Occasionally, Hassan would stop and place the twig upright in the sand, while with the tip or edge of a finger he swiped out an unsatisfactory line, or extended the canvas to accommodate the expanding picture.
Animal after animal he drew: the hyena, the fox, the oryx, the hare, the leopard. Mouse, cat, man, camel. The scale and the medium disallowed fine detail. A frisson passed between us when his quick marks resolved into recognisable form. The drawings of one who knew his subject from life.
Always they were in movement, the active animals of the mountains and the gravel flats, the plains and the dunes. He might take five, perhaps eight minutes to perfect the few necessary strokes: the hyena’s arched back must be just so; the angle of its head; its glutted smirk. The angle of the camel’s long neck, the extrusion of its lower lip, the length of its tail proportionate to its hind legs. If the sweep of the oryx’s horns did not match what Hassan knew to be right, a thumb would be applied and the sand refreshed, the line redrawn. And there, suddenly, would be the complete and living animal.
I was to write its name in the sand. “Camel,” say. Hassan copied it alongside and inscribed its Arabic counterpart below, , with the same grace of hand that characterised his drawing. I would attempt to copy the Arabic, the diacritical dot subsumed as soon as it was poked. We would share a moment’s appreciation of the drawing and the three iterations of the subject’s name, and then, with a flourish, the sand was refreshed once more, and the twig was moving in Hassan’s hand, and a new creature was lured into being.
On his mobile phone, a bright window in the windless night, he played me a film of forty minutes, which Mohammed had downloaded for him. It was composed of archive footage from the late sixties showing the build-up to the rebellion: women milking goats; boys stooped in fields with rifles strapped to their backs; lines of troops happily brandishing AK-47s; a British-made Strikemaster jet sweeping low above a distant horizon, then a plume of blast-smoke rising from behind a limestone outcrop. And playing over the footage—a dreadful sound, really, in the desert quiet—a scratchy recording of the rebel marching song.
* * *
—
AS WAZIR IN THE late 1920s, Bertram Thomas observed that the Sultan of Oman, Said bin Taimour, “treated Dhofar as a royal domain.” When the rebellion started forty years later, this mountainous region, some one thousand kilometres from the sultan’s palace at Muscat, remained a dependency of Oman. I had been only vaguely aware of the Dhofar Uprising and Britain’s role in it before coming to Oman. It began as a popular rebellion among the tribes of the mountains and desert against bin Taimour. The elderly sultan’s conservatism had confined Oman to an antique destitution, while the people—without hospitals, without schools—watched the neighbouring Gulf states prosper on growing oil revenues. The insurgency began in 1964, with a crossing of the Empty Quarter from Saudi Arabia by the leader of the Dhofar Liberation Front, Mussalim bin Nafl, and thirty followers. In a declaration of June 1965, the movement associated the sultan with the “hordes of the British imperialist occupation.” The DLF’s first act was largely symbolic: a machine-gun attack on an oil-company party surveying the Dhofar desert. In 1967, Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from its colony of Aden, in today’s southern Yemen, coupled with the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War led to a surge in Arab nationalism in southern Arabia. The influence of the new People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen, Dhofar’s western neighbour, and its Soviet and Chinese sponsors, led to a schism within the remaining ranks of the DLF, which prompted the renaming of the movement as the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Persian Gulf. Its fighters were sent to China and Iraq to train in guerrilla warfare. In those days, Hassan told me, “every Omani wanted a gun. An AK-47. If he joined the Communists he got a gun. If he joined the army he got a gun. He wanted a gun. That was his ideology.” He’d treated those men as a paramedic.
Oil production in Oman had increased from 88 million barrels in 1967 to some 120 million barrels two years later. The British were not unaware of these figures. When, in 1970, the sultan granted oil-exploration rights in Dhofar to a U.S. firm, his overthrow became inevitable. He was by then virtually impotent, in any case, confined day and night to his palace in Salalah. In 1971 a bloodless coup saw the twenty-nine-year-old Qaboos bin Said depose his father. “My first act,” Qaboos promised his people, “will be the immediate abolition of all the unnecessary restrictions on your lives and activities.”
He was a moderniser, educated in England, first at Eton and then at the army officer training school at Sandhurst. Former rebels like Hassan were offered amnesty, a resettlement grant. The sultan’s armed forces were enlarged. The rebellion became increasingly brutal: oil installations were attacked, oil-company drivers machine-gunned, the road to Thumrait mined and the RAF base in Salalah shelled. Tribal leaders who refused to give the rebels succour or safe haven were thrown off cliffs and “counterrevolutionaries” summarily executed. It was not until 1975, as Britain began to appreciate the strategic threat posed by communism in the region, that British officers and mercenaries were dispatched to Dhofar. The uprising was finally extinguished in December 1975, its surviving fighters “rehabilitated” or absorbed back into the desert. Qaboos the moderniser remains a popular figure among today’s taxi drivers and camel farmers, a friend of the Duke of Edinburgh and beyond public reproach. From the wall of every coffee-house, restaurant and guesthouse in Salalah he gazes down with formidable benevolence. “We could not have asked for a better sultan,” said Hassan.
The Americans found oil in Dhofar. Twenty-nine wells were sunk. But the output quickly declined and the remaining oil in any case proved too heavy for commercial exploitation. Fifty million dollars having been spent, the Americans packed up. But prospectors, from Oman and elsewhere, continue to survey the deserts of Dhofar, and the evidence of their efforts persists.
In the firelight I noticed that Hassan’s beard was hemmed with fine white where it met his cheeks and neck, as if its pigment were migrating from the edges. I thought of Bertram Thomas’s raven, its neck ringed with white feathers. We drank sugary ginger tea in paper cups, softened with cardamom milk from a tin. Dates were prised from a glistening mass. Hassan resumed his drawing. Again and again, between animals, there was the woman. When she first appeared he laughed, as if she had come unbidden; we both laughed. But then, as the face emerged, he became quiet with concentration. The point of the twig moving across the sand was suddenly the desert’s centre. The same woman each time; she was wide-mouthed, round-eyed, heavy-browed, cinch-waisted and curvy. His strokes slowed. I did not write the word underneath. When she was finished, we would both admire her for a moment, then a swipe of the hand refreshed the drawing plane. But after a few more animals had been drawn, hedgehog, raven, there she was again, rematerialising line by line. Finally the twig was put aside, he moved from sitting cross-legged to propping himself on one elbow, and we watched the fire. When I dropped a date stone in the embers, he silently reached into the flames, extracted it and flung it into the darkness behind us. No offer of life was to be wasted.
* * *
—
I HAD BEEN in the Sands for two days. We were to meet Nigel and Mohammed, with Soran, at the waterhole at Burkhana, fifty kilometres from the Saudi border. It wasn’t far from our camp. After an hour, as the morning marshalled its warmth, I spotted something lying on the gravel five hundred metres away. It was a triangular road-sign on a striped post, felled by the wind: an arrow veering left. Its presence here, fifty kilometres from so much as a camel farm, had the quality of a prank. It had been erected thirty years ago by the oil prospectors who had graded the track across the plain. The triangle’s border, once red, had turned yellow. And yet it had remained exposed, as if it had been laid down yesterday. Things on the gravel flats do not accumulate the sand that lies heaped in inordinate masses all around. The sand is blown from the surface, while the heavier gravel and anything discarde
d upon it remain—rocks, branches, shredded tyres, drinks cans and water bottles and oil flagons. Such was the permanence these articles seemed to possess that to pick one up—a rare length of dead wood to use as a walking stick, say, or a red stone shaped by the wind—felt like an almost profane intervention, an act of vandalism. A few weeks later, at home in my empty London flat, I would pour a pure white sharded grit from my trouser pocket, all that remained of a gazelle’s rib, as if, removed from the desert, like some memento from a dream, it could not exist.
I followed the direction indicated by the sign, and, after an hour, stopped and sat cross-legged on the gravel, and peeled an orange. The pungency of its aroma was enough to make me woozy. The previous evening, while I was exploring the dunes around our camp, I became aware of a noise slowly growing louder. Where there had been quiet, a dead bush, thrashed by a jet of wind that had no influence beyond the shrub itself, was letting out a soughing that was overwhelming. This was not Lawrence’s “effortless, empty, eddyless wind.” The shrub—a saltbush gone black years ago—was like something ensnared; in its fury it had thrown dark splinters of itself for metres downwind.
Even when the wind dropped, you had to work to experience the silence—had to shut your self up, for a start: stop fidgeting, stop the gulping, the ceaseless tonguing and lipping, the clicking of your jaw, the blinking of your jellied eyes, the burbling of the nostrils and the boiling of the guts. Stop breathing. It was easier at night, when the wind had stilled. I would wake to a full moon so bright it dazzled the stars, and as I held my breath in my sleeping bag the “silence” was a sharp hum, and accompanying it, much lower, there was a sound of liquid in circulation, as of water moving through a pipe deep underground.
Perhaps two kilometres off, a large grey vehicle was approaching. I got to my feet and watched it, but it seemed to get no closer. It was a quality of these plains that their selfsameness obscured the passing of time: a perished tyre thirty metres away might take half an hour to reach. Earlier I had picked a black rock from the ground and thrown it as far as I could, and within what seemed like just a few steps, I was stooping to pick it up once more. “Hour after hour,” Thesiger wrote, “day after day, we moved forward and nothing changed; the desert met the empty sky always the same distance ahead of us. Time and space were one.”
I resumed walking, and within ten minutes was close enough to hear that the vehicle was silent, nor had it moved for years. A water tanker, abandoned while making its way from the waterhole at Burkhana, it had been scavenged of its rear wheels and lay canted in the middle of the track, its paint peeling and its consignment long siphoned off or evaporated. Later Hassan would tell me it had been there since the oilmen came thirty years ago. Its cab, to look at it, might have been deserted yesterday, apart from the smashed-out windscreen. I had imagined myself to be many kilometres from the tourist trails, but the paintwork was strewn with the graffiti of passers-by, from Sweden and Germany and Qatar. “We love Oman,” a visitor from Switzerland had written. Had they carried their marker into the desert on the off-chance?
I climbed into the cab and sat in the driver’s seat, and looked through the glassless windscreen, back down the track that led, fifty kilometres away, to the village of Fasad. The desert’s stillness leaves you dazed, and it is hard to find a better word for it: at dusk, from the top of a dune, stillness. And yet it quickly becomes apparent that, just as the desert is not silent, it is far from being still. As a shaping force, the wind has a quality that water lacks: the ability to flow uphill. From the pinnacle of a dune a skein of spindrift is spun into the sky; along a dune-brink, a hundred tiny cyclones shimmy in line; a sheet of sand scuds over a ridge like a spool of paper rushing through a press.
The desert is refashioning itself. Nod off in an exposed place and you will wake to find you have been partnered by a buttress of sand, laid down snug beside you. The smallest twig will accumulate a hump in its lee. It is how even the mega-dunes began. In any torch-beam, even on the quietest night, airborne dust is visible. Subtly the desert is in motion.
* * *
—
A COUPLE OF KILOMETRES across the plain, under a dune thirty metres tall, I made out a jerry-built sun shelter. It had been nailed together from timber stanchions and roofed with plywood. The waterhole, Burkhana. The few patches of green seemed like the utmost abundance. Tethered to Mohammed’s four-wheel-drive, I could see Soran nosing a bag of feed. I spotted Mohammed and Hassan lying on a rug under the shelter, eating. All but two of the roofing boards had been torn off by winds and lay scattered hundreds of metres across the plain. Then I saw a figure, walking bandily up and down in the sun, some distance from the shelter. Where had his Sahara cap gone? Seeing me, Nigel raised his hand and roared. He was elated, too excited to rest. As I closed in, there was the smell of sulphur.
Bertram Thomas was disappointed to find that the “great brackishness” of the waterholes was “not disguised by desiccated soup.” Burkhana didn’t exist when he came this way in December 1930. Thirty years ago, a new foray of oilmen had arrived with their rigs, driven in convoy two hundred kilometres from Salalah, directed by those absurd signposts. Four kilometres down, they’d hit a pressurised reserve—not the heavy crude that had been struck in the 1970s, but warm sulphurous water, undrinkable by humans. Today, on the desert surface, were three artesian gaskets and an open concrete tank ten metres square, continually overbrimming onto a border of marshy turf. There is no water so tainted, Hassan told me, that a thirsty camel will not drink it, and Soran had already sated himself. There were birds here, a desert wheatear and a southern grey shrike, but like most desert “oases,” the place had been made a tip. It was impossible to tell the age of much of what had been dumped—bottles and oil cans, lengths of metal piping and boles of cement, plastic feedbags, cleated loops of tyre-rubber, and another of the oilmen’s felled signposts. Nothing was allowed to corrode in the desert dryness. This was a factor of its timelessness. The shelter might have been put up last year by the local camel farmers, or thirty years back by the oilmen. The camel droppings might be last night’s or last summer’s. The gaskets, four feet of red steel bearded with mineral encrustations, were ringed by chainlink fencing. Watered by the dripping gaskets and protected from grazing camels, the plants contained within these cages thrived.
We sat in the shade and ate last night’s camel stew reheated on a gas stove. Nigel’s cheeks and nose were livid. I was worried about him. He seemed exhausted. The man was sixty-five and today he had ridden twenty-five kilometres. He was drinking quickly, one bottle of water after another. He stood up and removed his camera from its case and took a dozen quick photographs of the dunes. Then he sat down. He was a natural camel jockey, Mohammed said, standing over him and clapping his shoulder. Nigel wouldn’t glory in the praise, but he had realised a childhood ambition. He had reason to be overjoyed, it seemed to me. It was possible to survive the hardships experienced by Lawrence and Thesiger; he’d earned some kinship with them.
His relief on this his last day in the desert seemed to allow some pent-up emotion to be eased out, and again he talked—as I sensed he’d wanted to talk since I had first met him. In the shade as we ate he spoke about his dismissal from the boys’ school, the headmaster who had been “more of a politician than an educator” (that phrase again), and the resentment he’d felt, before his redundancy, at being forced to admit girls into his classes—his belief that the sexes should not be mixed in secondary education. As he continued, he grew angry.
Hassan got to his feet. He was looking across the plain, where dust was rising—a vehicle, careening towards us at perhaps eighty kilometres per hour. He spoke to Mohammed quickly, and for a minute we watched the truck until it skidded to a stop beside Soran, the dust settling in its wake.
In the back were a black plastic water tank and plastic bags of feed and a rope net. Two men got out, slamming the doors. They looked tired and hungry. They were camel fa
rmers and had been driving for two days, looking for fifteen camels that had gone astray. We’d seen nothing. Hassan and Mohammed spoke to them, and the two men sat together with Mohammed on a piece of roofing board that lay on the ground some distance from the shelter. Hassan took food to them, and he and Mohammed stayed with them while they ate. Nigel, after a moment’s pause, continued; the distraction hadn’t soothed him.
It was not, as I’d first thought, a mere re-enactment of the frustration he must have expressed to his wife and colleagues at the time, but a reigniting of it. He was yelling. I was holding a half-eaten flatbread in my hand. He was like a cyclist who has lost control on a steep, potholed slope. “Of course it’s a bloody stupid idea! Of course! What did they expect? The boys were fine. The boys you knew where you were with. It was the bloody girls. All that…emotional baggage.”
The camel farmers and Hassan and Mohammed had stopped eating and were watching us, these red-faced tourists furiously arguing in their metre-square of shade. There was no way to quieten him. When I got up and walked off for a piss, Nigel watched for a moment, then yelled after me, “It’s a mess! The system! Christ!”
* * *
—
IN THE CAMBRIDGE archives was a series of telegrams received by Bertram Thomas in Bahrain, where he had stayed immediately after his crossing of the Rub’ al-Khali in March 1932. “The King has heard with much interest of your great achievement and offers you his hearty congratulations,” wrote George V’s private secretary. From Thomas’s mentor, David Hogarth, in Egypt: “Congratulations journey.” From his friends Mr. and Mrs. How in Edinburgh: “It takes a remarkable fine man to do that.” From the literary agent Curtis Brown: “Have firm offer English language book rights story your journey.” From Mecca: “Heartiest congrats Philby.”
The Immeasurable World Page 5