"You might want to try climbing up to the top," Hugh suggested, without a huge amount of conviction. "The view is absolutely splendid." Most of us had collapsed on the stone seats in the shade, but our collective honor was saved by the mountain goat, who began sprinting up the almost vertical steps in his miraculous seven-league wingtips. (I later discovered that he had gone to Oxford the year I was born, which made me feel even older and less fit than I am.) Meanwhile, Houada was busy demonstrating the brilliance of Roman acoustics by whispering sweet nothings into a hole in the wall on the far side of the theater, while I pressed my ear to an opening and pretended I could hear him. But instead of Houada's voice, it was the unmistakable whine and screech of bagpipes that suddenly shattered my eardrums.

Striding into the arena, dressed in full regimental regalia—with the addition of red-checked kaffiyehs—was a group of Bedouin in kilts, playing the kind of rousing marches that had helped the British Army color so much of the world's map a tasteful shade of pink. It was a surreal image. Surrounded by the remains of one great empire, playing the martial music of another, the Bedouin cheerfully stomped around, banging their drums and wheezing into their bagpipes, winding up their bizarre performance with a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of "Ode to Joy."

Today, my friends," said Houada, "we are going into the desert to see the castle at Azraq, where your Lawrence wrote part of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom."

As a child of the sixties, my Pavlovian response to Houada's announcement was to see Peter O'Toole standing on the crest of a sand dune, his white robes swirling in the wind and his heartbreaking cornflower-blue eyes looking straight into mine. But the reality was that "El Orence" had holed up in one dank room of this castle during the cold and gloomy winter of 1917–18, quite probably gazing into the eyes of his companion, Sharif Hussein bin Ali. Here's how he describes their arrival:

"It was to be Ali's first view of Azraq, and we hurried up the stony ridge in high excitement, talking of the wars and songs and passions of the early shepherd kings, with names like music, who had loved this place; and of the Roman legionnaires who languished here in yet earlier times."

Well, the shepherd kings may have loved this place, but the general consensus, at least among the ladies in our group, was that it was "a bit grim," and we all decided that we'd had quite enough of El Orence's sadomasochistic desert chic, and retreated to our nice air-conditioned bus.

"I thought you might be in need of some wine, women, and song after Azraq, so this afternoon we are going to visit one of my favorite places in the whole of Jordan," Hugh told us, as we barreled past a slow caravan of dusty oil tankers grinding their way back from Iraq. "Qusayr Amra was originally part of a much larger complex that included a caravanserai, baths, and a hunting lodge—all probably built around A.D. 711 by the Umayyad caliph Walid I. But the most fascinating aspect about the surviving building, which I've always thought of as a sort of pleasure palace, is its eighth-century frescoes."