Hegra is a Nabataean city of tombs in the desert of northwest Saudi Arabia, more than a hundred façades cut into outcrops of rose-gold sandstone, and nearly every one of them has writing on it. The Nabataeans were the desert traders who carved Petra, and this was their southern city on the incense road from Yemen to the Mediterranean. Many record the year the grave was sealed and the king reigning at the time, which makes this one of the best-dated Nabataean sites anywhere. Others carry warnings cut to keep anyone from disturbing the dead. Above the doorways carved guardians watch you come: eagles, griffins, sphinxes and snake-haired faces, wings spread. They moved incense and spices between empires and mixed their customers' styles into the stone. Greek eagles and medusa-like masks sit over a stepped crown that is entirely Nabataean.
You walk the necropolis with a Rawi, a local storyteller-guide, close enough for you to pick the inscriptions out above each door. The city lived on water reached by hand: about 130 wells cut straight down into the rock, tapping groundwater twenty metres below to grow crops in open desert. As the sun drops the sandstone shifts from honey to deep red, the stepped crowns throw long shadows, and the carving comes forward in the low light. Arabic calls the place Mada'in Salih, the Cities of Salih, after a prophet the Quran sent to warn the Thamud, who rejected him and were destroyed. For centuries travellers on the road to Mecca kept away from ground they took to be cursed. Beyond the tombs a 4x4 takes you out into the AlUla valley, among wind-carved rock towers, one of them a 52-metre elephant with its trunk to the ground. One tomb stands by itself in the middle of an open plain, cut from a single freestanding rock: Qasr al-Farid, the Lonely Castle. Round the far side the chisel marks simply stop partway down, four columns still waiting for a façade nobody came back to carve.