twice, until they came to Al Qasr just beyond one of the main streets in Shmeisani, not terribly out of the way, but far enough from the bustling center, and Nasr was right, Al Qasr was good for them, so appropriate they were at home from the first day. Yes the furniture looked like a secondhand furniture store thinly disguised with a quick overlay of blankets and drapes from the downtown souk, but its sparse shadowy rooms were quiet and overheated on this wintry night, a warmth comforting to Alia’s thin frame that ached in the cold and to Adam’s lanky body racked with a dry, hacking cough which would not go away. Al Qasr was good for them, a small hotel whose name meant castle, there might have been three dozen rooms, but patrons? The narrow, western style lobby was always deserted, the dining room empty except for a hard core of midday and late night carousers. Jordan was not dry as Adam had predicted, on the contrary, it was a desert watering hole for thirsty Arabs from far away Kuwait and nearby Saudi Arabia who came to load their cars with alcohol which became contraband as soon as they crossed the border. If questions were asked, inspections made, as they were, a friendly gift or two usually smoothed things over with customs officers, or so it was said. The sleepy pace, the somnolent rhythms of life in a small hotel—it was winter, a quiet time they deduced although in fact it was usually that way—made a comfortable shelter, a place to get their bearings, regroup was Adam’s word, before setting in motion the reason for being there. On Friday they went to jum‘a, midday prayers, at Abu Darwish, a black and white basalt and stone mosque in an older part of town where the people did not greet them enthusiastically, looked at them suspiciously wondering what on earth these strange looking foreigners were doing in their world, but when they showed themselves to be at home with the prayers, they said nothing and left them alone. Still, since it was the only time they were not cordially received, and even the taxi-driver chose that occasion to overcharge them, it became an indelible counterpoint against which all the kindness was remembered. They both studied Amman from the taxi as it took them out of Shmeisani and through the heart of downtown Amman, a valley formed by the confluence of seven mountains, then up another mountain on the opposite side of town, up to the mosque. Their impressions of the previous night were confirmed, amplified, a beautiful city on a small scale with an architectural solidity rooted in its pre-Roman origins and those readily identifiable remains of great public building from the Roman era. When the business of bringing the city back to life in the 1920s and again in the 1970s was undertaken, they went about it slowly, one eye on the past, one on the present and a third gazing with trance-like fixity on a future which might or might not come into being. Things happen slowly in the

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