No Houmous for Breakfast:

Eternally baffled by the Middle East Geoff Hill went to Jordan in search of enlightenment, Houmous and John the Baptists head...

Amman, just after dawn. In the shade of an olive tree, sparrows savoured the blessed cool in the last few moments before the peace was shattered by the call to prayer.

However, they must have been Israeli sparrows, for they rose as one and tilted west through the rising heat, heading for the West Bank.

In Jordan, everyone, even sparrows, is from somewhere else. Down the long centuries, Mamlukes, Circassians, Chechens, Turks, Palestinians, Iranians and finally Iraqis, the boots of their Mercedes stuffed with dollars, have flocked to the country in such numbers that refugees now outnumber locals two to one.

With the sparrows gone, there was little of interest in Amman, since it was only a muddy village when it was chosen as the capital in 1921. John the Baptist's head was cut off there, but

it's in a box in Damascus.

No, the answer was to take to the road and leave town, which was an adventure in itself, since the last recorded use of an indicator in Amman was in 1948, and that was an accident caused by the left knee of the unusually tall chaffeur of the French ambassador, who was trying to fight off a bee which flew in through the open window of the Traction Avant given to him by the ambassador as a gift on his return to Paris.

"The benefit of all the refugees is that Circassian women are lovely. I saw one in Safeway this morning. Gorgeous," said Dig Bulmer, our eclectic and erudite Scottish guide as he swerved to avoid a wild-looking youth on a matching horse on the road out of town.

Our destination was Jerash, a well-preserved Roman city where after a gap of 2,000 years, chariot racing was making a comeback.

"Look at the manhole covers, and the flagstones angled so the chariot wheels didn't cut ruts into them. The Romans had it all: sanitation, order, baths and libraries, and then we descended into the Dark Ages. The abyss is never too far away," said Dig as we applauded the winner and wandered out of the arena and past miles of colonnades, arches, temples, shops and bath houses.

"Dig, you're getting very serious in your old age. Here, there's something that's always baffled me about the Middle East," I said, stopping to admire a particularly fine Corinthinian column. "If all the women are expected to be virgins on their wedding night and all the men are expected to be experienced, where

do the men get their experience from"

"The Chinese girls in Aqaba. Or poverty-stricken Hungarians exchanging favours for a tour of the desert," he said as we rounded a corner and came upon a pair of soldiers playing Beethoven on the bagpipes, one of the legacies of British colonialism, to a brace of large, pink Germans.

It was obviously time to leave, driving down the road to Madaba, home of a famous 6th Century mosaic map of the Middle East, in the floor of the town's Greek Orthodox church.

Outside, men sat around in cheap Chinese wellies under one of the ubiquitous posters of King Abdullah dressed up in one of his myriad Action Man outfits: the Western Diplomat, the Bedouin Arab, the Family Man, the Soldier.

But beneath his chubby affability lies the ruthlessness which made his father, the equally revered King Hussein, switch succession on his deathbed from his brother, Crown Prince Hassan, to Abdullah.

It is a ruthlessness shown by a story you will hear often in Jordan, of how Hussein asked Abdullah's brigadier to train him twice as hard as the rest of the army recruits. The brigadier duly did, only to wake one night with Abdullah's revolver pointed at his head.

"You have tested me enough," said Abdullah. "Once more, and I will kill you."

"You need to be tough to rule in the Middle East," as Dig put it. "That's why Saddam Hussein is still respected, if not liked, as a hero by many Arabs. And Mel Gibson, funny enough: you'll find a copy of Braveheart in most Jordanian homes."

As for the mosaic, it was remarkable, in spite of being almost destroyed by the builders who put up the church before the foreman got back from his lunch break and gave them a good thrashing with an olive branch.

The next morning, we stood at the top of Mount Nebo, on the same spot where Moses said: "Now there's a view to die for." Whereupon God took him at his word.

In the cool of late afternoon, we came to Karak, the Crusader's mountaintop castle which was the home of Reynald of Chatillon, as bad as his wife Stephanie was good.

He was wont to fling his captives with their heads in a wooden box so that they remained painfully conscious as long as possible, but when Saladin attacked the castle during a wedding, Stephanie sent down tea and buns to his Muslim hordes.

Saladin responded by directing his fire away from the newly-weds' bedroom, a more chivalrous act than when during a subsequent siege, the Crusaders sold their wives and children for food before finally surrendering, at which point Saladin spared all except Reynald, whose head he chopped off.

It is not, of course, Amman or Madaba or Karak that people come to Jordan for, but Petra, where we arrived next morning brimming with anticipation. Only to find that Laura Bush had arrived at the same time, and the place was temporarily closed.

We took refuge in the Titanic Cafe outside the gates, beside the Indiana Jones Gift Shop, which offered ancient traditional skills such as burning your memory cards onto CD.

"Why Titanic" I asked the owner.

"I don't know. It was my brother's idea," he shrugged.

In the dusty square, boys wandered to and fro with donkeys, calling optimistically: "Air-conditioned taxi, sir"

In the end, though, not even Laura Bush could spoil Petra: to walk all the way down the long canyon of the Siq and emerge suddenly to the face of the Treasury is one of those moments, like arriving in Venice by water, that will live with you for ever.

If you can imagine starting with a square block of sandstone and carving Florence out of it, you have some idea of what greets you as you wander around, wholly agog.

To avoid coming down with Stendhal's Syndrome, you might be better to acclimatise yourself at Little Petra, a sort of Nabatean commuter town a few miles away, where in the cool of early morning we wandered down the troglodytic gorge to see the only surviving paintings, a joyous ceiling scene of leaves and flowers, birds and cherubs created by an unknown optimist 1900 years ago.

Or simply stand and take in a silence so deep that you can hear the flutter of a passing sparrow, or the drone of a distant bee.

There are many theories as to how Petra came into being, but my favourite, if only because I just made it up, is that one Saturday Aaron the Troglodyte got up and decided to mow the lawn, then realised he didn't have one, so hauled out a chisel and spent the afternoon carving a nice pair of pillars either side of the cave.

Naturally, Mrs al-Faraoun next door was having none of this, and before long the al-Faraouns' cave sported a lofty architrave with an urn on top. And so on.

And if Petra is a miracle of man-made beauty, then Wadi Rum is nature's proof that it can do just as well, given time.

It was through here that Lawrence passed on his way to take Aqaba from the landward side, which was a bit of a surprise to the Turks who were all looking out to sea.

"He wasn't quite as successful at Tafileh," said Dig. "The night before the attack, he told the Arabs what a useless outfit they were, which annoyed them so much they left before dawn without him.

"He woke alone in the desert, chased after them so hard that he accidentally shot his camel in the back of the head and some time later walked into Tafileh dusty and dishevelled to find that the Arabs had taken it without him."

We mounted camels and followed Lawrence's trail across the burning sands, nodding off with the languorous, soporific gait of these most ugly yet noble of beasts, then climbed a mountain to the spring where Lawrence would come to strip and bathe, easing the skin complaints which tortured him in the heat.

And there we found, in the cool water, the smells of wild lavender and tarragon and the warm breeze whispering up from the endless desert, the peace and simplicity that he too found here, that most complex of heroes.

Factfile

For information:

The Rough Guide to Jordan, £13.99 is very good.