survive sahamat

Be in me as the eternal moods / of the bleak wind, and not / As transient things are— / gaiety of flowers. / Have me in the strong loneliness / of sunless cliffs / And of gray waters. / Let the gods speak softly of us / In days hereafter, / the shadowy flowers of Orcus / Remember thee.
Ezra Pound

August 2007

‘We’re stumbling through a gorge in the moonlight. Everything is black and white and silver: the boulders smoothed by a river that does not exist anymore, the rugged rock faces rising up on either side. We could be lost – we haven’t a clue where the wadi is leading us – except for the fact that you could either go forward or retrace your steps. We had pressed on in the dying light of the evening an hour earlier, passing a gigantic, crumbling, forgotten dam. Hundreds of years ago, it had tried to contain Wadi Halfayn. Now, you can walk through where it had given up, spilling out its insides of mud and stone.’

This is what we’d written in December 2004, after exploring the nooks and crannies of the Samail Gap. Now, more than three years later, we came back in the daylight, re-examining the massive wall that has been around for centuries. The first thing you notice on the right wall of the wadi is the ancient falaj channel, perhaps three metres above the floor. A kilometre into the wadi, which runs straight in front of your track, is a sub-wadi, spilling to the right into a bowl, surrounded by mountains. It is here that the stone wall stands, connecting one wadi wall to another.

The first thing we noticed was that the falaj channel doesn’t run around the secondary wadi on the right, it just stops on either end of the mouth, where the stone wall cuts through. Scrambling up the wall, we discovered its real purpose: it wasn’t a dam but an aquifer, a bridge that led the falaj – a groove on its top – across the depression of the wadi. This also explained the missing section right where the sub-wadi was at its deepest. We had presumed this was where rainwater had flooded through, breaking the dam that was never repaired. But the problem with this theory is that the missing central portion wasn’t jagged edged – it was smooth and straight. There was still one problem with our latest theory, though: how did the water in the falaj get across the missing portion? We thought that there might have been an arch above that had long since fallen down, but the edges revealed no break. It wasn’t until we tiptoed to the edge that we found out the truth, the real show stealer in an ancient architectural marvel.

The ancient builders knew that a wall that supported the falaj would be torn apart if it dammed the wadi. To let the seasonal flood waters through, they had to make a break in the wall, yet had to figure out how the water in the falaj would cross over. They managed to complete the link by building a hollow shaft at either end of the wall, with a connection underground from one to the other, each opening with a hole at the top of the wall, where the channels ended at the break. Water pressure would pump the water through when the falaj was full. The pièce de résistance is the shallow square hollow that the builders carved into the channel, just before the water enters the first hole: water falls into the niche, and so do the little bits of gravel and debris that would have entered the underground channel and eventually choked it up. Now, the debris would remain in the square hollow while the water would rise up, free of solids, and then fall into the next hole up the channel in the second part of the wall and over the falaj ahead.

There is no one to marvel at the ancient engineering today, tucked away, disintegrating and dry. No one except Walid bin Hilal bin Zaher al Hashami, a 13 year old shawawi, who stands alone, with a handful of goats behind him sitting in the shade of his one-room reed hut. The Hashamis are originally from Wadi Bani Rawahah, but Walid’s family has now settled in nearby Sahamat, leaving him alone for most of the day in the wadi while his school stays closed for the summer. Once it reopens, Walid has goatherd duty over the weekends. He might just be beginning to be a teenager, but Walid is already inviting us into his few square metres of shack, all dried date palm fronds, wire mesh to keep out the goats and industrial pipe frame to keep it all together. Apart from a basket and a sack, a goatskin water container, a clay pot and some blankets, the hut is empty. It is surprisingly cool inside, considering the forty-something air outside, but we don’t accept the offer to eat because he has so little.

Walid is a thin, soft-spoken boy with long eyelashes, large eyes, a baseball cap and a bright blue football shirt. He bears the scars of his favourite sport, a chipped front tooth, but wears it proudly. “I don’t get lonely all by myself,” he insists. “I like sitting with my goats.” Walid has a sort of silent maturity that might come from the harsh realities of Wadi Halfayn, with its dead-end road, unappreciated engineering, abandoned hollows and bare, sun-baked stone. “When I grow up I want to support my parents,” he says in the glow of plastic sheets over reed walls. “I want to be a doctor.”



The wall at Wadi Halfayn
40 Q 0582179, 2552188
Elevation 676m

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