Men, Monsters And Messiahs

JORDAN MAY BE SMALL, BUT THE COUNTRY’S SURREAL LANDSCAPES AND RICH HISTORY MAKE FOR AN EPIC HOLIDAY.

- MERAJ SHAH

‘Beware the ides of March’.

In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare famously wrote about a real-life soothsayer who tried to warn the Roman emperor of imminent danger. On March 15, 44 BC, on the steps of a Roman amphitheatre, a group of mutinous senators assassinated Julius Caesar. Nearly 2,000 years later, almost to the day, as I marvelled at the grandeur of Gerasa, an ancient Roman city in Jordan, that old prophecy came back to haunt the world in a far more virulent manner. I had been in Jordan for a week when the novel coronavirus’s shadow began looming over countries in the Gulf and Africa. I’d been guilty of ignoring travel advisories when I’d landed in Amman a few days back. A 10-year-old’s imagination had been fired up by David Lean’s epic, Lawrence of Arabia, and I’d wanted to visit Jordan ever since.