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A honeymoon on horseback

Olivia Glazebrook

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Olivia Glazebrook and her husband brave the Jordanian wilderness

It was early April, and although deliciously hot during the day, it was cold at night. When we arrived back at camp before dinner we collapsed on to cushions, drank tea, and watched the evening sun turn the rocks a rich, warm orange. I would try to force myself to get up and have a shower before it got dark and cold, but it was such heaven just to lie there, bolstered by cushions and warmed by tea, and watch the last sunlight slide off the tops of the rocks, and an indigo dusk suffuse our surroundings. After showering (inevitably) in the half-dark, and hopping about on the sand with a towel, I dressed for dinner in the alluring combination of leggings, pyjama trousers, sheepskin slippers, several T-shirts, a couple of sweaters and a hat to cover my increasingly filthy hair. Fortunately we ate in almost pitch darkness, so no one could be startled — or dismayed — by such curious attire.

A capricious wind followed us about, blowing one way and then the other. Sometimes it dropped altogether, and then you could hear it begin again, rushing towards us with its melancholy sigh. One night it blew into our tent and rearranged all the furniture in the bedroom. I awoke pinned to the bed by a canvas cupboard, and wrestled with it in silence for a moment before clearing my throat and addressing my husband in my most helpless, wifely tones:

‘My love? The cupboard seems to have fallen on top of me.’

‘Oh dear, poor darling,’ came the solicitous reply, followed by a short silence, and then, ‘Snoooore…’

Weakened by giggles, I wrestled with the cupboard for a moment more before falling back to sleep. When I woke in the morning the cupboard and I were still locked in a familiar embrace.

On our final evening, before it got dark, I went for a walk up the narrow gorge behind our camp. Just a hundred yards from the tent, the silence was total. Pink sand was banked between the canyon walls which came so close together I could touch both. I climbed up heaps of tumbled rocks until I could see both the way I had come into the gorge, and the view out. Ahead of me, mountain after mountain reached to the horizon. A pair of doves clattered into the air from a ledge above my head, flapping noisily upward as if trapped in the rafters of a barn. I shimmied a little way up one of the canyon walls until I could perch on a ledge, and settled down on my haunches to hear the silence beating in my ears. After half an hour, as refreshed as if I’d swum in cold water, I returned to camp.