Not without reason. Two tectonic plates have split to create the wide desert valley of Rum, and a sunset here is a wonder of darkness and light. At the southern end of the valley is the fort of the Desert Camel Corps, the descendants of the Britishtrained Arab Legion. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence wrote that when he passed between these rusty crags his “little caravan fell quiet, ashamed to flaunt itself in the presence of such stupendous hills.” The unabashed members of the Desert Patrol, however, are proud to be photographed in their best bib and tucker. When not posing for visitors, they chase smugglers and renegade Bedouin.

Beyond the .ruins of the Nabatean temple and behind the Bedouin tents, the great massif ofjabal Rum shoots up to 1754m. A jeep, or better yet, a camel, can take you farther through the sheer rust-colored cliffs towering above the mudflats- These whopping slabs of granite and sandstone erupted through the desert floor millions of years ago, and their striattons in the bays and grottoes point toward prodigious vistas down the 30km-long wadi, The other-worldly lavender mountains cast against the empty sky have inspired the name Valley of the Moon.

For JD4 a Bedouin will lead you on a camel to a crack in the rocks, the origin of the springs that support all the wadfs life. Dark stains point out the conduits carved by the ancient Nabateans to conserve that precious water. You may also be shown Lawrence’s Well, where T.E. used to doze. The Bedouin can point to many mammoth boulders inscribed with millennia-old ‘ITiamudic graffiti. Such script, which evolved into modern Ethi-opic, can be seen from Ma’an to Meda’in Salih in Saudi Arabia.