Petra is a city in Jordan that was carved rather than built: its temples and tombs are cut into the faces of rose-red sandstone cliffs instead of raised off the ground. You reach it through the Siq, a gorge more than a kilometre long and in places narrow enough to touch both walls. Then it splits, and the Treasury is standing in the gap, forty metres of facade cut whole out of the rock. This is the reveal every photograph of Petra is chasing, and it still works in person. Early in the day the low sun gets down into the gorge and takes the stone from shadow to warm rose. The Nabataean traders who cut all this also had to keep water out of it, and diverted the seasonal flood away from the Siq. After a flash flood killed twenty-two visitors here in 1963, Jordan rebuilt their dam at the mouth of the gorge.
Past the Treasury the path opens into the Street of Facades, rows of tomb fronts cut side by side into the cliff, and the scale keeps climbing as you go deeper toward the Royal Tombs. Step into one of the cool chambers behind those doorways and the walls run in bands of red, purple, ochre and grey, swirling where iron stained the sandstone. Nobody painted any of it, and the ceilings look painted anyway. Around eight hundred rock-cut steps wind up into the hills to Ad-Deir, the Monastery, a front fifty metres across and bigger than the Treasury, with a café opposite and a fraction of the crowd. A signposted staircase climbs the Al-Khubtha cliffs to a ledge directly above the Treasury, and from up there the facade you stood under that morning has shrunk to a single carved detail in an enormous wall. Until the 1980s the Bdoul Bedouin lived in these tombs, herding goats between two-thousand-year-old monuments. Most were moved to a village north of the ruins when Petra was listed, and many still work inside it. The carvings were somebody's house within living memory.