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on the back wall, and an unpleasant musty smell. Nothing here to protect her.
    When she came out, the gang of scruffy teenagers stood on the steps and blocked her way.
    There were five of them. The one with the soccer ball bounced it once. The others fanned out in a semi-circle, cutting off any escape.
    “Hello, habibi .” The boy leered and bounced the ball again.
    They moved up the steps, closing in like a pack on the hunt. The leader gave her a quick smile with rotted teeth.
    She shrank into the doorway of the Kazneh.
    He bounced the ball, creating a sharp retort against the rock, and moved up. She caught the stench of him—the sour breath, the fusty clothes—and she backed away into the darkness of the tomb.

Chapter Six
    A rapid string of guttural Arabic, an array of curses, stopped her stalkers. The words bounced off the walls from behind them, freezing the ruffians in place.
    The leader flared his nostrils, tossed his head, and flung the soccer ball at the next boy. The sharp retort of a rifle firing into the air startled him and the ball bounced down the steps into the road. Without turning, the boys stepped back and scurried after the ball, bending low to grab it.
    A Bedouin holding a rifle stood in the road, his face distorted in anger. He started shooting at the dirt in front of the ball, chasing it up the valley. The boys ran after it, past the theatre, around the bend in the road, out of sight.
    The Bedouin slung the rifle onto his shoulder by the strap, started up the steps toward Lily, and bowed with a flourish of his cloak and a grand sweep of his hand.
    Her champion. Who is this man? “Thank you for rescuing me.”
    “You are our guest. I am called Adan el Bdoul.” He smiled at her.
    “Awadh, the man with the horses, is your father?”
    “My uncle. We are all el Bdoul here. The desert belongs to the Bedouin, and Petra belongs to el Bdoul.”
    “Even the boys who threatened me?”
    “Those boys are worthless as a cracked cup. They mean nothing.” He shrugged and held out his hands, palms up. “You are the guest of el Bdoul of Petra. No one snarls at a guest but a dog.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “You should keep your head covered. Your hair glints golden in the sun, brings out the dogs.”
    She raised her hand to her head self-consciously. “You live here?”
    “I have a three cave apartment.” He laughed with a proud toss of his head. “One for a guest room, one for a bedroom, one for a kitchen. Come, let me show you.”
    He led the way up the valley along the Street of the Façades past the rock-cut tombs on the west side, past the theatre, to the part of the valley where the tombs were arranged to the east.
    “You played with my daughter,” he told her. “You danced with her and gave her a hat.”
    “It was nothing,” Lily said.
    “It made her happy.”
    He entered a doorway decorated with a pediment and carved pilasters. “Come in, come in,” he called to her and waved his arm past the pilasters toward the dark interior.
    It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness after the bright glare of the valley sun. Inside was cool—the air tinged with an odor of wet moldy stone, smoke, and spiced coffee.
    A bench covered with several layers of red-striped coarsely woven cloth ran around the inside walls. Three loculi , places for ancient sarcophagi, were cut into the walls above the bench and stacked with coarse rugs and cushions covered with cloth striped and dyed the same deep red.
    The dirt floor was swept clean. In the center was a hearth with a blackened coffee pot beside it.
    “Sit, sit,” Adan said.
    He took two of the cushions and placed them on the ground near the hearth. Lily sat with her feet folded beneath her, remembering Gideon’s admonition not to insult a Bedouin by showing the bottom of her feet.
    Adan lit the fire and nestled the coffee pot into it. Like Jalil, he boiled the coffee up three times, taking it off the fire and tapping the side of the