Jericho

The road down into Jericho descends for forty minutes through an increasingly lunar landscape. The hills of the West Bank flatten and the vegetation thins and the air thickens and warms, and by the time you reach the floor of the Jordan Valley you are below sea level and the date palms that rise around the town feel tropical and strange and displaced from everything you have just seen. Jericho is the lowest city on earth and possibly the oldest — inhabited, according to the archaeological evidence, for at least eleven thousand years — and both of those facts do something odd to the way you inhabit it. You walk its streets with an awareness of depth, of layering, as though you can feel all that time pressing up from the ground beneath the tarmac.

The tell of Tel es-Sultan, which is the archaeological site of ancient Jericho, rises just northwest of the modern town as a mound of eroded earth studded with excavation pits and partially exposed walls. The Neolithic tower here, built around 8000 BCE, is one of the oldest stone structures on earth, and it sits in the open air under a tin roof, reachable by a footpath. I walked up to it in the early morning before the heat became serious, and stood at its base and put my hand against the stone and tried to locate the right feeling for that encounter. I am not sure I managed it. Some things are too old for the right feeling. But the air at that hour was cool and the site was empty and the birds were very loud and that was its own kind of sufficiency.

Hisham’s Palace, a few kilometres north of town, is what I had been least prepared for. Built by the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik in the early eighth century and devastated by an earthquake before it was completed, the palace complex has been partially excavated to reveal extraordinary mosaic floors. The Tree of Life mosaic — a single tree with three gazelles grazing beneath it, one of them being stalked by a lion — is reproduced on every Palestinian Authority postcard and tourist brochure, but the reproduction does not capture the thing itself: the stones are small and precise and the colours have survived thirteen centuries in the ground and the craftsmanship communicates something across all that time with a directness that is almost aggressive. The mosaic does not ask to be admired. It simply continues to exist, which at this point is enough.

Back in town, I drank fresh pomegranate juice at a café on the main square and sat for an hour watching Jericho conduct itself. The pace here is different from Ramallah or Nablus — slower, more deliberate, the heat enforcing its own protocols. Horse-drawn carts share the road with cars. The market near the centre sells bananas and dates and guavas grown in the surrounding irrigated farmland. An old man played backgammon across from a younger man who checked his phone after every move and was losing badly.

The cable car up to the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Temptation — built into the cliff face of the Mount of Temptation where Jesus is said to have fasted — offers the view of Jericho that every camera wants: the flat green palm-fringed plain, the Jordan River shining in the distance, the Dead Sea a silver strip, the hills of Jordan rising blue on the far side. I went up in the late afternoon and the haze gave everything a quality of unreality. The monk who sold me a bottle of water at the monastery shop wore a black robe and had a beard that reached his chest and charged me one shekel for the water and did not engage further, which seemed right.

When to go: October through March. The rest of the year the heat in this valley is genuine and unremitting — Jericho sits in a depression that catches and holds warmth with impressive efficiency. Arrive early in the morning regardless of season; the light on the tel at dawn is the best it gets, and the heat is still manageable.