n.a coastal region of the western Arabian Peninsula bordering on the Red Sea; includes both Mecca and Medina; formerly an independent kingdom until it united with Nejd to form the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
The original railway carriages dating from 1908 still make chartered journeys from Qatrana, 90km to the south, on one of the last surviving stretches of the Hejaz Railway, says Zureqat.
When Lawrence arrived in Jordan in 1916, Amman was a village, home to the ruins of Roman, Byzantine and Islamic civilizations and a new train station on the Ottoman Hejaz Railway.
Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba.