"The View The End Of The World [sic]."

Strong desert winds tear at the Jordanian flag outside Ajed’s mountaintop abode. The sound is a violent one, but the atmosphere inside his blanket hut is the essence of tranquility. We sip another cup of tea and gaze down at the imposing Monastery facade. Despite the rusty sign touting it as “The View The End Of The World,” few of the tourists milling about the ruins of Petra below will make the final trek up to this spot.

It’s like looking onto another world through a timeless window in the clouds. The past commingles with the future, eclipsing the fleeting and irrelevant present. Digital cameras memorialize remnants of an ancient civilization for future scrapbooks, while modern coins are exchanged for oxidized copies of those from a lost Nabatean age. The middleman is hardly noticed.

I was there with my camera hours ago. Now I am paused in the present, deep in conversation on unlikely topics with the living, grinning, chain-smoking Petra. Born in a cave in a nearby Bedouin village, Ajed has spent his twenty-four years peddling donkey ‘taxis’ and fake artifacts to the daily tide of tourists. When I showed up this afternoon, he pushed a “Jade-stone necklace, nice with my eyes.” Soon, though, we were sharing a pot of tea and our thoughts on love, trust, sexism, and how windswept pinnacles can transcend it all.

The sun is turning in for the day, and Ajed suggests we witness it from the Monastery roof, so we descend from his home and scale that of the bygone monks who shared these sands. Sitting cross-legged atop a world wonder, we watch the famed pink hues of the Rose-red city filter through flapping huts dotting the horizon.

As the light fades, one hut blazes brighter than the rest, and we realize it’s on fire. We scramble down and run towards it, but Ajed’s uncle intervenes. We’re not to approach it, he shouts in Arabic dialect from an adjacent peak. That hut belongs to a drunk and a member of the opposing tribe. Our presence would bring trouble and suspicion.

While the winds escort most tourists out through the Siq, here the flames and chaos pick up. The only high-plateau local with a cell phone, Ajed instantly becomes the relay point between silhouetted, red keffiyeh-clad men shouting across the darkening desert and technology-laden youth spotting smoke from the valley below. Stuck in a limbo all my own, I watch as the life savings of a Bedouin family from the wrong tribe disintegrate into the night air, becoming just another vestige of these lands.