Dateline November 2, 2022, Amman, the Citadel and Shobak Castle

The plan for the day was Mount Nebo and Madaba, but plans, as ever, are written in pencil. Hasan picked us up and we set off for Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have died and been buried, only to be turned back on the final climb by the police. The road was closed. There was a tribal dispute up ahead, and they wanted no tourists caught in any crossfire. As Hasan explained how these feuds run, one tribe wrongs another, the injured tribe takes its revenge, a third steps in to arbitrate while the police stand well back, and only once it is all settled do they take up the original crime, it struck John as a scene straight out of the Godfather. We were happy enough to change the plan. Hasan proposed we push on to Amman and then down to Petra for the night, and save Mount Nebo and Madaba for our last day, if the tribes had made their peace by then.

The Amman Citadel. Amman wears its age openly. The Ammonites made their capital here, Rabbath-Ammon, more than three thousand years ago; the Ptolemies renamed it Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, for Ptolemy II; and the old name returned as Amman after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. We reached the Citadel, the hilltop acropolis over the city, around half past eleven, just ahead of the Friday call to prayer, and our guide there, Mohammad, walked us briskly through so he could be finished in time to pray. The hill has been lived on since the Stone Age and fortified in the Bronze Age, and it has passed through nearly every empire that ever crossed this ground, which makes it one of the oldest continuously settled places anywhere. Its great survivors are the Roman temple, a Byzantine church, and the Umayyad palace. The temple, known to everyone as the Temple of Hercules, went up under Marcus Aurelius in the second century, and its towering Corinthian columns are visible from half the city.

Between the temple and the eighth-century Umayyad palace stand the bones of a Byzantine church, the little that survives of its mosaic floor kept covered against the weather.

It was Friday, the Muslim holy day, and when Mohammad hurried off to pray we were left to ourselves. From every side of the hill the call to prayer rose at once, loudest from one great mosque down below.

Below the hill sits the Roman theater, built under Antoninus Pius in the second century to hold six thousand, the largest in Jordan and still in use, with a smaller theater beside it, the Odeon, that once seated the city's nobles. We had meant to walk down to it and on through the old town, but Hasan judged it unwise, because a protest was underway.

The crowd was the Muslim Brotherhood, out in force and angry that the laws were not strict enough, and we could hear the chants even up on the Citadel. Hasan told us how the Brotherhood works. Years ago, he said, wealthy men began paying the imams to look after the poor, and skimmed off some for themselves; over time the imams handed the poor less and less while their own power grew, until they held it over people's heads, spread the word in the name of Allah, or the money stops. He said that he and most of his friends know the Quran sanctions nothing of the kind, but that they hold their tongues for fear of what speaking out would bring. We left it there and started south.

Shobak Castle. The road toward Petra runs past hillsides pocked with caves lived in since the Stone Age, and past a little inn where some of the rooms are caves and one, said to be the smallest hotel in the world, is a VW Beetle wrapped in rugs and paint with room, supposedly, for two. We did not test it.

Then the castle itself, so well hidden in the rock that you can hardly pick it out until you are nearly on it.

The Crusaders built it in 1115, under Baldwin I of Jerusalem, and called it Montréal, the royal mount, the first of their forts beyond the Jordan, set here to watch and to tax the trade and pilgrim road between Egypt and Syria. It held through siege after siege until 1189, when it finally fell to Saladin, the great sultan of Egypt and Syria, after a blockade so long the defenders are said to have gone blind for want of salt. The Mamluks took it later and rebuilt it, leaving their Kufic inscriptions on the walls, and through the slow Ottoman centuries it was left to crumble. Standing in it you feel the whole sweep at once, Stone Age caves to Crusader keep, all in a single place.

Dinner, and on to Petra. Hasan took us to another of his favorites, the Sandstone, run by relations of his, where he had telephoned ahead for a special dish: Mussakhan, a Palestinian roast chicken with sumac and red onions, and it was wonderful.

Then the short drive to the Marriott at Petra and an early night. In the morning we would walk into the lost city.