Cortina Inverno

66
When the
map is the
treasure
I
was staying in Petra, Jordan, for 12
days for a photographic shoot of the rose
red City. As an alpinist, though an inexperienced
one, I had reached new vantage
points, after two or three days of
travel by a mule, some solitary and scarcely visited.
It was the year 1990 and both the tourist guides and
organization to visit Petra were rather imprecise;
therefore I was able to wander where I wished to and
see what the site had to offer. Quite happy with what
I had already accomplished, I could have come back,
yet I decided to take some time to visit Qa’ Disi, next
to Wadi Rum, the desert where Lawrence of Arabia
was said to have hidden. There, helped by a
sand storm and some luck, I met Sheik Jleil
Abu Kayed, the top authority on the area and
chief of all the tribes. In that sea of dust and
rocks I spent two days in the home where he
lived with his three wives and 35 children. We
were waiting for the storm to drop so I could journey
with him to the mysterious destination of Qa’
Disi. We set off at dusk; after two hours off road, we
stopped in an infinite maze of mountain passes that
sank in the sand. I felt I was living a movie scene: the
sheik was coming forward with his flapping mantle
toward the base of a gigantic boulder, walking
with the same ease as mountain people move on the
rocks. I followed him, a little behind his imposing
figure, until I realized I was walking on a bed of flint
stones, arrow tips, cutting blades, sharpened chips:
a true deposit.
Most probably, precious tools were made on
that site. I would have stopped, but the sheik kept
striding up, so I was content to put a couple of
handfuls in my pockets. Shortly after, we arrived at
a fissure on the base of the mountains where a huge
rock was leaning against the great face wall, leaving
only a 50 centimeter wide crack. I had made it,
oltreconFine
I had reached the site that keeps the most ancient
geographic map of the world, engraved in the rock.
I had heard about it from Edoardo Borzatti, an
archeologists from Florence university, who had
not revealed the precise location in order to study
it thoroughly before letting out the piece of news.
A boulder of some tons with an almost level surface
of 3 by 1.5 meter was lying there, embedded almost
in the darkness with a series of paths joining
some forty cupels of different sizes. On top of this
rock, Aby Kayed stood, fiery of his secret, talking
loudly to himself in an Arabian language that, unfortunately,
we could not understand. The artefacts
he pointed to, surely dated back to the Neolithic age,
from 12,000 to 9,000 years B.C. when Humans
started to become sedentary and farmers, and were
likely meant to show the paths between settlements
to avoid getting lost in that maze of mountains and
sand canals. A map, jealously hidden from the eyes
of other tribes or from nomadic robbers in transit,
that had remained such for ten thousand years. On
one side, a recent signs of use of a cereal grindstone
had erased other precious signs. I was fascinated,
breathless. I took pictures and looked,
looked and took pictures, my heart was pounding.
He stood, with a finger in a cupel, and the
other pointed at a distant mountain through
the small slit that let thin blades of sun in. Up
there was probably the site corresponding to that
cupel. A veritable map, a topographic map with
paths connecting all the tribes, the family groups
to other groups.
I would have stopped there two days to take
photos, but he drew me further across more sand
canals and around other mountains to show me,
other mysterious and fascinating rock engravings
of armless figures on an overhanging wall;
below, on the rock some small graffiti with camels
and ibex; finally other cupels lying upside down to
grind a little wild wheat and where to live sheltering
beneath the overhanging walls.
Back to Italy, I tried to get more information
and by comparing the map with an aerial- photogrammetric
relief of the area I discovered that it
was possible to find a correspondence between the
cupels and the locations of human settlements in
the surrounding mountains and valleys. 23 years
have gone by and still I often wonder whether those
sites have become the destination of tourists following
their guide or if they continue to be solitary
as they have been for over 10,000 years.