Love in the Lost City of Petra

It's easy to become intoxicated by atmosphere. In the lost city of Petra, rose-colored sandstone and scintillating skies render a hotbed of love, albeit the most unlikely love. Love flushes and blushes like a young bride in this wonder of world, brought to international attention by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Al Khazneh, the Treasury, stands as centerpiece of this architectural marvel, carved with beauteous colummns and friezes of a pink that seemed to glow. Instead of Harrison Ford flashing his famous whip, tour guides lead gentle donkeys bearing tourists. All the guides belong to the indigenous people, the Nabateans, a people ancient as the Bible itself. They are modern-day bedouins, shepherds who make decent money showing impressionable tourists around the city of their ancestors.

That's not all. Nabateans also have a particular way of wooing. They show eligible female visitors that this is where they grew up, where their grandfathers tended goats and where their mothers churned milk. They show the lofty monastery atop the mountain where they climbed as children, and iridescent walls where they hid from their parents. Then they show the women their tents, where they proceed to do the thing that men and women do. Afterwards, these modern and curious ladies (often American) decide to stay. No joke. They marry into the Nabatean tribe, and live their lives in shepherding villages. Apparently, it happens all the time.

Thank God I was with my brother. The Nabatean guide atop our donkey was young and as dusty as they come, save for the designer Tommy Hilfiger jeans he sported. My fiancee, he said, is an opera singer in Chicago, showing a photo of striking brunette on his smartphone. She already got me a ticket for the States, and then we will be back here to get married. We will live here, among my brothers and uncles. Any chance they will live in America? No, he shakes his head, most of the women who visit here stay here. They are happier.

Was it love? Or infatuation? Or the call of a simpler life? First-world luxury and conveniences somehow paled in comparison to the rough and tumble, sweat and grime of the Nabatean life. What was it that fulfilled these women to the point of giving up modern livestyles?

I never knew because I never went inside those tents. The sun began to set, casting a red light over the city and the stones seemed warm, alive. Then the wind blew and the sand swirled in glistening ruby-red speckles, the beginnings of a mirage. And I gazed through that thing of beauty, wondering if I was dreaming.