BEDOUIN ROADS
by Bernard Domenech - photos  M. VERIN

The Bedouin have always known a huge number of roads across their mountains, perhaps four or five thousand of them - but only a handful of men venture on them nowadays.

Memory is fragile, and yet these climbing routes are extraordinary, among the loveliest and the oldest in the world. It should be important to keep them in mind, and to see that they remain as they were when they were rediscovered.

Incredible walks on typical slabs	Incredible labyrinths of corniches and balconies

They let you pass from one valley to another, crossing a pass, to reach or to cross a plateau, a crest, a summit, through a labyrinth of complicated canyons, of corridors, of chimneys, of walls and fragile spurs, of miraculous slopes, of domes and of basins with a thin covering of soil, where struggling junipers try to grow in the mixture of fine sand and round quartz pebbles fallen from the sandstone ledges.

They can be fairly short or very long, from a hundred meters or less to more than two kilometers, and can cover more than 600 meters of altitude.. They usually lead to look-out points from where the Bedouin watched for the caravans to protect or ambush them - from an economic point of view it was much the same thing - and also to locate game. The ibex still find refuge on distant plateaux, reached with difficulty by humans, but where there is water and vegetation. Sometimes the Bedouin climbed to find medicinal herbs, which they used in quantity.

Summit domes of white sandstone

It isn't easy to follow these roads : the turnings are not obvious and the people who discovered them and use them - probably not so very long ago - didn't systematically mark them.

They didn't use cairns, but sometimes just stood up a large flat stone, like a wall to indicate a dead end - "No through road!" - piled up blocks of stone under an overhang or below a stretch of smooth rock, or cut handholds in the soft sandstone to help them over a nasty place, which they might need to come down later with a heavy load; they wedged a branch or a tree trunk into a crack or carved signs, which might not mean anything to us - and often mean nothing to the local people today - but which were clear pointers and directions at the time - even the simplest scribble.

Jumping above cracks and sicqs	Finding one's way among the mushrooms

This minimal signposting is enough even today, to keep you on the "right" road, if you are careful to pick out the deliberate marks and if you take the time to understand and to learn the logic. Things were simpler formerly, of course, since the knowledge of these roads was passed on, within the "family" from one generation to another. Even then, nobody knew them all, since hunting grounds are like gathering grounds for mushrooms today - one doesn't talk about them to strangers.

But with time, the people who knew them passed on, the traditional knowledge passed with them. forgotten or lost, they became legends (what happened to the beam which could be thrown over a siq to reach the summit of Jebel Rum?)

Bedouin roads often start in deep canyons

Most of the roads are ancient and go back a very long way  - for many we don't know how many years, but a few can be dated - an inscription on one of them takes us back to 600AD. However, some of them are modern: it was Hammad Hamdan who  was the first to climb the east face of Jebel Rum in 1972 by the route which is named after him (Hammad's Road 5b) and  by "The Eyes of Allah" (5a). Hammad was an instructor in the army, nowadays he is a garage owner in Wadi Rum. A marvellous climber, calm and collected! In any case, all these ancient roads can be difficult and are often very exposed. It is for you to trace out now, with no further clue, the two fine itineraries that Wilfried [Colonna] and I found a few years ago. The original discoverers are unknown. "The Inscribed Road" (3b) is the easiest and most direct way (about 2 hours generally) to climb the west face of Jebel Rum, on the right hand side of the corridor whose left hand side is taken by "Sabbagh's Road". Perhaps the sight of an ibex gave us the clue. You can come down again on the other side by "Hammad's Road" and cross the summit like this.

"The Missing Fingers" (4c) is more complicated, and follows a collection of ramps and of corridors on the north-east face of Khush Khashah : at the top, three flakes of rock leaning against a cliff represent the fingers lost by a hunter. From the summit, cross towards the south and come down by "Sabbagh's Road" : a  demanding day 's scrambling.

They often follow pool systems and cascades