I don't remember when we got to Wadi Rum, I only remember how we got there. We had taken the new desert highway from Azraq to Ma'an, arriving there at night and entering the hotel beside the old white mosque ...
No, that's not it, that's how we got to Akaba! You see, the whole thing is muddled, deserts loose their names, highways stretch out in my memory like lost ribbons. I remember now, we went to Wadi Rum after a week on the beach with the Bedouin in Akaba. In fact we went to Wadi Rum twice, once with Shosh and once just the two of us. Before I go any further, let me recommend a fine Bedouin guide, his name is Oudi Mtiar and he can be reached at 2032 859. His family is adorable and special mention must be given to his baby daughter Mariam and his rambunctious little boy, adorable loveable ticklish little Ahmed.
I can give you a physical description of the Wadi in as few words as possible. It is flat with huge canyon like rocks forming streets and avenues in it. Economy of language is the best justice you can do to a place like that. We took the car in about 12 km and twisted and turned, up dunes and down dunes until we found a niche in a mountain face and camped there; building a fire and roasting the chicken we had bought and had slaughtered for us in town.
Lawrence, it seems, had also been in Wadi Rum, and his description of the place is plastered on the walls of the Tourist Information Centre. But it is in the desert where you can come face to face, if even for a day, with a certain hard reality. An implacable rock of a reality. For this I will refer you to T.E. Lawrence's description of the desert God.

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness of this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair or their carnal unworthiness of Him and by the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables. This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being.

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A God of Negations.

To the desert, then, and to the God of the Horizon.