“I asked, “and where are the Cities of Salih?” It was answered, “In none of the precipices about, but in yonder jebel”, whose sharp crags and spires shot up now above the greenness of a few desert acacia trees, great here as forest timber. “And, Khalil, thou shalt see wonders today of houses hewn in the rock,” some added, “and the hewn houses standing, wellah [or Wallahi, meaning By God!], heels uppermost, by miracle!” Other plainer men said, “This we saw not, but Khalil now thy way is ended, look, we have brought thee to Medain, where we say put not thyself in the danger of the Bedu…”
-from Chapter 3, Travels in Arabia Deserta by Charles Doughty (1843-1926), called by his fellow travellers Khalil, typically a Christian given name
Madā’in Salih, or the Cities of Salih, is a cluster of Nabatean tomb facades carved from standing sandstone outcrops near the desert town of Al-’Ula north of Medina. According to the Quran, Salih was a pre-Islamic prophet who warned his fellow Thamudi tribesmen to abandon their idol worship or risk destruction. They asked him to prove his divine witness by sending to them a pregnant camel, and when he did so they killed it rather than keep and care for it. Salih and a few fellow monotheists escaped the area before the tribe was killed amid earthquakes and lightning strikes.
Charles Doughty was the first European to see the tombs, named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008, sixty years after the European discovery of Petra’s equally impressive Nabatean tombs in Jordan. He arrived by camel in 1876 in the annual hajj pilgrimage caravan from Damascus in the care of some loyal guides who kindly overlooked the fact that he was a Christian.
There are controversial Saudi government plans afoot to promote this delicate ecological and man-made site for domestic and foreign tourists to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from oil, but recent reporting indicates they are, not unexpectedly, already falling apart. The one hotel town of Al-’Ula may thus be spared an onslaught of selfie-seeking day-tripping litter bugs.
I visited Madā’in Salih some years ago in a caravan of Land Rover enthusiasts, all Brits. We checked out the tombs and they dropped me at the bus station for a ride back to Jeddah via Medina. The bus had broken down so I flagged a share taxi, a big mid-70s Chevy Caprice, its interior tricked out with windshield pompoms and leather pads, a Quran on the back shelf and a perfume bottle glued to the dash, owned by a toothless bedu who invited me to the front seat, leaving room to squeeze another passenger between us.
I asked about the drop point in Medina, he said not to worry, he’d leave me at the bus station with hourly departures for Jeddah. What about prohibitions on non-Muslims entering the city? No problem, he said, that only held for the Prophets’s Mosque- directly across from the station it turned out- and besides I could hide inside the station until I left.
The taxi filled up with three rough hewn Saudis- the typical Al-’Ulaian is a far cry from the man purse-clutching, mirror-shaded, wanna-be princeling, turban-folded-just-so preening lobby lizards in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton- in the rear seat and the front’s middleman, so here I was, “in the danger of the Bedu” as they had warned Doughty.
No surprise here- our cigarette smoke choked conversation quickly turned to girls, those of the night bought in Jeddah by the hour and all those patrilineal cousins you marry straight out of middle school. I did not follow the conversation too well, but let us just say that my Egyptian Arabic vocabulary for sexual practice, learned twenty years earlier and then much forgotten, left me high and dry on the beach while the other 5 were howling with laughter.
When asked how such things went down in America, I answered in the same “on the one hand, and on the other…” manner I’d learned in all my mixed gender bull sessions in college dorms. In retrospect, in a foreign language and at 80 mph headed to Islam’s second holiest city, that was even funnier
The overhead highway signs on Medina’s outer ring road warned, “All non-Muslims, This Way”, pointing the opposite of where we were headed, and I was dropped at the bus station just as the mid-afternoon call to prayer began. Streams, rivers, and then flood tides of men passed me as I ducked into the station, but in Saudi Arabia I had forgotten the rules- all commercial spaces shut their doors and kick out their patrons for prayer time. So there I stood, my NY Yankee ball cap pulled down as far as I could tug it, but not low enough to miss seeing everyone staring at me as they passed, them wondering, Who dat?, and me wondering, Would maybe the last of those Bedu dangers from the Cities of Salih finally get me killed.