Where you staying?” the man who was to become my husband asked. “Why you not stay with me tonight in my cave?”
We were sitting on the rock-cut steps of the monumental treasury at Petra in Jordan and I was excited because a Bedouin with a home in a cave and the offer of a free night’s accommodation was just what my friend Elizabeth and I had been hoping for. His name was Mohammad and he wore a dusty bottle-green synthetic suit with flared trousers and a red-and-white fringed and tasselled cloth twisted up on his head.
We slept that night in the cave that was to become my home; not that I had any inkling then on that day back in 1978. The cave had been carved out of a red sandstone mountain 2,000 years before by the Nabataeans. Mohammad had painted it quite gaudily in green and white, put in a front wall with windows and a door, and laid a concrete floor that was hard under our sleeping bags. He slept outside on a ledge. I had never heard of the Nabataeans and having just travelled through the archaeological sites of Greece and Egypt I wasn’t interested in details. I wasn’t interested in Mohammad yet either, so the next day, with Petra “done”, we got a ride to Aqaba on the shores of the Red Sea.
I first saw the man who was to become my father-in-law about a week later... standing in the middle of a dirt road waving a pistol. We had been enticed back to Petra to attend a Bedouin wedding and now we were squashed into a pick-up truck with a singing crowd of robed men, head-covered and tattooed women and skinny children in a procession of vehicles escorting the bride to her groom. The convoy halted in front of the pistol-wielder and a hugely noisy exchange followed. Mohammad reassured us that it wasn’t an argument, which was comforting because several of the wedding-guests also carried weapons. His father was simply trying to invite us all to stop and drink tea.
A week later my friend and I set off again. I had noticed Mohammad’s smile by then and I knew I enjoyed his generous gentlemanly ways, and Petra had become unforgettable too with its water-worn oleander-filled valleys, towering monuments and hand-painted pottery shards. But Elizabeth and I were still travelling: Syria and Lebanon were next on our list.
I didn’t get far. Within weeks I was back in Petra having a wedding of my own. I lived there until Mohammad died 24 years later. We stayed seven years in the cave, without electricity or running water, and 17 in a house in the settlement of Umm Sayhoon, built to provide Bedouin people with such services.
In July 2006 I went back to Umm Sayhoon to put up the tents for my son Raami’s wedding. Mohammad’s father had also died by then, but several hundred other Bedouin attended, and so too did a few New Zealand and Australian relations. A throng of people escorted Raami’s bride through the village streets. Many held mobile phones high to photograph the occasion. As we passed under the swoops of power and telephone wires others recorded it all on video. My mind went back to 1978, when I left Petra that second time and got a glimpse into this then unimaginable technology-filled future.
So that we could catch the early morning bus Mohammad had taken us to stay with a family living in a woven goat-hair tent up beside the road to Amman. There was no electricity for hundreds of miles and the starlit plateau stretched away outside. We sat cross-legged in the dark. The fire of wormwood under the teapot was a low glow. The snuffle of sheep and goats blended naturally into the rural silence. The sound of a revving V8 engine did not.
A pick-up truck halted in front of the tent and shone its lights in. Mohammad jumped up with the sons of our host and they escorted the pure-white robed driver (in fact my future son’s future father-in-law) into the tent. Then they helped to rig up an eight-inch black and white TV on the truck’s bonnet and connect it to the battery. They fiddled with the antennae, twisted the knobs and finally settled to an evening of ghosts in the snow. They were thrilled. The driver lived in Saudi Arabia and was the only person they knew who could afford a television.
Now Umm Sayhoon has electricity and satellite dishes, washing machines and Moulinexes. The Bedouin commute into Petra daily. They might all enjoy reminiscing about a wormwood fire in a goat-hair tent on a starlit summer’s night, but not many of them wish they were back there.
Marguerite van Geldermalsen now lives in Australia. Her book “Married to a Bedouin” is published by Virago (₤12.99).
