Aqaba, Jordan Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon, called the most beautiful desert in the East. A gorgeous emptiness, a sandy, drifting desert punctuated by hard, wide platters of baked clay, salty and cracked, and mounds of rubble at the feet of sand-lapped, knife-sharp granite cliffs and peaks. Further into the desert, these turn mostly to softer hills and cliffs, striped and colourful sandstone rounded by the steady winds, thrusting abruptly out of the moving sand. This is where T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, struck by the beauty of a particular rock formation, named it, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom", after his book of the same name. It should be noted that the seven pillars of his book have nothing to do with the stone formation he named in the Wadi. Lawrence was very good
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