dead-end stories

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it
Lawrence Durrell, Justine

Such stories can run through the emptiness of the Empty Quarter like dead-end dirt and sand roads in the Ramlat Hashman. Choice seems endless: a vast, flat expanse with the tracks of pickups heading helter-skelter in seeming abandon. To an outsider, which unmarked turnoff to take is a life and death choice, but these fade into everyday decisions for someone like Ahmed. As we left the ravaged ruins of Shisr, propped up by the promise of tourism and headed into empty space towards Hashman, he pointed out signs in the middle of nowhere. On the horizon to our left – that would be south – he saw a well, or beir. I looked through his treasured Nikon binoculars and saw nothing except haze. He’s got to be bluffing, I thought, trying to impress me. But he would turn completely off the sandy track the next day, as we made our way from Hashman to Mitan, We drove for hours, following one pickup trail and then leave it for another, seemingly without enough reason. To be honest we did get lost after overshooting our destination, thrown off course by new roads since he had last been there, but we did get there eventually.

Out of the flatness of the desert, just kilometres south of the Yemeni border – little more than a pole in the sand – and the gigantic dunes of Saudi Arabia to the northeast, Mitan rises up. It seemed like a metropolis after half a day’s worth of wandering lost between countries, a mirage on the horizon that quickly grew into a sprawl of dusty wooden cabins, a laundry, a tailor’s shop, the inevitable wali’s compound and the promised half-constructed line of new villas that 500 inhabitants will eventually move into.

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