Dateline November 3, 2022, Petra, the Lost City Beyond the Treasury

Past the Treasury the canyon opens out, and the rest of Petra unfolds, far larger than that one famous facade ever lets on.

The Street of Facades and the theater. Beyond the Treasury runs the Street of Facades, tomb after tomb cut into the rock, leading down to the great theater. The Nabateans carved it out of the hillside, slicing through older tombs to do it, and the Romans later enlarged it to hold several thousand, by some counts as many as eight thousand. Even its drainage was thought through.

The Royal Tombs. Look up to the eastern cliffs and the Royal Tombs come into view, a row of huge, elaborate facades that catch the light through the day, the grandest carvings in Petra after the Treasury itself.

Qasr al-Bint. We chose not to climb. There are long stairways up to the High Place of Sacrifice and beyond, but we left those to younger legs and walked instead to the far end of the valley, to Qasr al-Bint, the main temple of the city, built in the first century and dedicated to Dushara, the chief Nabatean god. Down the center of it all runs the Colonnaded Street the Romans laid after 106, where you can still walk the old flagstones the Nabateans walked.

How much is still buried. The astonishing thing is how little of Petra we were actually seeing. Archaeologists reckon only about fifteen percent of the city has been uncovered; the other eighty-five percent is still under the sand and rock, waiting. To take in even what has been found, the Byzantine church with its mosaic floors, the High Place, the Monastery up its eight hundred steps, you would want two or three days and, as we joked, legs rather younger than seventy.

The walk out. By the time we reached the far end we had walked better than five miles, and that was plenty. The way back up to the Treasury is more than an hour on foot, not as steep as the Siq but uphill the whole way, so we gave up bargaining for a horse cart and hired donkeys instead. Janice rode a great deal as a girl, so for her it was like climbing back on a bicycle; John needed a solid ten minutes to make peace with his mount. Twenty minutes later we were back at the Treasury, thick now with the midday crowds, and very glad we had come in early in the morning.

From the Treasury we caught a golf cart up through the Siq to the gate, found Hasan, and pointed the car south. Petra had been everything we hoped and a good deal more. Next, the desert of Wadi Rum.