ABSTRACT

One morning when I was last in Hong Kong I asked my friend Miss Lim, who always cleans my room at the University's guest house, what she did with the money she earned as a Hong Kong chambermaid. "Have you ever been to Petra?" she replied. Having arrived in the colony penniless twenty-three years ago, she had just returned from a tour of the Nabatean, Roman, and Greek ruins of the eastern Mediterranean.