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.