The Scorpion’s Bite Read Online Free PDF

in the path to the city, and the adolescents disappeared into the ruins of the theatre, laughing.
    As she walked along Lily pictured ancient Petra with the noise of workmen busy chiseling the great facades, cutting into the rock to hollow out interiors. She visualized the funerary processions, lines of camels stepping in somber pageant along the valley. She imagined what it would have been like then: the early Nabateans using Petra as hideaway for a nomadic Hole in the Wall Gang, and later, when the Nabateans were the proud rulers of the desert and its caravans, with Petra as their capital, a city with gardens and burbling fountains.
    And here in this valley, in these rock-cut tombs that looked like temples, they buried their dead.
    What were they like, these ancient Nabateans? Were they the descendants of the Edomites? Were they like the Saudis, with white kafiyas and flowing white cloaks?
    She had read about them in Roman histories. It was rumored that they were cruel and avaricious, that they had captured Judeans as they fled from a burning Jerusalem and slit the captives up the belly to see if they had escaped with hidden treasure.
    ***
    A child, a girl about five years old, sat in the path in front of her. With one hand, the child scratched at a tousled mop of black curls; with the other she drew stick figures in the rosy dust. Her faded dress was streaked with the pink dust of the path. A smear of clay-colored mud smudged her cheek. She looked up at Lily with doe’s eyes, smiled with tiny pearl-like teeth, stood up and smiled again.
    Lily began to go around her. The child moved to the side as Lily moved to the side, back again when Lily moved back, threw out her arms and laughed. Lily took both of the child’s hands and the girl tossed her head, giggling, her curls bouncing as they moved back and forth, swaying, dancing, laughing.
    When Lily stopped, out of breath, she took off her hat and jammed it playfully on the child’s head. The girl posed, this way and that, hands on hips.
    As Lily was about to take back the hat, she remembered how the tiny disheveled girl scratched her head, and thought of head-lice. She tilted the hat on the child’s head, and stood back to admire it.
    “Beautiful,” Lily said. “ Kawais , jameel ,” and tapped the hat to set it more carefully on the child’s head.
    “Keep the hat.” She patted it again, and waved goodbye. “ Ma’a sa’alama .”
    The girl understood that the hat was a gift and ran off, smiling, skipping, calling “ Abou, abou ,” holding the hat in place as she ran.
    Lily continued walking up the valley toward the theatre, passing the tombs hewn into the colored rock, with crow-stepped crenellations, with cornices and pediments reflecting the bright tints in the sun. In some places, she noticed the holes pecked into the rock for scaffolding for the workmen who had carved the tombs.
    And crushed underfoot along the way, the ceramic remnants of the Nabatean funerary feasts, sherds of fine eggshell-thin ware, deep red, decorated with orange, or red, or dark purple-black paint depicting leaves and fronds and feathers, or tendrils and vines.
    She got as far as the remains of the monumental theatre, hewn into the cliff and the face of damaged tombs. The curved tiers of the amphitheatre must have held over five thousand people.
    The gang of boys that had harassed Awadh erupted out of the theatre toward her, hooting, shouting in Arabic, their leader bouncing the ball.
    Lily backed up, apprehensive, then turned and rushed back down the valley where she felt safer.
    She reached the Kazneh, climbed the steps to the colonnaded portico, and held onto one of the columns, panting. When she caught her breath, she checked the rooms on either side of the portico. They were empty.
    Calmer, she went up more steps to the entrance to the central chamber and into the dark interior.
    There was little there—open niches on each of the sidewalls to hold sarcophagi, a more elaborate one