Roman ruins, half-finished concrete structures, modern military bases and refugee camps dot the highway. The harsh, landscape tells the story of past and present civilisations who have tried to tame it. This is Jordan's Black Desert, also known as Harrat al-Sham, a frontier in more ways than one. A few minutes down the road was the Azraq Wetland Reserve and the Shaumari Wildlife Reserve, where we mingled with gazelles and watched military cargo planes fly over the horizon. Suddenly, a military drone zoomed overhead, perhaps on its way to surveil a battlefield somewhere in nearby Iraq or Syria. The rolling hills of the Levant had turned into a flat, black volcanic desert. We were 30km out of Qasr Mushash, an ancient Roman frontier post on the eastern outskirts of Amman and the site of Jordan's proposed new capital.
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