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.
Rose-red there lies, and vivid in the sun, A magic city, hid in Araby; Of her no ancient legend has been spun, And all her past the silent years have won To the deep coffers of antiquity.
About her brooding stillness there blow The scarlet windflowers, as a carpet flung Upon the stones. And oleanders grow Where, in the night, the mourning jackals go A-prowl through temples of a god unsung.
And so she stands, and centuries have kept Her olden secret, tragic or sublime; Without her gates, what tides of men have swept, Within her portals, race of kings have slept? This “rose-red city, half as old as Time.”
Was there no poet’s voice to chant her pride, To clarion her magic down the years? No warrior famed, to set her valourous stride? No splendid lovers who for love’s sake died, Gifting to song their passion and their tears?
Was there no storied woman’s golden face To glimmer down unnumbered years to come? No prophet’s vision to foretell her place, Mysterious city of forgotten race? Only her beauty speaks, and it is dumb.
And so she stands, while Time holds jealously Her olden secret, tragic or sublime; Her sorrows, joys, her strength, her frailty Are in the coffers of antiquity, This “rose-red city, half as old as Time.”
[by Mona Mackay, Christchurch, New Zealand.]
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.