"Allah Makes All Things Easy!" This isn't an animal story.

No lions live at Petra nowadays, at any rate, no four-legged ones; none could have survived competition with the biped.

Unquestionably there were tamer, gentler, less assertive lions there once, real yellow cats with no worse inconveniences for the casual stranger than teeth, claws, and appetites.
The Assyrian kings used to come and hunt near Petra, and brag about it afterward; after you have well discounted the lies they made their sculptors tell on huge stone monoliths when they got back home, they remain a pretty peppery line of potentates.

But for imagination, self-esteem, ambition, gall, and picturesque depravity they were children--mere chickens--compared to the modern gentleman whom Grim and I met up with A.D.

1920.
You can't begin at the beginning of a tale like this, because its roots reach too far back into ancient history.