the whiff of open sky

Whate’er she meant by’t, bury it with me,/ For since I am/ Love’s martyr, it might breed idolatry/ If into other hands these reliques came./ As ’twas humility/ T’ afford to it all that a soul can do,/ So ’tis some bravery/ That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.
John Donne (1573–1631). The Funeral

Majoe Mathew has been staring at the ends of the world a long time, and according to him, it’s constantly changing. Standing at the last frontier between desert and road at sunrise, Majoe inhales deeply. You can smell the freshly sprayed bitumen here, mixed with the dull scent of industrial machinery. And beyond, always present, the whiff of open sky, rolling desert and an incredibly deep blue sea so full of fish you can see them jumping out if you look long enough.

Majoe seems to live and breathe the road here, heading a team that has built the newest road in the sultanate. As the site manager of road maker Strabag Oman looks out over Khuwaymah, where Phase One of the tarmac, now complete, ends, he tells of the story of the road. It is a complex tale of discovering the desert, getting stuck in it and surviving sand storms for three months a year. But over the technicalities of blasting rock, building upon sand and through sabkha, Majoe laces his experiences with a first-hand account of the land and its people.

While phone calls in his office make him roll out blueprints, it is a National Geographic that lies on his table at the site camp, tucked away in a pause in the sand dunes, off the new road. So instead of bitumen ratios and kilometre readings, there’s a prehistoric chimp staring up at you from its yellow-rectangle frame. “I don’t believe that you can really get a feel of a place as a tourist,” he says. “To really experience a place, you have to live in it, and know its people.” Such insight developed early, from his roadwork around the Indian subcontinent, where travel went hand in hand with asphalt. “I was always interested in the socio-anthropological aspect of things around me,” he says, halfway through a carrot.

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