Journey through Arabia Petraea

In 1828, a young Frenchman leaves Cairo in Bedouin dress, at the head of a small caravan of dromedaries, with guides from Sinai and an engineer, Linant de Bellefonds. Their goal: Petra, the Nabataean city hidden behind the rocks of Edom, which Léon de Laborde means to measure and draw rather than guess at.

By way of Suez, the Egyptian tombs of Serabit el-Khadim and the granite gorges of Sinai, the caravan reaches the fortress of Aqaba. There, under the anxious eye of the governor Hassan Agha, they must wait for the Alawin chiefs, negotiate in the divan and sit out a feigned quarrel among the drivers, before heading up the Wadi Araba towards Mount Hor and the tomb of Aaron.

Then the valley opens. For eight days, Laborde and Linant camp in a tomb and survey the theatre, the Khazneh, which the Arabs call Pharaoh's Treasury, and El Deir, which no traveller had yet approached. Around them prowl the fear of plague coming from Gaza and the hostility of the fellahin.

The return crosses another Sinai: the loyalty of Hussein, the Towara hunter, the monastery of St Catherine, which one enters at the end of a rope, and the rocks covered with inscriptions in the Wadi Mukattab.

A book by a draughtsman and a scholar, in which the Bible, the Nabataean merchants and the pilgrims of old prepare the encounter with a sandstone city that Europe barely knew. Who, then, were these people who carved their palaces out of the mountain?