HEGRA, SAUDI ARABIA’S FIRST UNESCO World Heritage-listed site, now has an official subtext: ‘The World’s Masterpiece’. To be honest, I first thought this a little hyperbolic. Really? It belongs to the world? To me? But that was before I went there and saw it and felt it for myself.
I won’t be quibbling now. It is a treasure. More than 130 tombs, funerary facades, inscriptions and cave drawings cut, etched and painted by the ancient Nabateans in outrageously monumental outcrops of sedimentary sandstone; a gnarled geology hewn
