RUINS OF A TRIUMPHAL ARCH. 
It is to be remembered that against Petra itself the Divine denunciation has been 
explicitly fulfilled. The whole area of the valley is a bed of ruins. The “line of 
confusion and the stones of emptiness” are scarcely more than the obvious expression 
for the havoc of the actual City. Though the fabrics, such as they were, formed 
from the rocks, are nearly indestructible, and will excite the wonder of many a future 
age,—Bozrah has become “a desolation, a waste and a curse.” 
The Arch-way in the Engraving, in the lower Roman style, is little more than 
a heap of stones. There appears to have been a central arch with two side ones, 
opening upon the esplanade which extended from the Theatre to the Doric edifice 
immediately under the rock of the Acropolis. In front a bridge, of which a portion 
remains, crossed the stream. On the hill are considerable ruins of temples and other 
public buildings, and portions of the esplanade still sweep round its base . 1 
Among the relics of the Arch lies a large stone, bearing a figure with expanded 
wings, which probably occupied a place on the Arch. From the pilasters and the 
fragments scattered round, the whole structure seems to have been loaded with ornament . 2 
This profusion, and the Greco-Roman character of the sculptured fronts in various 
instances, render it more than probable that the City was the object of considerable 
decoration by its Western masters, from the second century, when it first became 
a Roman province. But the Roman style was unfit to mingle with the Petrsean. 
Both were lavish of ornament; but the former was often lavish without luxuriance 
and costly without grandeur. The latter, alike from the magnitude of its scale and 
scene, was never rich without being superb nor simple without being sublime. 
The fulfilment of the prophecy does not require that this extraordinary and once 
beautiful City should be either wholly untrodden by man, or a place of unexampled 
horror. The denunciation which condemns it to eternal flame 3 seems to regard it 
only as a general representative of heathen blasphemy. But the peculiar allusions 
to its fall are perfectly compatible with a certain degree of habitancv. The Fellaheen, 
or Arabs, who haunt its cliffs and chasms, amount to several hundreds. It is not 
wholly destitute of quadrupeds; the camel is everywhere in Arabia, and the wild 
goat browses among its recesses; the eagle soars above its coloured pinnacles; partridges 
and pigeons wing the lower air; the note of the blackbird, and many of the smaller 
songsters, is heard; and in the season of flowers the sheltered chasms and the sides 
of the rocks are covered with bloom and filled with fragrance. But the inhabitants 
are the savage and the robber, and civilization is gone for ever. 
“ Hear the counsel of the Lord that He hath taken against Edom; and his purposes, 
1 Roberts’s Journal. 
2 Kinnear, 150. 
