Major Acid's E-Rag
From the Kingdom
From
Saudi Arabia in Early 2000
Ghosts and Camels and the
Graffiti of the Doomed
I’ve been thinking about the Taleban, not because I’m in Afghanistan. As
you know, I’m in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah in the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia. Recently, however, I over-nighted in a small hotel some 800
kilometers north of Jeddah in a small city called Al Ula. Al Ula is the
jumping off point for trips to Medain Saleh, the ruins of an ancient
city with tombs and homes carved in the soft sandstone hills that shoot
out of the desert.
Medain Saleh was built by the same people who built Petra in Jordan.
Petra is a world famous tourist destination. Medain Saleh is Petra’s
poor relation, a little older, a lot shabbier, and far more ravaged by
the same impulse to cultural destruction that the Taleban unleashed on
Afghanistan’s ancient Buddhas.
There are no giant Buddhas in Medain Saleh, but there used to be
wonderful carvings of eagles and winged lions. Over the centuries these
were either completely destroyed or at least rendered headless, although
many of the more than 300 tombs show damage from more modern tools –
rifles. Bedouin, our guide told us: some of them pious and bent on
destroying the idols of a blasphemous pagan religion, some bent on
showing the power of their rifles to prospective customers by blowing
holes in the sandstone in the less pious pursuit of gunrunning.
Yet the tombs remain, artificial caves gouged from the rock with small
hand tools. The peculiar, worm-like pattern of the tools is everywhere
on the insides. On the outsides, smooth facades have been carved, some
only fifteen feet high, others fifty or more. Most of the facades have a
unique pattern. From each corner at the top, what look like large,
inverted steps work down and inward until the final steps meet. You can
imagine that if the whole of a tomb were turned upside down these
symmetrical steps would form an interesting doorway. Some of my students
at the school I teach in insist that all the tombs were indeed turned
upside down in some divine retribution for their inhabitants worshipping
of false gods.
Medain Saleh – the City of Saleh. Saleh was an ancient Islamic prophet
and his story is in part the story of the end of the ancient city. The
city’s rich and powerful refused to heed the prophet’s teachings. They
demanded, at the very least, that Saleh provide a miracle as proof, a
camel say, to appear live from the very rocks of the mountains. Saleh,
being a man and not a magician, asked his god for guidance, and a huge
camel leading a calf did indeed come forth from the mountains. The
people were ordered to leave the camels be, and to allow them to drink
on certain days from the well, while the people would drink on the
alternate days. The rich didn’t like this, and in fact the size of the
camels scared not only the local herds of goats and sheep but also the
people themselves.
The camel and its calf were killed.
Then, a great cry was heard over all the land, and all who heard the cry
fell sick, changing colours from red to yellow to black, then finally
dying. One old woman, an evil woman, survived the terror, but only long
enough to tell the tale in other cities before finally expiring.
Our tour guide related this tale in the central meeting chamber in
Medain Saleh, a man-made cave maybe forty feet a side, with smooth
sandstone benches on three sides of the cavern. We listened politely,
after which he gathered us together for a group picture then handed out
box lunches from the hotel in Al Ula.
Medain Saleh is a large complex cut in sudden thrustings of sandstone in
a high desert plain. Here and there around the hills stand the remains
of less grand mud brick houses reinforced with the trunks of small palm
trees. Most of the people likely lived in such houses, and large areas
of the complex remain fenced off waiting for excavations at some
unknown, future date. Only a few would have lived in the rock houses
since most of them seem to have been tombs. A fifty-foot high façade
might conceal a room of no more than fifteen feet a side in the walls of
which crudely cut slots held the bodies of the dead.
A few of the structures, though, were probably homes, and some of these
seemed to be both home and tomb in one, the dead buried in small
chambers off the main rooms. A few of the structures have second floors
which we clambered up to then looked out from across the desert and
tried to imagine the mud city that once stood below.
Visitors can wander through many of the tombs, though some are fenced
off. The guide might tell you that this one or that has bones still in
it. I did find a finger bone, but most of the bones seemed likely to be
goat bones tossed in for effect. Indeed, two of us stumbled across the
remains of a goat, hooves and fur still intact, tossed in a small bush
and certainly not dating from Nabataean times.
Visitors can also search out the impressively large well or a harder to
find cistern carved into the side of large sandstone formation. The
cistern was once filled and fed by rainwater running down the cliffs and
collected and directed by ingenious stone gutters. One can also find a
narrow cleft between two cliffs into which, so said our guide, prisoners
awaiting execution for their long-ago crimes were once herded. Ancient
script, faint with time, can still be seen scratched into the walls of
this natural prison, the graffiti of the doomed.
Time passes quickly on a visit to Medain Saleh. Tourists aren’t allowed
to stay on-site over night, and care must be taken anyway to leave time
for a visit to a more modern construction. On the edge of Medain Saleh
stands a Turkish fort that looks exactly as if it came from the movie
Beau Geste, except it is surprisingly cramped.
The fort guards part of the Hejaz railway, the Turkish rail link that
knifed deep into the heart of Arabia in the early twentieth century, the
very railway that Lawrence of Arabia was once busy blowing up. An engine
that Lawrence missed sits in one of the sheds near the fort, its only
passengers now just curious tourists.
There is more, but the bell for classes is ringing and I have to go. My
students will be asking me about Medain Saleh, of course. They have
never gone there. Some will insist again that the tombs are upside down
houses. They will tell me that the reason no one stays overnight is
because there are ghosts, and some will tell me there are sound
religious reasons for the deliberate destruction of eagles and winged
lions.
I am not allowed to argue religion with my students, so I will nod my
head politely, but I will be thinking of the destruction. I will be
thinking it is lucky that Medain Saleh is not in Afghanistan where the
Taleban is busy obliterating cultural history with a ferocity beyond
even the pious gunrunner in the Arabian desert. I will be thinking I am
lucky to have had the chance to see some history in the Kingdom. Even if
I don’t really buy the story about the giant camel.
From the Kingdom,
