like glass over a pillow

I feel the silence waiting/ To take them all up again/ In its vast completeness, enfolding/ The sound of men.
D H Lawrence, Amores, 1916

Far away from where the road buckles under desert, Stefan Altziebler is pouring over a satellite image of the area, explaining how a road over desert is like glass over a pillow. “Think of the road as glass,” says the general manager of the road construction company, Strabag. “And the desert sand as your pillow. If you thump your hand down, the glass will crack as the pillow under gives way. But if your glass is on a table, its stiff top will support the blow.” Which means that Strabag’s new road, between Ashkharah and Khuwaymah, will build itself layer upon layer, each supporting the next, from soft to progressively harder. “You’ll start with sand, move up to filling, add the aggregate base, top this up with asphalt.”

There’s a lot of engineering that goes into 60km and RO4.7mn of desert road. First comes the earth work: gouging out the area where the road will be layed, removing the top layer of sand in this case. This is then filled in with hard material dug out from what is known as a ‘borrow pit’ within the industry, a source of filling material that meets specifications layed out by Strabag’s engineers. This material is then mixed with water, and forms the foundation for the next stage: the aggregate base course. This is when stones are sourced, crushed and screened. They’re brought to the site, and then layed with a paver, with the help of laser-guided instruments for correct alignment. Over this comes the prime coat, where bitumen is sprayed. Over this comes the asphalt: a mixture of bitumen and a filler of dust-like particles and other materials, brought together at 170ºC. The road is compacted till it cools down to about 75ºC, at which point it can’t be pressed any further. Because of the intense temperatures of Oman, as less bitumen is used – just four per cent of the asphalt.

Such are the intricacies of a desert road – lives spent beating the desert, deflating tyres for the sand and building the technology to make roads where there was empty space. All this, though, is just a preview to what the Sharqiya coast has in store. As Bedu fishermen laden with squid begin to venture onto fresh asphalt for the first time, the next story will unfold.

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