ROWNUM and ORDER BY

Am using Oracle 9i.

Just wanted to know in which order the db will execute my query if my query contains a 'WHERE ROWNUM < 1000' and an 'ORDER BY ...'.
The documentation says that the order of evauation depends upon the indexes used in the ORDER BY, but doesn't specify clearly in which order.

Please help.You can't use ROWNUM and ORDER BY in the same select because the pseudo column ROWNUM is affected before the sort.

So, you have to do :

Select ... FROM (SELECT ... FROM ... ORDER bY...) WHERE ROWNUM<1000