Oman: Arabia’s Empty Quarter deserts and the sounds of silence

Inspiration abounds in the timeless deserts of Oman.

Rub al Khali Desert, in the Empty Quarter, Oman.

I’ve always felt the draw of the desert — that peculiar allure of such an alien, beautiful, pitiless place. I’d wanted to write a novel about that draw for some time, but I’d had to wait for the right story to appear.

It had to be Arabia, and it had to be the Empty Quarter — the world’s largest continuous sand desert; and luckily, there is one country still welcoming tourists from which you can travel into the Empty Quarter: Oman. This bewitching country forms the backdrop for my latest novel, The English Girl.

Oman was a late bloomer. Sultan Said bin Taimur, who ruled from 1932 to 1970, took conservatism to whole new levels. Claiming poverty, and that his people oughtn’t to be corrupted by modern or foreign ways, he built no roads, schools or hospitals. For much of the 20th century, Omani people remained as they had since medieval times: poor and uneducated; afflicted by, and dying of, a range of easily treatable diseases.

Things only began to change in 1970, when the present sultan, Qaboos, took over from his father, and used his oil wealth to modernise the country.

I like abandoned places, and forgotten traces. I admit to a slight sinking feeling on the drive from the airport into Muscat proper. Though Sultan Qaboos has not allowed the kind of high-rise development that characterises the UAE, there has been a transformation.

Many old buildings have been swept away and replaced with new — some, including the incredibly vast and serene Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, are on a scale my book’s characters wouldn’t have believed. But the old city of Muscat still sits, contained, in the cupped hands of the surrounding rocks, the “rugged volcanic hills” that J. Theodore Bent wrote about in 1893, protecting Muscat from “every cooling breeze”. Muscat was then rumoured to be one of the hottest places on earth, and Bent clearly was not impressed by this new British Protectorate.

Muscat’s harbour is guarded by two old Portuguese forts — Merani and Jalali — both now military buildings and out of bounds. From the battlements of Merani, canons were once fired each sunset, as the gates closed and curfew began. After this “dum dum” ceremony it was illegal to go about without a lamp.

Fort Jalali, opposite Merani, was a prison of fearsome reputation, into which men often vanished without trial, on the whim of the sultan. Occasionally, political prisoners were allowed to have extra food and water brought in by their servants, a loophole I was keen to exploit in my novel. But, viewed only from the outside, I felt that the soul of these places lay tantalisingly out of reach. The nearby souk is clean and tidy, with no dark corners.

The English Girl, is set in the days of pioneering exploration, in the early 1900s, and in 1958, during the Jebel War. This is a little-known episode in British military history, during which British officers, under the legendary Colonel David Smiley (upon whom, it is said, Ian Fleming’s character James Bond was based), and the RAF helped Sultan Said put down a rebellion led by the newly elected imam, Ghalib. The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman became a British Protectorate in the late 19th century, and the division implied in that title — Muscat and Oman — was key to the conflict. Muscat was the city of Muscat, and the coast down to Salalah in the far southwest. Oman was the interior: the Hajar Mountains, the vast desert beyond.

Despite his official title, by tradition the sultan only ruled Muscat and the coast, and an imam (or indeed nobody) ruled the wild tribes of the sand and mountains. But when rumours began of oil in the desert, Sultan Said enforced his sovereignty there as well, and the tribes didn’t like it. There hadn’t been an imam for years when Ghalib was elected, and the time was ripe for rebellion.

From Muscat, I am impatient to get into the Hajar Mountains, which form a wall between coast and desert. Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, is a huge, flat-topped plateau surrounded by jagged peaks. Its apparent misnomer is a mystery — it is brown, grey, shadowy — and may refer to ancient rumours that the high plateau was a fertile paradise.

This natural fortress, to which Imam Ghalib and his fighters retreated in 1958, has been conquered only twice: by Persian invaders a millennium ago; and by the SAS and Smiley’s men in 1959. For a while, the sultan’s men even tried using the Persians’ steps, cut into the rock centuries before, as a route to the plateau, but they were too well guarded from above. In the end, the SAS spent one moonlit night climbing a route so impassable that the rebels had hardly bothered to guard it at all.

We drive all day on rocky tracks, climbing, jolting; stopping for views of distant plains and high summits, jagged as teeth. Towards the end, I’ve lost all sense of direction. “Which one is Jebel Akhdar?” I ask Ahmed, our guide, waving my hand at the peaks all around. He looks at me, bemused. “All are Jebel Akhdar.” Vast swaths are bone dry; canyons and cliffs drop vertically, or rise suddenly. I begin to get an idea of how daunting a mission Smiley’s men faced. This is brutal, unforgiving terrain, so rough and hazardous I have no idea how they went about navigating it.

There is no Garden of Eden on the high plateau, but it is cooler, and wetter, and there are villages terraced into the steep ground that are shady with date palms and pomegranate trees. I step over frogs along the path to the wash trough.

The way of life here has barely changed in centuries. Many still rely on the falaj system of water channels introduced by the Persians to take water from springs to the dry places; life is still shaped by daily prayer, and women still wear the full veil and abaya.

During the Jebel War, women were often used to carry messages up and down the mountain, between enemies and friends alike, since women would always be allowed to go unmolested — they could not be stopped, or questioned. A freedom that might allow for a multitude of schemes, I muse, so long as one were fully veiled. This idea knits itself into the plot of the book, as I feel curious glances drawn to our uncovered western faces.

I want to stay longer in the ruins of Tanuf, Sheik bin Himyar’s home village, bombed out by the RAF in 1955. Suleiman bin Himyar — the Lord of the Green Mountain, as he was called — was leader of the mountain tribes and a key ally of Imam Ghalib’s. The villagers were warned, and none was killed, but they moved on rather than rebuilding. The falaj still flows, but the mud buildings are being slowly weathered back into the ground, and a spreading tamarind tree shades a ghostly place.

The sky turns flat grey and it begins to drizzle; the ruins are the same deadened colour as the mountainside. It is resonantly desolate and Ahmed is puzzled by my desire to linger.

I am learning that Oman doesn’t do elegant decay. Many of its old forts, testament to its long history of being invaded and reconquered, have been comprehensively restored; perhaps too much so for a lover of echoes like me. Nizwa, the ancient, traditional seat of the imam, sits on the far side of the Hajar Mountains, on the edge of the desert. Its fort is an enormous, businesslike drum, full of horrible ways to booby-trap an intruder. But I lose my heart to Fort Jabrin, which stands alone looking out at the far desert. Built in the late 17th century, and housing the remains of Imam Bil’arab bin Sultan, Jabrin looks and feels exactly how I’d hoped an Arabian palace would. A maze of corridors and chambers around courtyards; white walls, intricately painted ceilings, stone steps polished smooth by years of footsteps.

From the battlements I stare out at a flat horizon that seems impossibly far away. A hot wind is blowing in from the desert, bowling along the corridors, pouring up the stairs. The fort sat abandoned for years, infested with snakes. It has been restored to perfection, and not too much. It’s a place to wander and get lost in dreams. This is the place my 1950s character, Joan, longs to explore. She is thwarted, due to Sultan Said’s strict restrictions on the presence and movements of foreigners; and, being there, I feel sorry for her.

The coast between Muscat and Salalah is largely pristine. There’s a phosphorescent algae in the water that makes the breaking waves glow at night. There are beaches made entirely of tiny pink shells. There are nesting turtles, osprey, and startling places where the desert sand drops directly into a jade green sea. It is incredibly beautiful, but I am impatient to get away into the desert.

The most famous explorer of this part of Arabia was Wilfred Thesiger. He wasn’t the first to cross the Empty Quarter, but in the 1940s he explored it more comprehensively than anybody else. And though he would have hated the roads that now penetrate parts of the sand sea, and he would certainly have abhorred us in our 4WDs, once we leave the roads far behind I feel I am seeing the same desert he saw and hearing the same silence. Because it’s the silence that strikes you. I realise, sitting high on a dune to watch the sun set, that I have never heard silence. When a raven croaks nearby, it sounds like a roar.

Genies, or djinn, still exist in Oman, and especially in the desert. I hear Khalid, our young driver, muttering a short prayer each time we pitch camp, or tip away dirty water, or gather firewood. “We can disturb the djinn, when we disturb the sand,” he tells me. “It is best to show respect.” Similarly, when I ask why the prime, beachfront building next to our hotel in Salalah is derelict, he says it’s because it had once been a slaughterhouse. “The blood brings the djinn.”

This then, is the draw of the desert: there’s still magic here. When the wind blows hard, the sand moves like smoke, snaking along the ground; it carves the dunes into giant waves, ever poised but never breaking; it whips up miniature twisters, out of nowhere — more evidence of djinn. A campfire at night sinks the rest of the world into perfect darkness, and it’s easy to imagine that it has ceased to exist. The sky overhead is mad with stars.

The sunrise on the dunes is so beautiful you just have to stare, even though it scorches your eyes. And it is timeless. Utterly timeless.

CHECKLIST

In July, Anantara will open a small, canyon-edge resort in Oman’s spectacular Green Mountain region, two hours’ drive from Muscat; the resort claims to be the highest in the Middle East and features 115 guestrooms and villas, 32 with private pools perched over the cliffs or hidden in gardens. More: anantara.com,tourismoman.com.au

Katherine Webb’s novel, The English Girl (Orion/Hachette), set in the Omani desert, is out now.