Thumrait is the base of the Royal Air Force of Oman and served as a U.S. logistics hub during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The men at the bakery pointed to the blimp and asked Hassan what it was. Its mooring cable could be followed to the grounds of the American base on the town’s outskirts, Hassan explained—a radar balloon, surveying Yemen to the west. (American drone strikes against Islamic militants in Yemen were already occurring. A few months later hundreds of Yemenis would be killed when the government in Sana’a was overthrown.)
The road between the town and the desert had been used by Yemeni militants, and as we drove we were twice stopped at roadblocks. The usual portly swaggering policeman, in blue camouflage, checked our papers while behind him his soldier colleague in green stood with his feet planted wide, cradling his rifle. Flanking each checkpoint, fore and aft, were low-slung sun shelters of camouflage netting, and gun-jeeps manned by watchful teenagers.
These last outposts of life were quickly left behind. The landscape flattened. The horizon was lined with low dark hills like spoil heaps. In an hour we reached the serer, plains swept free of everything but fine gristle-coloured gravel and occasional black camels in pairs. Placed upon the horizon, twenty kilometres away, were four broad silos with conical tops, perhaps twenty metres tall. “Chicken farm,” said Hassan. Of course: highs of fifty-four degrees centigrade; wind speeds of 140 kilometres per hour; five millimetres of rain per year. But there it was, the A’Saffa Poultry Farm: “The third biggest chicken farm in the world!” It was a risky venture: during a heatwave in Oklahoma in 1980, a chicken farm’s air conditioning failed, and within minutes half a million hens were dead.
Out of the heat-haze a smear of green resolved: fields of alfalfa, fed by the waterhole at Shisur. Stretching the width of each field, motorised irrigation booms mounted on trolleys travelled back and forth day and night. At the limits of their reach the green stopped dead. There were people alongside the road, Pakistani labourers bare-headed in the impossible heat, as if hitchhiking, but making no attempt to flag us down. They were employed to superintend the irrigators. It was a kind of intensive care. If the watering were to cease for a day, said Hassan, the crop would be ruined. He added something I did not understand at first: “Like African people use creams, to make their skin lighter. But they are still African.” Then he said: “The desert stays always desert.”
He veered off the road, it seemed arbitrarily, and followed a plait of tyre tracks. As if the green had been only imagined, a fine pale grit extended to the horizon in every direction. Everything else had been ground away. We were travelling at 100 kilometres per hour, but it might have been 60, or 120. The only way of assessing speed, other than checking the dashboard, was the G-force and the intensity of the rattling. There was only the flat plain outside: no trees flashing by, scarcely any rocks bigger than a thumbnail. A stage was being progressively cleared. We would thunder joltingly over an isolated hectare studded with pebbles like blackened eggs. Dust devils shimmied in the middle distance. You blinked and they’d vanished. In the heat-haze the horizon lifted like a page in a draught. For eighty kilometres just these gravel plains, more relentless in their aridity than even the Empty Quarter’s heart. At least in the Sands, for Bertram Thomas and his retinue, there had been occasional waterholes; here, for camel-days, there would be nothing, not so much as a frond of ailing saltbush, and no shelter for anything bigger than an invertebrate.
There had been a quiet sifting of the land as we’d dropped down from the mountains: solid to particulate, coarse to smooth, hard to soft; almost indiscernible.
What was this process of atomisation? It was the desert’s forces doing their work. A boulder warmed will expand; cooling, it will contract. Repeated over a hundred thousand days and nights, the opposing pressures will begin to undo the rock’s integrity. Tiny fractures will appear and widen; in high-altitude deserts, frost will enter these cracks and jemmy them apart; salt will seep into the rock as a solution and in crystallising expand the cracks still further (a process known as salt-jacking). The boulder thus divides and subdivides, spalling and flaking and crumbling, and with wind and water (such water as there is), the pieces will be dispersed. And so mountains become boulders, and boulders rocks, and rocks stones, then gravel, shingle, grit, sand—ultimately, dust. And the edge of the Rub’ al-Khali, a sea of sand, when it came into view, was as unmistakable as the skyline of New York.
Rising from the plains, the dunes were visible from twenty kilometres away. After the hours of ash-like grey and pale cracked clay, it was as if we were nearing a new reality, one that seemed as gorgeous and auspicious, from afar, as the world of dreams. Here was a place for a checkpoint, I thought, a true border. I sensed Hassan’s relief.
From the desert’s edge, crescent dunes no bigger than whales encroached onto the plain like scouts sent ahead of a vast school clamouring to their rear. Hassan got out and crouched in the thin sand and released a minute’s air from each tyre for traction.
* * *
—
WRITING ABOUT the Empty Quarter in 1888, Charles Doughty claimed he “never found any Arabian who had aught to tell, even by hearsay, of that dreadful country.” He spent years travelling in the Arabian Peninsula but never reached so far as that dreadful country’s edge. Richard Burton was considered “demented” by his Bedouin guides when he proposed entering the region (he decided against it). But in Arabia Felix, Thomas’s “companions started shouting excitedly, ‘ar raml! ar raml!,’ sweeping their canes as they did so along our right front, where in the far distance a sunlit yellow ribbon edged the skyline.”
In between accounts of derring-do, Thomas takes an anthropological interest in his escorts—their foods and dialect, their rites of circumcision and marriage, their religious ablutions and sexual practices. A footnote on “the marital bed” he encodes in paternal Latin, but a few pages later he admits, unblushingly, to relieving a Bedouin tomb of its skeleton in order to smuggle the skull back to Britain for analysis. He is equipped with “head callipers to make and record skull measurements, for such measurements are vital to anthropologists.”
When Hassan returned to the driver’s seat after letting down the tyres, he unfurled and removed his headscarf and I saw that he was bald, his crown as glossy and planar as a club head. Why it came as a surprise I don’t know.
We entered the dunes and almost instantly it was impossible to tell in which direction lay the plains we had just come across. To one lost in a maze, the outer passages are indistinguishable from the interior. I was reminded that one of the Arabic words for desert is a synonym of “labyrinth.” For two hours Hassan drove deeper into the Sands, looking for his son Mohammed and the other Englishman, cresting one bank of dunes after another, following a trail that was invisible to me.
The dunes at the desert’s edge were beach-size but kilometre by kilometre their stature grew. It was like nothing I had experienced save for being at sea. As if Hassan were piloting a skiff over choppy straits, our path up and down the dunes assumed a rhythm: a pass identified; a roar of acceleration; then the momentary sensation of equivocation on the wind-stropped crest, before the sudden plummet. I felt myself being made dumb first by the rhythm and then by the minimalism of the place. It went on: the nearby sand, the horizon—then just sky. It was the desert as pictured by a blind person.
After an hour we found Mohammed’s Land Cruiser in the centre of a flat rink of gypsum. Soran the camel was couched nearby. And crouching in the shade of the vehicle were Mohammed and Nigel, the other Englishman, with whom we would be spending the next few days. Nigel was not what I’d expected—a man of my age or younger was what I’d expected. No tan, not especially tall. The first thing he said when we met, as if hailing a celebrity across a river, was his own name. There was a boyish intensity about him that was unusual but which might have been less conspicuous in a British setting.
It was hard to believe Mohammed was H
assan’s son—hefty, buzzing Mohammed. Under the seat of his Land Cruiser he kept a ceremonial sword, which he would sometimes unsheathe and, with a glance to ensure you were watching, throw spearlike into a dune.
Hassan set the English down at the spot a few kilometres away where we were to camp, and then drove back to help Mohammed with Soran. It was then that I found myself face to face with Nigel, and learned about the things that had happened to him. When Hassan and Mohammed and Soran finally returned we made camp in the windbreak of a ring of low dunes.
So loved was Mohammed by Soran that the mere sound of his vehicle approaching would send the camel into groans of exaltation. As the day began to cool, I clambered barefoot to the summit of a tall dune nearby. It took twenty minutes. The sand under my soles was losing its warmth, as if life were abandoning it. Like a pond it was cool beneath the surface. I wanted to convince myself of our massive isolation. From there, maybe thirty metres up, the desert laid out before me was brinkless, its colours shifting by the second as the sun went down; but its vastness was not of the “sublime” kind that induces unease. The scale wasn’t belittling, because one had no sense of one’s own size in proportion to it.
My eyes followed a line of footprints progressing along the dune ridge—mine. For Hassan, Mohammed and Nigel, thirty metres below, the sun had already set, and the flicker of the fire they had made was visible against the darkened sand. The edge of night was reeled away.
Soran, once hobbled at the knees, was docile. Camels’ night vision, Mohammed told me, is exceptional. “If your camel looks slowly left to right, it is a fox. If your camel stops chewing and stares into the darkness, something is wrong.” Arabian camels come in five colours: white (“fawny cream”—Thomas), red (“gazelle colour”), black (“black-brown”), yellow (“between fawny cream and gazelle colour”) and green (“dark wood-smoke”). Soran was a “yellow,” with a dark bushy hackle along his spine, smaller than the all-black brutes loitering alongside the road from Thumrait. He wore a smile of beatific forbearance, and was the object of lavish tenderness on the part of Hassan and Mohammed—tenderness born of respect, even love. They would no more shout at or beat him than they would the sagest of grandfathers. When a campsite had been chosen, an empty plastic feedbag was filled with sand and Soran was slackly tethered to it. For hours, as we sat around the fire, he stepped his front feet from side to side, left foot to right, right foot to left. More than once in the night I would wake to that gentle sound, the sound of an old man sweeping his yard.
Nigel seemed concussed. He sat silently in his camp chair in the darkness a few metres from the fire. I went and spoke to him and saw that his face was still caked with sunblock. He looked up at me and I was dazzled by his headtorch. “Have you had a spiritual experience yet?” He was serious. I wondered if that was what he was waiting for. I held a hand over my eyes. “Not yet,” I said. In retrospect I shouldn’t have been so cynical.
* * *
—
THE MAIN QUALITY sought in a desert campsite, other than shade from the sun as it rises, is shelter from the wind. It’s thought that most of the Rub’ al-Khali’s dunes accumulated some one million years ago, during the Late Quaternary period, when winds even stronger than today’s winnowed sand from both the wadis of the peninsula’s interior and the Arabian Gulf. The wind continues to be a potent presence: it shapes and reshapes the dunes, and, during the day, is as constant as the sun. The sun heats the morning sands, the warm air rises and must be replaced. Hence the wind ubiquitous in desert literature. Herodotus tells the story of a Libyan army sent into the desert to subdue the lord of the desert wind, only to vanish in its entirety, “into a red cloud of swirling sand.” At a ruined fort in northern Syria, T. E. Lawrence and his Bedouin companions “drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert.” Bertram Thomas recounts the story of a party of the Mahra tribe who pursued a band of camel raiders into a part of the desert unknown to them, only for a wind to rise and obliterate the tracks they had been following. “Six months later one of my own party of Rashidis came upon the seven skeletons and the bones of their camels.”
The desert is mobile, and wind its engine. It is the wind that shapes the dunes. To travel in the Empty Quarter is to see their forms—“species,” as they are known—in their infinite permutations. The desert is formed chiefly of the uruq variety (from the Arabic “vein”), towering parallel ridges sometimes tens of kilometres long; and of crescent-shaped barchans (from the Arabic “horn”), whose tips point in the direction of the prevailing wind. But few deserts, even the great ergs or “sand seas” of the Sahara, are formed of sand alone. In the southern marches you experience not a pure dune-land, an endless beach, but rather a complex of arenas. The sand is quartz; anything softer will be ground to dust and blown away. Each surface grain accumulates a rind of ferric oxide, and it is this that accounts for the Arabian dunes’ characteristic redness. Thomas suggests that “Dhofar” means “Red Country.” The redness was most conspicuous in hollows, and where the sand was finer; but dig beneath the surface and the colour changed to a cool grey-green.
The dunes are separated by shuquq, “interdune corridors”—elongated plains of brown gravel and white gypsum; while the dunes are barriers exhausting to man, camel and vehicle alike, these flat plains are the desert’s highways. From their edges archaeologists have recovered the bones of water buffalo, the shells of freshwater molluscs and the teeth of hippopotami. For, some twenty-five thousand years ago, during a cold phase in the global climate, these plains were lakes. Arabia, like the Sahara, became green. Then, as the planet warmed once more, the water evaporated and the vegetation died. The desert returned. Today, even from a small distance, the plains can resemble lakes—it’s possible to walk along their shores or between islands of crusty marl deposited by the ancient waters. These honeycombed accretions, sometimes a metre or more tall, are home to desert foxes, and twice I caught a distant glimpse of one—black against the gypsum—ducking into its cave.
To travel here, then, is to move from one lakebed to another, over passes in the intervening dunes. Even for the desert traveller who is not dying of thirst, it is easy to believe, having laboured across the partitions of sand, that what you are beholding as the next plain comes into view, sometimes rippled or blue-tinged and shimmering with heat-haze, is a tremendous sheet of water. Not mirage, not illusion, merely resemblance. At such times the aridity of the desert occurs to you with its full force.
* * *
—
IT WAS WHERE the sand melded into a gypsum plain that two ravens came to inspect me, as I was walking alone the following morning, soon after dawn. They monopolised the attention, as did any living or moving thing. They were a delight—their darkness refreshed the numbed eye. Their vibrancy and their familiarity. Where had they come from? I looked up and they were there, circling against the blue, and only when they were near did they begin to emit their noise, a single bark traded every thirty seconds, thrown casually one to the other. There was a mutual curiosity, I was glad of their coming; but their curiosity wasn’t idle.
In explorers’ accounts, the raven always appears as one of a pair. Harry St. John Philby, who knew these sands better than any other foreigner, describes every raven he meets—those that visit his camp or which he and his Bedouin party come upon. Finding one wounded at an oasis, he keeps it as a mascot, christening it Suwaiyid, the diminutive form of the Arabic suwid, “black.” When one of his retinue shoots a hen raven at her nest, “the cock with hoarse cries of anger and distress intervened bravely to protect his wounded mate.” Ravens also punctuated Bertram Thomas’s crossing a year earlier: “I shot an interesting example with a neck ringed with white feathers. A badu asked for the heart of another pure black specimen which he proposed to eat whole because of some virtue it possessed.”
It was hard to think of the ravens as ill omens. I stopped and tipped my face up towards them, an
d held my breath. The thrash of their pinions was audible—I could almost feel it—as they swung overhead, once, twice, before settling side by side twenty metres away, pecking desultorily at the sand. They stood wide-legged and haunchy, watching me, showing their gloss to the sun. Each cast a shadow as black as itself.
It hadn’t been my intention to follow in Thomas’s “footprints,” but here I was, walking between Ramlat Fasad and Ramlat Mitan, as he had done: “high, red dune country”; “parallel white ridges with intervening red valleys”; “flat or gently undulating white sands with transverse red hills.” The crusty gypsum underfoot had yet to absorb the sun’s warmth. Before the heating ground caused the winds to rise, the sky was already an intense blue. The horizon dunes were a clean grey-mauve, the dunes a hundred metres away gaining colour as the sun rose.
I walked until it was too hot. Every few kilometres I would find Hassan parked high on a dune-side overlooking my approach, dozing with his bare feet on the dashboard. I might get lost but he wouldn’t lose me. In the sand under his window, scraps of orange peel would be scattered; nearby, the double dents where he had knelt to pray. We would sit and talk for a few minutes, I would drink, and then he would drive on and I would follow his tracks for another few kilometres.
The desert was not only vast: there was intimacy in its involutions and granularity—the cool mouth of a tunnel dug by a mouse; the arc scribed by a windblown strand of vegetation; the campfire’s dome of light. Mohammed and Nigel and Soran were camping elsewhere that night. In the light of his headtorch, Hassan swept a smooth plaque in the sand beside our own fire with the edge of his hand, picked a bone-white twig from the embers, and began to draw.
With darkness the wind drops. In the morning all about the camp are the tracks of every creature that passed by while you were sleeping—foxes, hares, mice, scorpions. “The sands,” wrote Thomas, “are a public diary…No bird may alight, no wild beast or insect pass but needs must leave its history.”
The Immeasurable World Page 4