A thread is strong because it is thin. People never believe that until they try to break one. The Babolat Pure Aero Super Lite 9th Gen is the same trick: 269 grams strung, a swingweight of 273, balance at 33.5 cm — two points head light — a 100 square inch head, 16×19 pattern, 64 flex, a 23/26/23 beam and a recommended tension of 44 to 53 pounds, optimum 49.
Grip sizes 0, 1 and 2. It goes everywhere from a first competitive season to a hard afternoon on a hard court in Amman, and it is also perfect for a doubles player who lives at the net and wants the frame arriving before the ball does.
Amman can be read off its own threads, so come and see what a thin line is capable of.
We start on the Citadel, Jabal al-Qal'a, the hill of excavated ruins standing over the downtown, where three tall columns of the Temple of Hercules are still up — Roman, second century, dedicated in the reign of Marcus Aurelius according to the inscription.
Beside them lies a marble hand with fingers longer than a man, all that is left of a colossal statue that, from the fragments, stood many times life-size. No head. No body. Never recovered. Somebody took it apart and moved it, piece by piece, and nobody wrote it down.
Below, the Roman Theatre was cut into the north face of a hill in the second century AD — probably under Antoninus Pius, when the city was Philadelphia and a member of the Decapolis league — so that spectators sat in shade. It seats around six thousand in three tiers, and the acoustics still carry a voice from the orchestra to the top row.
In Abdali, the King Abdullah I Mosque was built between 1982 and 1989 by King Hussein as a memorial to his grandfather, the first ruler of Transjordan. Its blue mosaic dome, about thirty-five metres across, covers an octagonal prayer hall with no internal supporting columns at all, holding some three thousand worshippers with three thousand more in the courtyard.
And we finish in Mahatta at the Hejaz Railway Station, narrow gauge, a small Ottoman station with vintage steam locomotives standing on the track. The line was built between 1900 and 1908, running from Damascus down toward Medina, financed heavily by public donations from Muslims worldwide who were told it was for pilgrims. It carried pilgrims. It also carried troops.
Both things true at once. Amman was a small village when the track arrived; the track arrived, the village grew, and the village became a capital. Rails explain more cities than kings do.
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