van Geldermalsen - Married to a Bedouin: Marguerite van Geldermalsen

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Marguerite van Geldermalsen is from New Zealand. In 1978 she married Mohammad Abdallah and they had three children. She was widowed in 2002 and now divides her time between Sydney and Petra.

Visit her website www.marriedtoabedouin.com

Married to a Bedouin

MARGUERITE VAN GELDERMALSEN

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2010

Copyright Marguerite van Geldermalsen 2006

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.

Extract from The Elephant and the Bad Baby by Elfrida Vipont,
illustrated by Raymond Briggs (Hamish Hamilton 1969).
Text copyright Elfrida Vipont Foulds 1969.
Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

eISBN : 978 0 7481 2273 8

This ebook produced by Jouve, France

Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette UK Company

For Salwa, Raami and Maruan
in memory of Mohammad

The map is not drawn to scale, but covers an area that is approximately 1 km from east to west and 1km from north to south.

Key:

The Petra I lived in.

Acknowledgements

There are a few people I want to thank by name. They are Mum, Dad, Ted, John and Anna for being my wonderful family (and also for some of the photos); Lennie Goodings and Elise Dillsworth at Virago Press; Mary S. Lovell who introduced me to them; Jane Taylor (janetaylorphotos.com) for facts and friendship and the photo of the Monastery on the back cover; and Jan Cornall for Effortless Memoir Writing. Also, to those who met me, and said, You should write a book, thank you.

To those who encouraged me while I was writing it - I needed that, thank you, To the Petra Bedouin - even those I havent named but who shared nonetheless in the making of our lives memorable, thank you. And most of all to Mohammad (may he rest in peace). If it werent for him I wouldnt have a story to tell.

1978: In the Beginning

Where you staying? the Bedouin asked. Why you not stay with me tonight - in my cave?

I met Mohammad Abdallah in Petra. My friend Elizabeth and I were sitting on the rock-cut steps of the Treasury with our backs against a gigantic column when the young man sat down on the step below and started to chat. He wore a heavily fringed and tasselled red and white cloth twisted up on his head and a western, synthetic suit: bottle green with flares.

Elizabeth and I had travelled through Greece and Egypt together and had been in Jordan for about a week. We were doing well. In Amman we stayed with a New Zealand couple and went to all the places of interest. We saw the museum, the citadel and the Roman theatre, and we made day trips to Madaba, with its mosaic map, and to the well-preserved Roman town of Jerash in the north. There, some hours after the last local bus had left, we were rescued by a group of Americans with their own air-conditioned bus and local Jordanian guide, who went by the unlikely name of Joe and who spoke English with an exaggerated American accent. They had not only taken us back to Amman, they had taken us to Petra the next day.

The effect of the air-conditioning on the bus was to exaggerate the mid-morning heat when we got out in the dusty car park at the entrance to the ancient city. The group had a tour organised, but before we could even think to make our own plans, Joe introduced us to his friend Rashid, who said very formally, Welcome. My name is Rashid. I am from the village of Moses Valley. I show you Petra.

Moses Valley was the village of stone walls and fruit trees we had just passed through as the bus worked its way down from the mountains, braking heavily. Joe had pointed out the spring where Moses struck the rock and water gushed forth and explained over his microphone that the names of the valley and the village were the same: Wadi Musa or Valley of Moses.

Rashid looked to be in his early twenties, like me. He was thin, dark-haired with pale olive skin, pointy eyes and an uncertain smile. He wore plain trousers and an open-necked shirt. We told him our names and shook his hand.

Lizabeth, he recognised. Queen Lizabeth.

Elizabeth was a well-tanned Australian without a line on her face, despite being some years older and wiser than me. She smiled benignly, giving nothing away. She had heard it all before.

There were neither gates nor entry fees and Rashid assured us he wouldnt charge us either, so we just lifted our bags and followed him down the path into Petra.

We had just about reached saturation point as far as ruins go. In recent months we had been to so many antiquity-filled museums and toppled-column archaeological sites that we could barely absorb another historical fact. So I hardly listened when Rashid told us that the Nabataeans were a tribe of people who ruled in the area for hundreds of years. I wasnt interested; I just walked one dusty sandal in front of the other. There was no shade. A horse or two passed, stirring dust, kicking open wet-straw-smelling droppings. For a while the path led between sandstone hills which grew higher and crept closer, then a shady canyon opened in the cliff in front and we entered the Siq. This is the only way into Petra, our guide said. Thats why it was easy to protect. And we could see what he meant. It was only a few metres wide and the sheer sides towering in reds and ochres cut out most of the sun, except where shafts of it reached in and caught the leaves of high-up fig trees in splashes of green.

Our bus-load of tourists passed us by on clattering horses, waving and laughing. The men leading them hitched up long robes, and the ends of their head-coverings flicked up as they waved sticks at the horses and shouted to each other. The long robes or thaubs were mostly white but occasionally someone wore a grey or tan or dark pinstriped one. The headgear consisted of a square metre of red and white, black and white, or just plain white cotton cloth folded in a triangle, the mendeel, with a mirreer, a double ring like a thick black rope, on top. They stirred up more dust and the path was stony, our bags became heavier, and despite the shade we were starting to sweat.

Half an hour later the picture I had first seen at the Jordanian embassy in Cairo came to life. Quite suddenly between the brick-red walls of the Siq, above the flowering oleander bushes, a sliver of monument appeared looming and sunlit. The rest of the faade came into view as the Siq ended abruptly and opened into a narrow canyon. We eased our bags to the ground and leaned against the rock in a slice of shade opposite what looked like the front of a towering Grecian temple. A few tourists went up the steps and disappeared through a doorway. The faint and soothing smell of wood smoke reached us from where some men lounged in the shade. A couple of them, in raggedy

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