doorway to nowhere

My world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes / Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm; / An endless tapestry the past has women drapes / The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform.
D H Lawrence, Amores, 1916

We are crunching over pebbles scattered around a lone watchtower with a caved-in roof, somewhere in the far northeastern corner of the Sharqiya. Once upon a time, a desert sheikh had built his gardens here, but the falaj is now choked with sand, and the watchtower has nothing to watch over, except a desert of salt flats on one side, dunes to the west and distant mountains to the north. For centuries the camel caravans had come and gone by here, trudging from one be’ir, or water well, to the other.

We are in their footsteps, but the sand is now brushed over with the thick sweep of tyres, not hoofs, and sometimes the soft pitter-patter of desert foxes. More present is the vegetation, clinging to the edges of a seemingly endless series of sandy ripples that flow southwest. Every tree here is a ghaf, and it is under their extensive clumps that you will find the Bedouin and their ramshackle huts of corrugated metal and sticks, wire netting encompassing family, goats and camels.

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