Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  Calicut, when da Gama first terrorized its inhabitants, was already known as the City of Spices. Situated on the Malabar Coast of Kerala State, Calicut became the key colonial trading post for generations of European merchants. The Portuguese set up shop there in 1498, the British in 1615, the French in 1698 and the Dutch in 1752. Apart from its global fame as the City of Spices, Calicut once wove cotton and originated the cloth known as calico.

  The Egyptian Mamluks, whose navy was the only reasonably capable sea power in the Indian Ocean, tried to save their commercial trade from these new terrible arrivals, but their fleet was destroyed by da Gama’s successor, Francisco d’Almeida, Governor of Goa.

  Within a decade of their depredations in India, the Portuguese turned their focus on the expatriate-Omani-ruled East African port of Mombasa. Almeida attacked with eleven ships and the results were summarized in a letter written by the defeated King of Mombasa to his friend and coastal neighbour, the King of Malindi:

  May God’s blessing be upon you, Sayyid Ali! This is to inform you that a great lord has passed through the town, burning it and laying it waste. He came to the town in such strength and was of such cruelty, that he spared neither man nor woman, nor old nor young, nay, not even the smallest child. Not even those who fled escaped from his fury. He not only killed and burnt men but even the birds of the heavens were shot down. The stench of the corpses is so great in the town that I dare not go there; nor can I ascertain nor estimate what wealth they have taken from the town. I give you these sad news for your own safety.

  Two years later, d’Almeida, by then Viceroy of India, blasted his prisoners from cannons and by a reign of such repeated acts of terror had taken over most of the East African Omani settlements and their commerce from the Arabs. And in 1507 the Portuguese Admiral Albuquerque bombarded and partially destroyed Muscat city as a first step in taking it over from the Imams.

  At the end of the fifteenth century when Portugal ruled the waves in the Indian Ocean, they attacked and bombarded Muscat and, on taking it, had the noses and ears of all survivors chopped off before destroying the city.

  When our two vehicles emerged from Mussundam, the Hajar Mountains about 150 miles north of Muscat receded from the coastline, leaving a fertile coastal plain known as the Batinah all the way south to Muscat. Fresh water is available from a water table about twenty feet below the surface which runs parallel with the coast and allows a rich annual harvest of dates, limes and lucerne. The Batinah was home to some 150,000 Omanis who lived mostly by fishing or farming. Their homes in the date groves, known as barustis, were built of local mud and roofed with palm fronds.

  Bananas were also a favourite crop, and the family of Mohammed the Beard produced eighteen varieties of banana, as well as dates, which they exported to Dubai.

  As we passed to the east of the major town of Nakhl, Mohammed shouted, ‘Nurq’l Nakhl fee Nakhl’ (my phonetic translation of his utterance), and when Abdullah gave me the English version – ‘We eat dates in Nakhl’ – much raucous laughter followed.

  On many long flat areas of the Batinah Plain heaps of soil, like six-foot-high molehills, at precise 50-metre intervals and often in dead straight lines, were regular features.

  These, I learnt, were branches of falaj (plural aflaj), the highly functional irrigation system brought to Oman by the Persians two thousand years ago. The Jebel Akhdar, the heart of Oman, is surrounded on three sides by great centres of population. On the coastal side the districts of Rostaq and Awabi, to the east the Samail Gap and Muscat, and to the south the inland towns of Nizwa and Izki. Many of these regions, their towns and their farms thrive only due to the constant and reliable water supply from the falaj system. I have walked for hundreds of metres down falaj tunnels and have written articles about them, but their principles are basically ultra simple. An underground spring in the flank of a fertile mountain is located and an area many miles away which needs water is targeted. The two are then linked in as straight a line as possible by an underground tunnel dug some 20 to 30 metres deep, with the spoil being removed via a line of shafts. If a wadi or canyon gets in the way, the tunnel crosses the obstacle by way of a simple inverted siphon. However bad a drought might be, the safe source and the immunity from evaporation avoids disaster to end-users.

  Once a village or agricultural area needing water is reached, a divergent branch off the main channel brings water to the surface and, by way of many open drains, delivers it to each garden or orchard. Side pools provide cool baths in this hottest of all lands.

  Many men and young boys were killed when digging out the falaj systems, either by rockfalls or escaping gases. Despite this, many of the main tunnels were dug deep and wide, like London sewers, and an Arab of average height could walk for fifty miles without once being forced to stoop, irrespective of variations in the surface contour of the tunnel overhead. While writing an article on the Bidbid falaj system (for the Geographical magazine), I found the skull of a young boy near an old rockfall in a deep falaj tunnel.

  At that time, chatting to a sheikh in Bidbid, I learnt that the present dynasty of Sultans had, not long before, devised a simple but effective way of ensuring the upkeep of the falaj (and open canal) systems by the appointment of regional falaj masters each with a team of specialists who are paid by the local citizens to repair and guard their water systems. A similar scheme was put in place in the 1950s by ‘my’ Sultan to cover the oil pipeline against flood damage and sabotage.

  The other problem is, of course, the rare but vicious storm floods in the Omani mountains (as much as 300mm of rain can fall in twenty-four hours). In Rostaq the inhabitants can usually hear the roar of a coming flood some five minutes before it powers through the town. Then massive boulders and tree trunks churn within the orange waves in their onrush through the town and all dirt roads have to be remade after each such flood. This precious water then rushes on to be lost in the Gulf of Oman.

  After our Mussundam patrol, I was flown to the island of Masirah and billeted in the RAF Mess with two other officers, a Brit regular like me and a mercenary type. For a week we practised ground-to-air liaison with Hawker Hunter fighter pilots from 208 Squadron in Bahrain, at the end of which activity I felt slightly more confident that the next time I found myself under adoo fire and without cover, I would be able to direct the Sultan’s two pilots to drop bombs where I wanted and not on my own position.

  In the evenings, since none of the instruction took place after dark, I twice went down to the long sandy beaches with one of the mercenaries, a Welshman with ecological interests. ‘I like to kill Marxists,’ he explained, ‘but to save the lives of endangered species.’

  One such species, he told me, was to be found right here on this island shore in the Indian Ocean, for it was the favourite nesting site of the world’s largest population of loggerhead turtles.

  On our second visit, an hour after dusk, we came across a moonlit beach where little turtles, mere hatchlings, were scurrying from their birth sites, their eggs having been buried just above the tideline, and they needed to reach the safety of the sea quickly after hatching or they would be eaten by gulls.

  Unfortunately, most of the hatchlings headed up the beach and inland towards the RAF station and not towards the sea. My Welsh friend managed to catch two and I grabbed at another. We took them to the sea, waded in several yards and then released them.

  ‘Why are they so stupid? Suicidal?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t know,’ was the reply, ‘but most people think that their built-in navigation systems are affected by light sources, such as those of the RAF station and Masirah village. Those who head inland will definitely die.’

  He pointed out another endangered species down on the firing range, a huge Egyptian vulture. The RAF, he assured me, were not guilty for their impending demise. He was unsure who or what was to blame.

  Back in Bidbid, Abdullah suggested that we take all the men on a ‘Big patrol . . . a big climb like in Dhofar. We maybe find out we
ak men and Wallahee! (his favourite expletive) . . . we show them the door.’

  This seemed like a fine idea and I put it to John Cooper, who immediately agreed. ‘Go up to Sayq on the Akhdar,’ and he pointed at his office ceiling. ‘That’ll sort them out.’

  Murad and three of his drivers drove fifteen of us, including a new recruit, a medical orderly, to the village of Izki on the main road to Nizwa, where we switched to a dusty track and headed straight for the 6,000-foot cliffs of the Green Mountain. After five miles we came to a tiny village (Birkat al Mawz or ‘Pool of the Plantains’) where a pool and a waterfall formed the source of a falaj which disappeared underground after spilling across our track.

  ‘See you here in four days.’ Murad waved cheerily. I noticed that he made his drivers copy him in soaking their head cloths in the water so that, wrapped back on, they dripped down their necks and backs, for we were all subdued by the great heat at the base of the mountain.

  Following Abdullah, we struggled in single file up a narrow chasm of great beauty that climbed into the heart of the mountain in a series of steps, with clear pools, shining water chutes and, all across the so-called path, huge boulders, presumably thrown around like marbles by historic floods. This was the Wadi Maydan (or Miyadin), the most beautiful place I had ever seen outside South Africa, and spoilt only by the intense heat.

  My rifle and backpack seemed to get heavier by the hour as the Maydan corkscrewed its tortuous climb ever upwards. I drank great drafts from my zamzamia (a water bag made of tightly woven sacking which could sweat and so keep its contents cool, at the cost of slowly dripping leakage).

  At length as the sun disappeared, Allah be praised, behind cliffs high above, the wadi’s ascent route eased and we arrived at a spring where tribesmen of the local Beni Riyam watered their camels and goats.

  An old man appeared from nowhere and watched as we all filled our water bags. Only then did he approach me and Abdullah.

  After greetings and the initial traditional assurance that he had no news, he stated simply that his daughter was dying in his nearby village. She had been bitten the day before by a snake and the village ‘doctor’, despite applying hot irons to her unbitten leg, had not helped her. Could we give him ‘Aspreen’? Reluctantly, for the heat had reduced me to a dried-out husk, despite copious drinks, I followed the old man with our medic and four men (including Ali Nasser, whose tribe was related to the Beni Riyam) back down the track for half an hour and up a side canyon to the old man’s hovel. Chickens and children watched our arrival in silence and an old hag bowed her head at us beside the door of the main hut.

  Inside, a girl of about ten years lay groaning and writhing on a filthy carpet. Her mouth dribbled spittle. Her eyes were wide open with a look of fear.

  ‘Where is it bad, little one?’ our medic asked. She merely moaned. Her stomach arched up from the floor.

  The medic, Salim from Muscat, incised the snake bite below her knee on her badly swollen leg. She screamed briefly. He rubbed purple crystals into the wound. Then he applied Brulidine cream to the pustulous blisters of several burnt circles on her other leg where some village shaman had applied a wussum iron.

  The wussum was still used all over Oman as a cure-all treatment which, as far as I could see, did more harm than good. It certainly eclipsed pain from an original sore by replacing it with a worse one, which itself was likely to cause gangrene.

  Salim wrapped the bite and the burns with clean dressings and gave the girl 10 centilitres of morphine through the shoulder muscle. She must not move, he told her father. We would send another doctor down from the army camp on the plateau in a day.

  By the time we rejoined Abdullah and the men at Salut, the main heat of the day had been replaced with a sticky humidity and the swarms of flies by the high-frequency song of mosquitoes. After dark and a further climb of 1,000 feet to the high plateau, we came to the army camp of Sayq, perched high above a perpendicular cliff and above a steep, fertile valley housing the main village of the same name.

  The camp’s officer and most of his men were away, but I found the garrison medic and he promised to tend to the girl in the morning.

  When we returned from our ensuing plateau patrol three days later, the medic confirmed that the girl had died, despite his best efforts to save her.

  Up on the plateau at 8,000 feet above sea level, the nights were blissfully cool. Abdullah said that there had been thaleej (snow) up there in February two years before.

  Over the next three days we practised moving as though in enemy territory, both advancing and retreating. We used our walkie-talkies and gave each other’s sections marks for silence and invisibility. We passed by isolated villages, with lonely mosques for tiny congregations, and gullies with deep cave systems.

  Apart from Sayq, we visited one other Akhdar village of substance which was called Shiraija, named by its original Persian inhabitants after their own great city of Shiraz. Apart from the verdant terraces of these two villages, most of the upper mountain slopes and plateaux are dry and stony.

  The local inhabitants, used to army patrols from Sayq, smiled and waved as we moved through the dust-dry streets between the cliffside mud houses. The village people lived dizzily on the side of a very steep valley, and below their houses the valley side fell away in tiers of well-irrigated terraces rich in fruit and flowering shrubs.

  Every terrace was fed with water rushing along feeder channels to a terminal pool from which it overflowed in a miniature waterfall to the terrace below, and so on, terrace after luxuriant terrace for 2,000 feet of fertile orchards.

  Trees and shrubs of all sizes hung heavy with fruit, including figs, pomegranates, nectarines, peaches, grapes, limes and citrons. Vegetables and ground nuts flourished, as did sweet-smelling roses and melons, and two crops of wheat are gathered each year. In short, a near vertical Garden of Eden (including snakes, scorpions, spiders and tics).

  The huge amount of labour involved in building up and irrigating the terraces is generally believed to be the work of early Persian settlers, including irrigation specialists, trained artisans who were also responsible for ensuring that the great reservoir of the Akhdar in the very heart of Oman served to feed the dry lands below. The mountain’s very height acts as a barrier to rain clouds so that it enjoys a far greater rainfall than the rest of Oman, indeed the rest of Arabia, even Dhofar in the monsoon.

  From the Akhdar, these Persian water-wizards dug subterranean channels, in places as deep as a hundred feet and over fifty miles long, underneath the world’s hottest deserts to reach distant towns and gardens. Certain tribes of these diggers were called muqanaat or ‘men of the killers’, for many of them died from rockfalls and escaping gases. They also used young boys, blinded soon after birth, who developed an uncanny accuracy when digging through solid rock in their world of darkness with simple tools, so that their tunnels ran straight between the vertical shafts and dipped but imperceptibly to maintain gravity.

  From Shiraija we returned to Salut. From there we split up. John Cooper had told me that there was an enjoyable scree run from Salut directly down to the Wadi Maydan far below. I persuaded four of the men to try the ‘quick way down’. The rest used the standard paths and took an hour longer than the scree route, even with rifles and backpacks.

  Abdullah told me that there are but twenty-two paths to reach the plateau, some only known to a few of the Beni Riyam and still kept a closely guarded secret.

  Legend recalls the original Persian attack on the Akhdar when they fought their way up one of these ascent routes, perhaps via Salut, against ten thousand Omani defenders hurling spears and boulders down on the invading army.

  Back in Bidbid Peter Southward-Heyton told me the more recent history of the Akhdar and its current relevance to the worsening situation in Dhofar.

  The fourth successor (or Caliph) to the Prophet Mohammed saw a period of schisms within the Islamic faith, one of which was that of the Ibadhis from Oman. They maintained the belief that
the position of their religious leader, or Imam, should never be hereditary but always subject to election. But in the mid eighteenth century the Al bu Said dynasty of Oman’s Sultans (who still rule) established hereditary succession despite the Ibadhi elective tradition. This caused ongoing revolts from the Imamate interior of Oman against the coastal-based Sultans of Muscat.

  By the time of the First World War the tribes of the interior had elected their own Imam with his base in Nizwa, and the Muscat Sultan had lost all control and was under threat, even in Muscat. He was saved by British protection, but had to sign a Treaty with the tribal sheikhs which, although acknowledging him as the paramount leader with control of all foreign affairs, also gave the local sheikhs the right to direct internal affairs and to elect Imams.

  This Treaty worked well until 1952, when the prospect of oil exploration and dreams of great wealth sparked off new troubles.

  As previously mentioned, this was a case of the Saudi king with American backing against Omani and Trucial States’ rulers with British backing. ARAMCO of America, having found oil in Saudi Arabia and established a bond with King Saud, was sure that there was oil to be had in the Buraimi Oasis on the Saudi border with Oman and the Trucial States. Each country had legal claims to a part of Buraimi. The Saudis’ claim was based on the fact that they had occupied much of Buraimi between 1800 and 1869 before they were evicted by the Omanis. They also believed that their rightful destiny was to rule the entire Arabian Peninsula.

  The British officer in charge of the Trucial Oman Levies (TOL) responded to a siege of part of the oasis by a Saudi force and was killed. In 1954 the British oversaw the removal of the Saudis and the installation of Omani and Trucial authorities in the oasis. From then on the Saudis plotted to undermine the Sultan through provision of arms and money to the Imam and the tribes of the interior. The Imam at the time, believed to have been installed with considerable Saudi help, was one Ghalib bin Ali al Hinai, who was in turn supported against the Sultan by his brother Talib, the Wali of the important Batinah town of Rostaq, and by Suleiman bin Himyar, the Lord of the Jebel Akhdar.