All the impressions created by the general aspect of this City are characteristic and 
forcible. The choice of the site may have been natural to a people desirous of security 
in ages of violence; for such a position, defended by resolute men, must have been 
impregnable. The sublimity was the work of Nature; but the taste, the labour, and 
the ornament, were the work of man. “The most striking feature” is not so much in 
the existence of any one work of surpassing stateliness, as in their multitude, in the 
unwearied variety of such labours along the whole extent of the perpendicular rocks 
adjacent to the main area, and throughout the lateral valleys and chasms, the entrances 
of many of which are decorated with every imaginable style of architecture; many 
more, probably, remaining to reward the research of travellers in safer times. 1 
1 Biblical Researches, ii. 529. 
EXCAVATIONS AT THE EASTERN END OF THE VALLEY. 
The cliff opposite to the Theatre is largely excavated, but among those works the 
one given in the Vignette is of superior design and preservation. The front presents 
an entablature and pediment, supported by four columns, and surmounted with an 
urn. The entrance is about twelve feet from the ground, and recedes considerably 
within the cliff, the rock extending fifteen feet forward on each side. The rock is 
on each side also hewn into an open gallery, supported by five pillars, two tiers of 
built arches supporting the ground between the colonnades, which thus forms a kind 
of terrace in front of the entrance. 1 
The architects of Petra had evidently a strong sense of beauty. Their choice 
of position, in all their more elaborate designs, is always admirable. The view from 
the platform in front of those edifices, whatever might have been their purpose, must 
have been most captivating. The City, in its pomp and animation below; the sur¬ 
rounding cliffs, in every variety of form and colour, and the whole seen through an 
atmosphere without a stain, and under a heaven without a cloud, must have formed a 
combination altogether unrivalled. 
1 Roberts’s Journal. 
