Petra, Jordan’s famous city of stone, faces a preservation struggle

We’ve been hiking a narrow canyon for nearly half an hour, hemmed in by huge sunset-colored cliffs, and the suspense is killing me.

Where’s Petra? 

(Laris Karklis/The Washington Post)

“It’s becoming clear why it was lost for so long,” quips one of my fellow travelers to the ancient Middle Eastern city.

Finally, rounding a hulk of rock, I spot a sliver of Petra’s most famous monument, al-Khazneh, or the Treasury. The two-story facade with its Greek-inspired columns is the first thing you see when you reach the end of the canyon, or Siq. Film buffs know it as the temple where Harrison Ford found the Holy Grail in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

Petra, Jordan: Where to stay, where to eat, what to do and more

Ever since I’d watched Indy gallop away from the striking rock-carved edifice, I’d wanted to see it with my own eyes. And what better year than 2012, the 200th anniversary of Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt’s rediscovery of Petra in 1812? I had 2¹ / ₂ days in the city — part of a nine-day tour of Jordan with the U.K. company Exodus — and I intended to take advantage of every second.

In real life, Petra — Greek for “rock” — was the religious capital of the Nabateans, an ancient civilization that once ruled much of what is now Jordan. These wealthy spice traders built Petra as a massive complex of monuments, tombs and marketplaces beginning aroundthe 6th century B.C. In its heyday, Petra served as a global crossroads, a place where camel caravans laden with frankincense and other goods stopped to hawk their wares.

Even now, standing before the Treasury in the cool Valentine’s Day sunshine, it was easy to conjure such a scene. A constant clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the bellows of colorfully blanketed camels and a flood of harried Arabic bounced off the high rock walls as tourists gawked up at the Treasury. (Unlike in “Indiana Jones,” the Treasury doesn’t hold a labyrinth of rooms — just a shallow recess and a royal tomb that’s not open to the public.)

Walking down Petra’s main path, or “spine,” I entered a more open mountainous area dotted with large caves, which housed most of Petra’s five Bedouin tribes as recently as 1985. That’s when Petra became a UNESCO World Heritage site, and many Bedouins had to move to a small government-built village overlooking Petra called Umm Sayhoun. Some resisted, though, and still live in Petra’s caves.

Perched on higher cliffs around me were arched entryways leading to the elegantly carved, high-columned royal tombs. Bedouins trotted by, trying to sell me donkey, camel and horse-carriage rides, shouting such phrases as “Nice experience in a Bedouin Ferrari?” And although Harrison Ford was nowhere to be seen, I got a kick out of Petra’s own “Johnny Depp,” a camel rider with kohl-lined eyes, a long black beard and a “Pirates of the Caribbean” T-shirt.

But although Petra retains much of its huckster spirit, its preservation is on shakier ground.

The Nabateans carved Petra out of sandstone, a soft rock that’s easily damaged by wind, rain, earthquakes and flash floods. Many of the monuments most exposed to the elements, such as the Royal Tombs, are already highly degraded. The civilization’s ingenious hydrology system, which diverted the floodwaters that regularly gush through the Siq, has fallen into disrepair.