In Jordan's spring desert bloom, hints of human history

For a brief time, Jordan's eastern desert blooms. The dozens of mesas commanding the bleak horizons are now skirted with vegetation.

Through binoculars, these charcoal husks of dead volcanoes seem shrouded in green mist.

Birds sing above yellow, red and purple wildflowers peeking up around flint shards and stone carvings. Many carvings are in the ancient Safaitic script, an ancestor of modern Arabic, but others are more recent: a drawing of a long-haul truck and "1999" scrawled in Arabic.