a quiet flood

Dar's a lazy, sortah hazy/ Feelin’ grips me, thoo an’ thoo;/ An’ I feels lak doin’ less dan enythin’;/ Dough de saw is sharp an’ greasy,/ Dough de task et han’ is easy,/ An’ de day am fair an’ breezy,/ Dar’s a thief dat steals embition in de win’.
Sprin’ Fevah, Ray G. Dandridge

Wadi Bani Auf was quietly flooding. As the 44-degree day dissolved into 34-degree twilight, rain pitter-pattered over unending layers of slate mountains and soggy fortifications. It fell on the three Hatali families digging in the soft earth on their farm at Ruma, on the Aufi grandfathers and grandsons who kept bees in Gafar and the century-old Said Abdullah al Aufi of Farah, who could barely see or hear, but felt the water instead. It turned the air in Bir muggy, so that the circle of elders sitting on the plastic carpet over wadi rock were soaked as they ate melons, while dates dried inside rooms and wasps took shelter.

The Aufis never had it this good. Tracing their lineage back to the holiest of cities, dabbling on the fringes of royalty, settling down in faraway colonies, the history of this tribe is one of migration and success. You will find all of that colour between the rock that holds Wadi Bani Auf together, the wadi that was named after the tribe.

There are few places you can cross the Western Hajar mountains by car, and for many years the most glorious way was up from Al Hamra, all the way to Sharaf al Alamayn (wrongly signposted as Birkat Sharaf) and down past Haat and Balad Seet into Wadi Bani Auf. Most tourists know this as an adventure-sport journey, either for the crossing itself or, more commonly, for the pools of water you jump through in a one-way route down the narrowest of offshoot gorges. But after a bone-jarring ride over wadi stones turned over with every rain and kicked up with every pickup, and a day spent in the water, they will never know how the wadi comes alive through the stories of its people.

For this, you have to turn your back to the rock and water, and explore the wadi floor. It is here that you will find the tribes, the beekeepers and farmers. This is the real story: how the wadi lives now.

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