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| Qasr al Farid or The Lonely Tomb, Mada'in Saleh, Saudi Arabia. Amazing photo by Richard Hargas |
The title of this chapter is an homage to M. C. Escher's famous lithograph of the impossible Penrose staircase, Ascending and Descending. I'm a big fan of Escher's visual paradoxes and the way he plays with architectural spaces. The abandoned ruin that Zahara finds in chapter 28 is a place where space (and time) bends back on itself. Zahara's paths do not end where they appear to; you cannot walk a straight line through the ruins.
Musical theme for this chapter:
The lullaby Zahara sings to herself is Lala Salama. It's a Swahili lullaby from Tanzania (Nazeem is originally from what-is-now Tanzania, and his mother used to sing it to him before she died.)
Zahara spins thread (or forgets to) with a drop spindle. A drop spindle is a very simple device: a small weight that can spin and a spot to attach and wind the thread or yarn. A spoon will do! I have made a good deal of thread using a drop spindle. Zahara would typically place a chunk of cleaned fibers (in this case, goat hair,) over one shoulder and twist the leading edge into a thread. This is attached to the spindle and wrapped a couple of times. Then the spindle is set to spinning and your task is to pull fresh thread from the bundle and to loop the yarn around the spindle whenever it gets too long.
Making one ball of yarn doesn't take too long. Making enough thread to weave an entire outfit--or a tent!--takes a long time. Zahara would have been spinning pretty much whenever there was goat hair available to spin, whether sitting, standing, or walking about.
The ruins are from a fictional civilization, but inspired by the archaeological remains of the Nabatean cities of Mada’in Saleh and Petra. The photo shows an enormous rock-hewn tomb at Mada'in Saleh, decorated with carved pillars and a staircase motif (which reminds me of the Escherian theme). The city has 131 of these impressive tombs, though this is probably the largest, along with wells and granaries and houses thhat ordinary people lived in.
The Nabatean civilization arose between the 4th and 2nd centuries BCE and was conquered by the Romans in 106 CE. Petra is now located in Jordan, while Mada’in Saleh is in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has a wealth of underexplored archaeological sites for several reasons:
1. The area used to be fairly lush, so people built towns and cities and monuments.
2. Then everything dried out and people abandoned the old sites. Desert conditions are great for preserving archaeological sites. Nothing is rotting or getting buried under layers of plants and no one wants to bulldoze everything and put up high-rises.
3. Until recently, the Kingdom has not been enthusiastic about the ancient past. It has only recently begun encouraging more archaeological study and tourism at these sorts of sites. (Satellite imaging has probably helped a lot with finding sites way out in the desert, too.)
The civilization in the book is fictional, not taken directly from the Nabateans. (For starters, it's meant to be older.) The ruins are also located inside a valley (more like Petra's location,) rather than out on an open plain. The narrow, canyon-like space Zahara passes through is based on the siq at Petra and the route to Jabal Ithlib at Mada'in Saleh. It's hard to do the siq justice in writing, so here is a video of it:
The ancient Nabateans carved niches for their deities and rooms for worship down here. Their deities were apparently shaped like slabs of stone, known as betyls. (Bet=house, el=god.) The Nabateans practiced animal sacrifice (which is still common) and were reported to practice human sacrifice. The book's fictional civilization, which the characters find scattered ruins of, definitely practiced human sacrifice.
Finally we have the prison. Obviously this is a confusing part of the book and I am not going to explain what is going on because that would be spoilers. The scene was inspired by T. E Lawrence's account of being captured and tortured in an Ottoman prison (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom). Lawrence's story is... largely untrue, at least according to Scott Anderson (Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East). That said, the account is not entirely false. Lawrence was captured and he most likely was tortured.
I have read a lot about prisons, mostly contemporary, but for an account of the prisons of the Ottoman Empire in Nazeem's era I turned to Griffith's The History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons. It is an old book, so don't expect modern language.
In general, pre-modern prisons suffered from the fact that imprisonment is expensive and no one likes criminals. Conditions therefore tended to be abysmal and the torture of the accused in order to extract confessions was often seen as a bonus deterrent. Ottoman prisons were no better or worse than the norm, which is to say, bad.
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