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take it out again the next night.
    Lily soaped herself and released more water from the sponge, soaped and washed again and again until the water in the basin was clouded with sand. Finally, she stepped out of the basin, dried herself, and dressed.
    ***
    She was surprised to find Gideon in the kitchen, helping Jalil with dinner.
    Jalil lined a large platter with flat Bedouin bread piled it high with mutton, eggs, and rice and set it in the center of the table. He put a warmed, damp towel at each place.
    They ate with their hands, folding a piece of the bread around the rice and mutton, their hands greasy with mutton fat, laughing as it ran down their chins with each portion, reaching for the damp towels between mouthfuls.
    When they finished, Jalil brought out cups of sticky-sweet tea that left Lily thirstier for drinking it, and they leaned back and talked.
    “Where does the water come from?” Lily asked. “You truck it in to the cistern every day?”
    “There’s a high water table here,” Gideon told her, “with springs and wells. Ain esh-Shallaleh , the Spring of the Waterfall. It’s called Lawrence’s Well by some. He used Rum as headquarters for a time during the last war.” He tilted his chair back precariously, then leaned forward. The chair legs landed on the floor with a bang. “There’s a Nabatean temple here dedicated to the Lady Allat, and some Thamudic inscriptions.”
    “The Lady Allat?” asked Lily.
    “The Lady Allat, the daughter of God, Goddess of the Moon, the maiden, the mother, the wise woman. She’s all these things. She’s even mentioned in the Koran. Herodotus called her the Arabian Aphrodite.”
    “You’ve been here before?”
    Gideon nodded. “At the Nabatean Temple.”
    Lily thought about it, and about Gideon helping Jalil in the kitchen instead of being locked in the room on the other side of the outpost.
    “You’ll show me the temple tomorrow?”
    “No,” he said. “Tomorrow, you will go to Petra.”
    “Petra?”
    “A wonderful place,” Jalil said. “ Al-medina al-wardah , the legendary rose-red city.”
    “But why?” she asked him.
    “Glubb Pasha says you must learn to shoot a gun.”

Chapter Four
    Lily turned the key in the old Buick and pulled out the choke. It whined and coughed and finally caught.
    Jalil leaned into the car and smiled. “Be careful.” He gestured toward the road. “A ghula , a witch, dwells hidden in the caves, lying in wait, ready to jump out and devour whoever passes by.” And then he laughed. “If you enter the cave of a witch you will not leave alive.” He threw out his arms in a helpless gesture and laughed again. “Maybe.”
    After a quick breakfast of eggs and what was left of last night’s bread, Jalil had told her about the car that was parked in the yard of the Outpost early this morning. It was an old Buick, he said, that belonged to Glubb Pasha.
    Jalil had made a pot of Bedouin coffee, boiled up three times and laced with sugar and cardamom. He gave the first cup with the foam to Lily, making a show of pouring it from a height to create the froth.
    She suspected that the offering was a bribe of some sort, that she was going to be asked to do something difficult. Gideon confirmed the suspicion when he spread out a British Ordinance Map on the table.
    “Jalil has already filled the canvas bag and your canteen with water,” Gideon told her. “And boiled you some extra eggs for the trip.”
    “What trip?”
    “Abu Huniak radioed me,” Jalil said. “You’re borrowing his old Buick. I filled it with petrol.”
    “Abu Huniak?”
    “Glubb Pasha. We call him Abu Huniak, little jaw. Part of his jaw was shot off in the Great War.” Jalil ran his fingers along the thick stubble on the right side of his chin to demonstrate. “He doesn’t mind if we call him that. We do it with love.”
    Glubb Pasha was Colonel John Glubb, British officer and commander of the Arab Legion, who had trained Bedouin to form the Desert