Walking through the pages of history

AT a coffee house, on a desert road, an ancient trade route where caravans once carried spices and silks from distant lands to Petra, I smoked my first hookah.

Forty three years after quitting smoking, the tobacco had a whiff of forbidden fruit as it glowed in its tiny metal dish on the elegant glass bowl that gives the ‘waterpipe’ an aura of mystique. With characteristic Bedouin hospitality, the host produced a fresh mouthpiece and showed me how to keep the pipe alight. A moment to savour.

Refugees were fleeing across the border from neighbouring Syria that morning so the Arab Spring was the main topic of conversation among Jordanians sipping tiny cups of strong black coffee and refreshing mint tea. Recalling the intonations of Munster Irish, desert tribesmen spoke in soft murmurings, striking figures in traditional headgear, the keffiyeh, a symbol of manhood and protection against the ever shifting sands.