a rope of sa'af

I love treason but hate traitors
Julius Caesar

But the desert is full of things. You just have to approach them from the desert, not the highway. To a city slicker these are little things, not worth a stop. To a habitant these are everything. Like Wadi Malhayt that you drive across on your way to Hashman. Just a few feet deep, you are barely aware this is a wadi at all, except for the scattering of shrubbery that sticks out of sand and hints at water, somewhere between Jebel Darbab and Muqshin. But the Bedu know that if you follow it 15km north you will reach water at al Khadifs. Such wadis are also where you will find the palm called sa’af, whose frond were used to twine rope in the old days, and one of the materials used to make the old bowls, along with leather, or gild. We found the palm in places like Wadi Ayyun where we stopped long enough for Ahmed to jump out of the 4WD and dive into a clump of palm fronds. “In the old days, all the bedu were doing this,” he says, whipping out a black bladed knife and slitting a few shoots off. In less than ten minutes he had made rope strong enough to tie an animal – and in another ten he could have twined it thick enough to haul a boat out of water, or a car out of sand. He did this by separating a single frond lengthwise, following its ribbed construction. Each long strip was twisted around another, and when you had enough strips wound tight enough you had rope. There is more you can do with sa’af. Pull out the entire shoot and you can eat the pith, a soft white core encased at the base, and the date-like berries above are edible too. Such knowledge of the land is just about kept alive, increasingly threatened by a new lifestyle where survival involves a drive to the foodstuff shop.

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