On the desert’s fringe, a sand-coloured fortress seems to rise from a pool of fresh water. Tumbling down from the dry, crumbling peaks above us, a small stream chases about the feet of Bayt Ar Ridaydah, a 17th-century tribal fort in the foothills of Oman’s Hajar Mountains.
We jump out of our four-wheel-drive – driver Ali and me, that is – and while I’m photographing the fort, he crouches instinctively and plunges his hands in the water running through the stone-lined channel that encircles its form. It’s not the picture I’d expected to paint in the little desert nation. Oman, the Middle East’s most peaceable country, includes a crescent of the world’s largest sand desert, Rub’ al Khali or Empty Quarter, which it shares with its neighbours, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
