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portico, and a second story above, it looked like a Roman temple. It was a tomb fit for a king, rich and powerful, perhaps the tomb of Aretas IV Philopatris, King of the Nabateans and friend of the people.
    And on the top of the Khazneh with its cornice on either side was a huge urn carved in the rock above the central tholos. The Bedouin thought it held the treasure of the Pharaohs.

Chapter Five
    Inside the valley, Awadh dismounted. He held the rope on Lily’s horse with one hand and reached for her elbow with the other in a clumsy attempt to help her alight.
    “You see there?” He pointed to the urn carved into the rock of the Khazneh. “The great pharaoh of Egypt hid his treasure there.”
    Lily stared at the legendary Khazneh, at the urn pockmarked with rifle shots, at the Bedouin standing in front of it, dwarfed by its monumental columns, and started toward it. It was like walking in a dream.
    Awadh was talking to her, but she didn’t hear him.
    She had seen the painting by David Roberts, who immortalized the Romantic Arab for Queen Victoria, where Bedouin in colorful clothing lolled on the steps or pointed rifles at the urn, waiting for it to break open like a piñata and shower them with gold. Now the Kazneh stood before her, elegant in its classic carvings, its floral capitals, while Awadh droned on and she ignored him.
    Finally his voice roused her from her reverie. “When you finish here,” he was saying, “say to anyone ‘ Bukrah al mishmish ,’ and he will come get me.”
    He leaned forward, waiting for an answer.
    “What does that mean, bukrah al mishmish ?”
    He tied the horses to a hitching post across from the Khazneh, hobbled them, sloshed some water into a tin watering trough.
    “Does it mean anything?” she asked, and turned to look at the Kazneh once more.
    “Nothing,” he shrugged. “Nothing at all.” His words hung in the air as he turned and started to walk up the valley.
    Lily followed him for a while along the Street of the Façades that was lined with monumental rock-hewn tombs, some with false fronts like temples, some with crenellated decoration and a simple gabled door, some with engaged columns and crow-step decoration.
    A strange roseate aura was reflected from the pink limestone of the surrounding rock. Lily was spellbound by the mystique of Petra. She thought of the quixotic early nineteenth-century explorers who, disguised as Arab pilgrims, rediscovered this hidden place for God and country.
    Here and there, she saw footholds carved into the rock next to the tombs for climbing the cliffs or for holding scaffolding. Gideon had told her that the elaborate facades had been carved from the top down.
    Up ahead, she saw Awadh near the remains of the Roman theatre where the valley curved to the right and rose to where the city began.
    Someday, when she had more time, she would come back and explore the city. She would climb to the High Place, visit the temple of the god Dushara that the Bedouin called the Palace of the Pharaoh’s Daughter. She would walk along the colonnaded Paved Street built for Hadrian’s visit in 130 C.E. Before Hadrian, in 106 C.E., the Emperor Trajan had absorbed Nabatea into the Roman Empire, swallowed it whole like a snake ingesting its prey.
    As Awadh trudged along toward the eastern bank of tombs, he passed a gang of adolescents, unwashed and scrawny, who seemed to be playing a rough sort of game. One of them had a soccer ball, which he would bounce and toss with both hands at one of the other boys.
    They shouted something at Awadh as he passed. He shook his fist at them, shouted back, and continued up the valley past the theatre.
    The one with the ball threw it at Awadh. It landed in the middle of his back, hard enough to knock him off balance. He didn’t turn around. He staggered, squared his shoulders with an effort, and kept walking toward the elaborate set of tombs beyond the theatre. Lily watched him until he was out of sight and around the bend