Heat, dust and philosophy
City softy Jeremy Atiyah rides a camel,
survives a storm and contemplates life as a nomad in the Oman
Bruce Chatwin used to worry that if
human evolution had never designed us to live in cities, then perhaps we still
ought to be living as nomads. In The Songlines, a book about travels in the
Australian outback, he noted, anxiously, that human beings - from the shape of
their big toe to the psychology of restlessness - had clearly been designed
"... for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land
of thorn- scrub or desert".
To move or to rest? To travel or to
settle? To change or to remain the same? I wondered if a spell in the desert
could really offer answers to these ultimate questions. A touch optimistic?
Last week I visited Oman Arabia ,
hoping to catch a glimpse of the lost world for which our species had evolved.
The Wahiba Sands, in the south of the
country, was where I planned to make my trek. The area is at least the size of Wales Arabia 's
legendary Empty Quarter
some 150 miles to the north, Wahiba is scarcely larger than Blackpool Beach
Finding a real bedu to take me across
the sands did not promise to be easy. According to Wilfred Thesiger the bedu
who assisted him on his desert trips were ultimately doomed to die slow deaths
as "unskilled labour" in cities for which they had not been born.
In fact Thesiger's notoriously cynical
predictions have not been borne out. It is of course true that the era of noble
beduin tribes dominating the Arabian peninsula
has passed. Camel caravans no longer carry frankincense resin from the groves
of Dhofar to the Levant .
The bedu of southern Arabia no
longer survive by squeezing dew from rags left out overnight on bushes. But
there are still at least 7,000 bedu in the Wahiba - that is to say, people who
live without permanent homes, who seasonally migrate, who live from driving
sheep and goats to new feeding sites.
In modern Oman
Despite his undoubted bedu credentials
(he wears a long beard, has a dagger in his belt, carries a stick, does not
speak English and is as at home on a camel as behind the wheel of a pick-up)
Said Sultan is worldly enough to liaise with a regular tour firm which sends
him his European customers. "I've done about four or five trips with
tourists every winter for the last eight years," he told me. "Most
trips are a couple of days, though I've just had a German for 10 days."
Said Sultan drove me in his beaten-up Toyota
The camps in these sands are not the
traditional black camelhair Arabian tents. Sultan Said led me to an unsightly
shelter of palm fronds and plastic tarpaulins surrounded by a wire fence (to
keep the camels out) and topped by a TV aerial. The whole home, I was told,
could be taken apart, moved and rebuilt elsewhere in a single day - though
always at least four kilometres from the nearest neighbour.
Suddenly a sequence of stunningly
beautiful children began appearing from behind the dunes, ranging from cheeky
nine-year-olds with raffishly arranged head-scarves to tall youths in spotless
white dish-dashas. Surprisingly, even the wife and daughters dared to come and
shake my hand.
"We like living here," one of
the teenage sons was explaining. "It's an easy life. All we do is send the
animals out to feed. Who wants to live in a town?" Rabbits and chickens
scuttled under my feet, laundry flapped on a string, the March sun shone
strongly but not excessively hot. Meanwhile, Said Sultan was preparing the
camels, tying on the simple wooden harness and the water skins, shoving
football-sized lumps of congealed dates into their slobbering mouths, before
allowing them to vacuum up the water in the tank with more noise than a
draining bath.
"We were riding four of the finest
camels in Arabia
and if necessary could travel both fast and far." Thus did Thesiger
describe his entrance to the Wahiba. But until a camel has helped you cross a
waterless desert, it is hard to understand the bedouin reverence for these
reptilian beasts with their constant belchings, bony, articulated necks and
underdeveloped bottoms. I was given an off-white female named Salmana, while
Said Sultan led two males; we departed on foot, the animals plodding silently
into the dropping sun.
The terrain comprised long valleys of
shimmering flat gravel, divided by equally long sand hill ranges. The Wahiba is
not an entirely barren desert: in places low arak trees and scrubby ghaf bushes
dot the sands, providing both firewood for the bedu and fodder for the animals.
We picked over waves of sand, descending into sandy crescent hollows and
negotiating minor avalanches. Said Sultan skipped joyfully ahead, finding invisible
paths up the dunes, while I laboured behind, unable to prevent Salmana nibbling
in a leisurely manner from every ghaf bush in sight.
A couple of hours later, exhausted by
the dunes, we rode: I astride my camel, Said Sultan, rather more elegantly,
kneeling on his. But riding a camel, as I soon found out, is no fun for
beginners. Salmana's irregular, lurching movement had soon given me an aching
bum.
With the sun setting, we stopped to
make camp. Said Sultan hobbled the camels to stop them disappearing, and we
drank from the skins. Bearing in mind TE Lawrence's stories of drinking foully
brackish or even sulphorous water in the desert, I was pleased to note that our
water tasted oddly of wax and sour yoghurt without being undrinkable.
We ate in complete darkness beside the
fire, sitting cross-legged on opposite sides of a dish of hot mutton stew which
we ate with our hands. The highlight was the bread: a round, flat loaf which
Said Sultan had cooked by burying it in the sand beside the cinders. Apart from
the occasional moan of a camel, the only sound was of the wind puffing off the
dunes. We had no tents, discounting the very slight dangers of rain or of
poisonous animals (adders leave noticeable slither tracks, and scorpions leave
ragged, asymmetrical puncture marks in the sand). Warm in my sleeping bag,
having drunk too many Arabic coffees with ginger and cardamom, I lay staring at
a wild moon.
The next morning, after breakfasting on
sweet tea and explosively fermented milk, we began inching across a vast plain,
featureless except for occasional isolated trees. After a couple of hours I
noticed a distant puff of dust approaching from the far side of the plain. A
car? "My brother-in-law," remarked Said Sultan. When the car
eventually reached us a man stepped out and the three of us sat cross-legged in
the plain to catch up on the desert gossip.
Did we discuss the question of all
questions, the nature of human restlessness? As if in response to Bruce
Chatwin's anxieties, the true power of the desert decided to show me its hand
later that day. Shortly before dusk an enormous thunderstorm suddenly exploded
over our heads.
Instantly Said Sultan had us and all
our luggage buried in the sand under a clammy plastic tarpaulin. A drastic
solution? Yes, but considerably better than the alternative, namely to be
totally exposed to the fury of the most violent and prolonged storm I have ever
seen in my life. For the next 12 hours I lay immobile and frozen in a
coffin-like space, tormented by the roar of rain and thunder, and asking myself
whether this was what people had been designed for: to cower alone in the
primeval mud, incomprehending and terrified in the face of nature.
Possibly. Or possibly not. City life, I
told myself, deserved another appraisal.
GETTING THERE
Jeremy Atiyah flew as a guest of Gulf
Air (tel: 0171 4081717) which offers return flights to Muscat
WHERE TO STAY
The arrangements in Oman Oman
FURTHER INFORMATION
Visits to Oman
