra, a city deserted and lost to history for fourteen hundred years and only rediscovered during the last century by the famous Swiss explorer, Burckhardt.

The secret of the enchantment of this first temple we saw lies partly in its position at one of the most unusual gateways in the world. The columns, pediments, and friezes have been richly carved, but it is difficult to distinguish many of the designs, which have been disfigured by time and Mohammedan iconoclasts. At one side are two rows of niches, evidently the traces of ladders used by the sculptors who carved their way down. These artist-artisans used a tooth tool that they might get the maximum effect out of the colored strata, which seem to form a perfect quilt of ribbons and swirl like watered silk in the morning sunlight. Although the temple is wonderfully preserved, it shows the effects of the sand-blasts of the centuries. The auditorium within is almost a perfect cube, forty feet each way. The architecture is of a corrupt Roman-Grecian style. The temple was carved from the cliff almost two thousand years ago during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who visited Petra in a. d. 131. The desert Arabs who were with me said it was called El Khazneh, or the Treasury, because of the great urn that surmounts the edifice, which the Bedouins believe is filled with gold and precious jewels of the Pharaohs. Many attempts have been made to crack the urn, and it has been chipped by thousands of bullets. My body-guard also fired away at it, but fortunately it was nearly a hundred feet above their heads. Colonel Lawrence is of the opinion that the building was a temple dedicated to Isis, a goddess popular during the reign of Hadrian. One traveler had carved his name in letters a foot high on one of the pillars of the temple, but Lawrence ordered his men to polish it out.

The city lay farther down on the plain of an oval valley, a mile and a half long and half a mile wide. How populous it was there is no way of telling, but several hundred thousand people must once have lived there. Only the more insignificant buildings have perished, and even of these some striking ruins remain. The upper part of the valley is the site of ancient fortresses, palaces, tombs, and amusement resorts—all carved out of the solid rock. The lower part was apparently a water circus where the people indulged in aquatic sports and tournaments. Petra is a huge excavation made by the forces of nature. From the nine-thousand-foot plateau from which we first saw the mountains of Edom, we had dropped down to an altitude of one thousand feet when we entered the ruined city.

All the travelers who have visited Petra have marveled at the wonderful tints of its sandstone cliffs. It is carved from rock the colors of which beggar description at certain hours of the day. In the morning sunlight they are like great rainbows of stone flashing out white, vermilion, saffron, orange, pink, and crimson. Time and the forces of nature have played the magician, painting the different strata in rare tints and hues. In places the layers of rock dip and swerve like waves. At sunset they glow with strange radiance before sinking into the sombre darkness of the desert night. We wondered at times whether we were really awake or whether we had not been transported to fairy-land on a magically colored Persian carpet.

Stairs carved from the rock, some more than a mile in length, run to the top of nearly all the mountains around Petra. We climbed one great staircase ascending to a height of one thousand feet above the city to the temple which the Arabs call El Deir, or the Convent, a most impressive gray faÇade, one hundred and fifty feet high, surmounted by a gigantic urn, and decorated with heads of Medusa. Most of the steps cut into the mountains lead to sacrificial altars, where the people used to worship on the high places thousands of years ago. An even greater staircase winds up to the Mount of Sacrifice, an isolated peak that dominates the whole basin. On the summit are two obelisks and two altars. One altar is hollowed out for making fires, and the other is round and provided with a blood-pool for the slaughter of the victim offered to Dhu-shara and Allat, the chief god and goddess of ancient Petra. One of my Bedouin companions insisted upon taking off his raiment and bathing in the rain-water which had collected in the pool. The average Bedouin needs a little encouragement along these lines, and so we did not reprimand him for his sacrilegious act. Lawrence told me that it was supposed to be the most complete and perfect example in existence of an ancient Semitic high place. Near the altars are the two great monoliths, each about twenty-four feet high, which the people of Petra carved out of the solid rock and used in their phallic worship, one of the oldest forms of worship known to man. The names of these monoliths and the nature of the worship do not admit of description. The mountain-top commands a view of all the surrounding valleys and mountains, as well as most of the ruins of the city. The outlook is sublime. It is a scene to stir in one’s heart those emotions which have ever led man to worship his Creator. On a peak near-by are the broken remains of a Crusader’s castle. Further off to the left rises a black lava mountain. On its summit, glistening beneath the burning rays of the Arabian sun, we saw a small white dome, white like the bleached skeletons we passed in crossing the desert between Akaba and the mountains of Edom. This peak is Mount Hor, and the dome a part of a mosque built by the Bedouins over the traditional tomb of Aaron, high priest of the Israelites and brother of Moses. We spent a day ascending it and upon reaching the summit found a Turkish flag flying over Aaron’s tomb. As a propitiation before any important event takes place, the desert Arabs climb Mount Hor with their sacrifice of a sheep and cut its throat before the tomb of Aaron. Although no news of it reached the outside world at the time, the far-flung battle-lines of the Great War reached even to the slopes of Mount Hor.

All the buildings of this city of ghosts have elaborate faÇades, but within they are simple and austere. The magnitude and beauty of them even now strikes one with awe. How much more they must have meant to beauty-worshipers in the days ‘when the city pulsed with life! Most of the stone is rose-colored when the sun falls upon it, and shot with blue and porphyry. The deserted streets are rich with laurels and oleanders, whose hues seem copied from the rock itself. In fact, the only inhabitants of this rose-red city for hundreds of years have been the countless millions of brilliant wild flowers that flourish in the cracks of the hundreds of former palaces and temples and wind themselves around half-ruined columns. Petra’s mighty men and beautiful women have passed on to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns. It is indeed a scene to impress one with evanescence of all life.

In the center of the city, surrounded on all sides by temples and palaces and tombs, is a great amphitheater, cut out of the base of the same mountain that leads to the great high place of sacrifice. Tiers and tiers of seats face the mountain avenues of tombs. The diameter of the stage is 120 feet, and the theater is the one symbol of life and mirth in all this mysterious deserted city. The laughter and cheers of thousands once rang here across this hollow cemetery of ancient hopes and ambitions. Here thousands of years ago the Irvings and Carusos of that bygone age performed and received the plaudits of their admiring thousands. Where now are all the gay throngs who occupied these tiers on feast-days and watched the games? The lizards are crawling over the exquisitely colored seats to-night, and the only sounds that have been heard in the theater for centuries have been the desolate howls of jackals. Little did the ancient Edomites or NabatÆans imagine that a people called Americans from an unknown continent would one day wander among the ruins of their proud city.

The presence of Egyptian architecture and symbols indicates that Petra must have been built by a race that had come in contact with the culture of the peoples who carved the Sphinx and piled up the pyramids. Even the desert traditions of nomenclature support the belief that Petra was at some time identified with Egypt. The nomads believe that these rocks were carved by Jinn, under the order of one of the Pharaohs, and not only are they certain that the great urn on El Khazneh contains the wealth of the old Egyptian tyrants but they believe that they actually lived in Petra and call a ruined temple down in the valley Kasra Firaun, the Palace of Pharaoh. But nobody knows when or by whom Petra was built. Some think that it had its beginning long before the time of Abraham and was an old city when the Israelites fled from Egyptian bondage.

As we stand there amid the ruins of this forgotten city, we are reminded that

The region around Petra was known as Mount Seir in the time of Abraham, and it is said that Esau, with his followers, came to this country after he had lost his birthright. We read in the Old Testament about Petra. It is called Sela, which is Hebrew for rock. It is believed that when the children of Israel were wandering in the Wilderness they came upon Petra and asked for permission to enter and rest. But the people of Petra refused, and Israel’s prophets predicted its desolation. Obadiah accused it of being proud and haughty, saying: “Though thou mount on high as the eagle, and though thy nest be set among the stars, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.” In the time of Isaiah it was a proud and voluptuous city, of which the stern old Jew predicted destruction.

The NabatÆans, an ancient Arab tribe, conquered Edom, and by 100 b. c. had created a powerful kingdom extending north to Damascus, west to Gaza in Palestine, and far into Central Arabia. Lawrence told me that the NabatÆans were great pirates who sailed down the African coast and made devastating raids on the Sudan. They had reached a high stage of civilization, did beautiful glass-work, made fine cloth, and modeled pottery. They frequently visited Rome and Constantinople. Both King Solomon and the queen of Sheba had employed the NabatÆans, who rivaled even the Palmyrians in organizing a rich caravan trade and made Petra their principal commercial center in Arabia. Antigonus visited Petra in 301 b. c. and found there large quantities of frankincense, myrrh, and silver.

The Greeks, knowing of this fortress city impregnable in its mountains, were the first to name it Petra, which means rock. Tradition says that Alexander the Great conquered all the then known world and wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. But tradition is wrong. Here is one city that Alexander the Great failed to conquer. Diodurus Siculus tells us that Alexander considered Petra of such importance that he sent Demetrius with an army to capture it. Demetrius tried to force his way into it by the same narrow defile through which we entered. But the inhabitants shut themselves up in their mountain fastness and successfully defied both siege and assault. Although the city refused itself to the visitor who came with the sword, it welcomed him who came with the olive-branch.

As the capital of the NabatÆans, it rose to its zenith in the second century before Christ. Greek geographers of those days called the land of Edom by the name “Arabia PetrÆa.” Under Aretas III, surnamed Philhellene or friend of the Greeks, the first royal coins were struck, and Petra assumed many of the aspects of Greek culture. Even in the golden age of Rome when Augustus sat on the throne of the CÆsars the fame of this far-away city had reached Europe. It was a Mecca for tourists from all over the world, and it must have had a population of several hundred thousand souls. It was a seat of arts and learning to which the Praxiteleses, the Michelangelos, and the Leonardo da Vincis of that day repaired. Its hospitality was a byword among the ancients. It opened its doors to the early Christians, who were permitted to have their houses of worship there side by side with the temples of Baal, Apollo, and Aphrodite. Petra was to this part of Asia what Rome was to the Romans and Athens to the Greeks. In a. d. 105 one of Trajan’s generals conquered Petra and created the Roman province of Arabia PetrÆa, but the city continued to flourish as a trade-center under the strong peace of Rome. In those days Petra was the focusing-point on the caravan routes from the interior of Arabia, Persia, and India to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. It was a great safe-deposit of fabulous wealth, fortressed by frowning cliffs. Both Strabo and Pliny described it as a great city. But when Roman power waned, the Romanized NabatÆans were unable to withstand the desert hordes. The caravan trade was diverted through other channels; Petra declined in importance and ultimately was forgotten. In the twelfth century the Crusaders, under Baldwin I, sent an expedition through the locality and built many castles; they were expelled by Saladin.

There are many indications that Petra was a pleasant and pleasure-loving city. Its wealthier classes must have lived in luxury such as even the luxurious East has not known in many centuries. With its concert-halls, its circuses, its mystic groves, its priests and priestesses of many sensual religions, its wealth of flowers, its brilliant sunshine, and its delightful climate, it must have been at the same time the Paris and the Riviera of Asia Minor. But, except for its immortal sculpture and the few casual tributes to it by writers from alien lands, it has not left a single record of its manner of living, or handed down the name of a single one of its Homers or its Horaces.

A little more than a century ago, John Lewis Burckhardt, a Swiss traveler, who had heard rumors of a great city of rock, lying far out on the fringe of the Arabian Desert, penetrated the gorge and found once more this wonderful old city of Petra, which had not been mentioned in any literary record since a. d. 536. In the century or more since Burckhardt wrote of his discovery of the rock city in a letter from Cairo, only a comparatively few travelers and archÆologists from the West have visited Petra. The danger of violence from Bedouin nomads was so great that not many had the zeal to attempt it. The lion and the lizard kept the court where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep, until Lawrence brought his fighting Bedouins into this city of tombs and empty palaces.