big hotels. A long stretch of sand separated Aqaba and the border fence, then closed, with Eilat. On this, my first visit in twenty-nine years, the border fence had opened to turn Eilat and Aqaba into one city. Once, Aqaba had been distinctly Arab with overgrown parks, neglected beaches, wedding-cake minarets and a few camels; Eilat was defiantly Euro-Israeli, concrete slabs, grey socialist-realist architecture, bars and women in bikinis. Now, they looked the same – the same hotels, shopping centres and other investments in concrete. Despite the open fence, Aq-elat, or Eil-aba, was as segregated by race, religion and language as most other cities. The transnational corporations, which gambled on prosperity in Jordan after its 1994 treaty with Israel, were losing. The Palestinians rose against Israeli military occupation in September 2000, and the result in Aqaba was that the Radisson, the Movenpick and the rest had fewer customers than staff. I walked along the Corniche to the Movenpick, Aqaba’s largest hotel, for dinner.
The Movenpick was said to be the new hotel in a town where hotels were under construction on every spare plot. Its vast edifice straddled, via a bridge, both sides of the Corniche. It occupied acres of seafront and its own man-made hill. Its vaguely Greco-Roman columns and mosaics were ornamented with modern versions of mushrabieh, lattices and lathed woodwork that protected windows, as in old Jeddah and Yemen, from the sun and strangers’ eyes. Despite the traditional balconies clinging like spiders to flat marble walls, the Movenpick looked more MGM-Las Vegas, sans casino, than Arabian Nights.
I was the only diner. The waiter, though cordial, spent most of his time in the kitchen. Like most solitary travellers, I had for companions a book, my thoughts and whatever I happened to see. I watched the lobby. A Filipina nanny came in with a flock of fat children in American clothes. She tried to persuade them to get into a lift. The children – loud, spoiled, rich – ignored her and ran through the restaurant. They rushed past my table, upset chairs and headed towards the swimming pool. When the empty lift closed behind the nanny, I thought she would cry. The children were learning young what their parents discovered after they earned money: they could abuse servants, at least servants whose families were too far away to take revenge. New money had taken them far from their Arab traditions, which required them to treat their household, including those paid to care for children, as family.
The walk back along the Corniche put me in melancholy mood. Only in the gaps between the new and half-completed hotels could I see the water. In patches that the developers had yet to fill, old Arab men played backgammon and smoked their glass-bowled water pipes. The brighter neon of Eilat, no longer hostile and no longer out of reach, was the model for Aqaba’s honorary entry to the modern, Western world. A few young Jordanians smoked narghiles – water pipes – like old men. The narghile was becoming fashionable again in the Arab world. The boys sucking plastic- and wood-tipped tubes were wearing, not the keffiyehs of proud desert warriors, but baseball caps. And they drank Coca-Cola.
A Ramble with Staff Sergeant Amrin
In 1973, I had spent the best part of a day searching for the fortress that Lawrence had conquered in 1917. Everyone I asked then had an original notion of its whereabouts – in the hills, on the King’s Highway, somewhere near the Saudi frontier. When I found it on the beach near the old town, I slashed through a jungle that had grown in and over it. Forcing a path along the ramparts, I was rewarded with the Turkish commander’s perspective of the Red Sea when the pillars of his empire were falling. Below the ramparts were storerooms and the yard where deserters and rebels had been hanged. Later, I asked to meet old people who might have remembered Lawrence from fifty-six years earlier. Some helpful Jordanians took me to a café to meet a man who could not have been more than forty. Much discussion ensued, until I asked how a man as young as he could have known Lawrence. He sorted through papers in a beefy leather wallet and produced a photograph of himself in black desert robes with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence in David Lean’s film. Indicating the fair-skinned actor, he asked, ‘What do you want to know about him?’
Early on my first morning back in Aqaba, Ahmed Amrin came to my hotel. At five foot six, he was taller than the man he most admired, the late King Hussein. His get-up was pure California, as if he’d shown up for work as assistant director on a Hollywood set: big Wild Foot boots, Nike baseball cap, grey Levis and a V-necked sweater over a grey T-shirt. His dark goatee was trimmed like a sail, and his left hand sported a wedding ring and a Timex watch. He spoke English as a British soldier would, and he knew his job. He was a guide.
Mr Amrin had taken his degree in English at the University of Amman. His favourite playwrights were Shakespeare and Marlowe, fellow partisans of royalty. He enlisted in the Jordanian army, serving three years in England at Catterick Barracks, near Darlington, North Yorkshire, studying electronics. When he returned to Kerak, his home town between Amman and Aqaba, he married. Jordan and Israel signed a treaty of peace in 1994, and former Staff Sergeant Amrin moved to Aqaba to claim the promised riches of peacetime tourism. He studied his country’s archaeology, history, even its geology, flora and fauna. He became a first-class tour guide in a land without tourists.
‘In the tenth century BC,’ he informed me, marching over a seaside dig next to the Movenpick, ‘this was a Solomonic port. It served the Nabataeans and the “Ptolemites” ’. Mr Amrin was a rare figure for the Middle East, an honest interpreter of history. Some Arab guides omitted the connection between the land and the ancient Israelites, as most Israeli archaeologists and tour companies avoided references to the Arab, his culture and his history. To Mr Amrin, who was once Staff Sergeant Amrin of the Royal Jordanian army’s engineering corps, the story was incomplete without Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Turks and the British. The ‘Ptolemites’, descendants of Alexander the Great’s General Ptolemy, had ruled Egypt from Alexander’s death until the Roman conquest.
Mr Amrin explained how the other side of the Gulf came to be called Eilat: ‘In the Muslim era, this was called Ela or Wela, which means “palm tree”.’ The ruins were so far beneath our feet that all I could see were brick-lined trenches. The archaeologists had a way to go, but they had forced the government to preserve the ancient Nabataean – Ptolemaic remains from burial under a hotel. It may have been an economic calculation: Aqaba had plenty of hotels but not much history. Walls two millennia old gave it an edge over Eilat, whose oldest structure dated to 1949. The earthworks that Mr Amrin showed me were a small portion of the Roman achievement, a link in the empire’s land – sea communications between the fertile hills of Felix Arabia, now Yemen, and garrisons in Egypt and Palestine. The rest of it was under either the Movenpick Hotel, where no one would see it, or the Red Sea, where anyone with goggles and flippers could have a look.
Aqaba as it came to exist was the creation of Islam’s third Caliph, successor to the Prophet Mohammed, Othman. Mr Amrin’s tale jumped from the pious Othman, one of the four ‘rightly-guided’ Caliphs, to modern Jordan. He said the Emirate of Transjordan was born of the Meccan Sherif Hussein bin Ali’s struggle during the First World War. Without prompting from me, he said, ‘Don’t forget the English and the French, of course.’
On our way to the Turkish fortress, our shoes collected the dust of Roman and early Muslim digs. We passed beaches where Jordanians above the age of twelve wore enough clothing for an English winter and children were stripped down to bathing suits. Mr Amrin said this was the ‘free beach’, one of the last that had not been sold to developers to serve the foreign tourists who no longer flew to Jordan or anywhere else in the Levant. Beside the shore, tiny plots of garden, bordered by squares of raised earth, sprouted green vegetables and spiky herbs.
Mr Amrin was, like most other native Jordanians, a monarchist. It was not the system he admired so much as the man, or the men. He talked about the dynasty that had given its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. His story began with the patriarch, Hussein bin Ali, already an old man when the British encouraged him to lead a tribal – in Lawrence’s fantasy, national – revolt against the Ottoman Empire. His sons, Abdallah, Feisal, Ali and Zeid, harassed the Turks in the east, while Britain advanced from
