The Nabataeans ruled over it from the sixth century BC; spices and silk from India, ivory from Africa and incense from Arabia changed hands along it.The King’s Highway, the “Tariq al-Sultani”, winds for nearly 1,200 kilometres through the jebels that separate the Dead Sea from the high desert plateaus. Way of the Philistines, Via Maris, Via Traiana Nova or road of the Levant, it is a crossroads where the East meets the West, and humankind meets History. It greets pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem or Mecca, remembers the Great Arab Revolt led by Lawrence of Arabia, brushes past the goat-hair tents of the Bedouin. From Aqaba to Aleppo, by way of Petra and Damascus, it crosses Jordan and then Syria: a proud, suspended road, where the donkey stays on its feet despite the violent wind that orders it to lie down.
“In 2002, during my round-the-world trip by bicycle, I was arrested by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, accused of spying. Once released, I discovered the hospitality of the men and women of the King’s Highway. A few years later, I set off again for Jordan and Syria to pay tribute to those who had helped me,” says Christophe Cousin. The journey begins on a fishing boat on the Red Sea. The fishermen’s fishing ground is hemmed in by borders: Israel, from which they keep five hundred metres or a kilometre away, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. One day, they hooked a fish bigger than their boat; from ten in the morning until five in the evening, they towed it as far as the royal palace, where the royal family, on holiday, lent them a hand, before they had to cut the line so as not to sink. Then a train links the port to the open-cast mines of Wadi Rum: in Jordan, the desert tastes of phosphate. Mohamed Al-Masri has been driving it for more than twenty years. The son of a railway inspector, he grew up in Ma’an station: “trains run in our blood”. Further on, an old Bedouin lives off his camels, their milk and their sale: everything he needs is in the desert.
The former little fishing village, devoured by developers, has tripled in size in five years, to the point of becoming elusive.
For the man of the desert, train times do not matter: only one time counts in his eyes, the time of prayer.Petra presents itself as a succession of mirages and misunderstandings. You expected a cave city at the bottom of a gorge; it is a small town that opens its arms, and Mohammed Ali Al-Nawafleh who opens his door. The sculptor draws his forms from the site and the surrounding nature. The civilisation of the Nabataeans left its mark on History, he says, but no one takes an interest in their grandsons, “the new Nabataeans of Jordan, the masters of stone”. At the foot of the temple, a souvenir shop and a royal couple recreated for the tourists reign over a kingdom of jesters. In town, the sheikhs, tribal chiefs, receive guests in the diwan, the hall for grand receptions, and any serious conversation there begins with a cup of coffee. When a man wounds or kills another, customary law exiles the attacker and his family, and prevents revenge: no one turns to the state. On the road to Amman, Bedouin women have pitched their tent: they follow not a herd but the harvests, three or four times a year. In Amman, Wissam Ottaké points out the Vertex tower, thirty-four storeys, one of the six or seven that the new Abdali district will have. Then the Dead Sea, 417 metres below sea level: with the overexploitation of the Jordan, it has lost a third of its area in fifty years.
As a reading companion, Joseph Kessel; as a mattress, water at 1,240 kilos per cubic metre, in which you float without effort.Crossing from Jordan into Syria means leaving the south for the north, heat for cold, the king’s secret police for the president’s mukhabarat. Filming the road there is almost impossible: permits are granted only for the cities, as if the spaces linking them did not exist. Damascus, “the eternal”, is mentioned in Genesis, and it is said to be as old as glass. Ahmed Al-Halaq learned the art of blowing it from his father: the Phoenicians may have discovered glass, but the people of Damascus were the first to blow it. His finest piece he made to repair a dialysis machine, after two weeks at the foot of the furnace. The worst is winter, when the furnace has to be stopped and rebuilt by hand, with cold, damp earth: “a little death”. Every morning, the Al Malik Al Zahir hammam offers refuge. There, Rachid Al-Halaq has proclaimed himself the storyteller of Damascus, to revive a tradition that television has almost wiped out; the story of Antar and Abla, 3,200 pages, takes him a year and a half. For nearly twenty years, he has been putting on his show at the Al-Nawfara café. In a lingerie shop, Maha offers her good customers a chocolate: inside, a pair of knickers.
Seen from Mount Qasioun, the capital looks like an old woman who has lain there since the dawn of time.
She has seen the empires of the earth rise, shine, then collapse.
Hafez al-Assad and his descendants share the city’s walls with the posters of the big brands.
According to local tradition, Jesus will return to earth here at the Last Judgement; the mosque also houses the tomb of John the Baptist.In Syria, you go to sleep at the feet of dolls and wake up among cars: a 1954 Pontiac picks up the hitchhiking traveller. Between a beautiful woman and a beautiful Pontiac, Omar Al-Saidawi chooses the Pontiac. His father died twenty-four years ago, and he can still smell him in the car. At the monastery of Mar Musa, 1,300 metres up, 263 steps separate night from day. The monks help Christians and Muslims to draw closer, and here, God is called Allah. One of them, from Al-Hasakah, near the Turkish and Iraqi borders, had come to question the desert; he discovered that God, instead of being an answer, is himself a question. On Arwad, Syria’s only island, a boatbuilder watches his sons abandon the trade, and fibreglass replace wood, for those who want to go fast. In Aleppo, Abdel-Kader Mossalee, “the king of meat”, cooks by instinct, with all his senses, and calls himself the last guardian of the city’s old cuisine: meat with cherries, pine nuts, plenty of oil and butter. The journey ends further on, alone, among ruins. “Since we filmed it, this road is no more than an echo of the past. The war has ravaged the region,” writes Christophe Cousin.
1954, the year of winter in France, and of spring in Syria, where democracy blossomed again.
Resafa, the ancient Sergiopolis, 150 kilometres from Aleppo: in their thousands, caravan traders and pilgrims once celebrated the end of their journey here.“For with every sunset, there is a new morning to embrace.”Christophe Cousin