THE RAVINE. 
This view is taken from the Theatre, and represents the Excavations in the opposite 
cliffs; and the continuation of the chief eastern entrance to the City. The face of 
the rock is perforated in every accessible spot; and the prominent masses seem to 
have borne towers, and other defences of the pass. The bottom was flagged with large 
stones, not unlike the great Roman ways. But their level is now much broken up. 
Laborde conceiving that these excavations are tombs, remarks on the singular 
neighbourhood of this scene of mortality to the animation of the Theatre. “ What 
a strange habit of mind,” he observes, “the people of Petra must have possessed, thus 
to familiarize themselves so constantly to the idea of Death; as Mithridates (!) accustomed 
himself to poison, in order to become insensible to its effects.” 1 ■ 
Yet it is by no means clear, that any of these excavations were originally meant 
for tombs. Eor the excavations in the acknowledged Cemetery, outside the City, are 
not merely on a much smaller scale, but of a different form, being generally niches, 
cut into the shape of a coffin, and frequently in pairs, as if for members of the same 
family, and also frequently covered with mould and verdure; in all those points resem¬ 
bling the tombs surrounding Jerusalem; while within the Ravine they exhibit no 
imitation of the shape of the coffin, no verdure, nor any other covering than dust, 
nor that dust any other trace than those of the serpent and the lizard. 2 
The picturesque effect of the scene is less open to disputation. The rocks present 
an endless variety of colours, varying from crimson to the softest rose, and sometimes 
verging into orange and yellow; those are sometimes exhibited in broad stripes, changing 
and blending into each other like the hues of shot silk. But the general contrast of 
the cliffs with the sculptures singularly strikes the eye. Nature in her most savage 
wildness is brought into immediate connexion with art, sometimes capricious and romantic, 
but often graceful, and always new. All above is a succession of vast crags, battlements 
shaped by time and tempest, and sheets of colouring, which time and tempest may have 
only brightened. All below is a succession of colonnades, porticoes, and corridors; some 
approaching the purity of the Greek, and others mingling the styles of East and West; 
some minute and delicate, others broad, bold, and colossal; and all displayed with the 
rich effect of an Eastern climate, and in positions affording every advantage of light 
and shade. 
In those examples of every style two are predominant, the Egyptian and the Roman- 
Greek; the former visible in the frequent recurrence of truncated pyramidal forms, 
and the slightly inclined fronts and sides of the more massive monuments; the latter in the 
general floridness of decoration in the remaining columns, architraves, and bas-reliefs of 
the ruins which cover the site of the city, and in the principal sculptures of the rocks. 
1 Laborde. 
2 Roberts’s Journal. 
