Desert Woodlands

Metaphor is a way of life for the Bedouin, and poetry is his summit

July 2005

How could I possibly describe to you the beauty of the Bedu gathering in the middle of the desert? Imagine shadowy shapes, crisp white dishdashas in the half moonlight, flapping masars in the wind, ghostly camels in the night and the infinitely delicate greeting of touching noses. Above, clouds that sprinkled seconds of rain earlier stand backlit against the moon, stirred by summer winds across the Sharqiya Sands.

Everyone in Muscat, huddled against the onslaught of the summer, had thought I was crazy to venture out into the desert. But this is Oman’s best kept secret: while the capital seems to shun any outdoor activity, wadis to the south are overflowing, spilling across the road that I took. And further on, wild woodlands spring up from the fringes of desert – a tangled, unruly but triumphant growth in the face of everything sensible. Just feet from the sand dunes lie lush plantations behind towns like Mintrib and Rakhe, full of date palms, bananas and fields of deep green. But the real wonder are the clumps of shrubbery and grass that now carpet the desert, right from the northern edge to the east coast.

I followed that carpet of vegetation from Rakhe, clinging to the fringes of desert with plantations and forgotten ruins. It was there that I stumbled on Saalim Wahaibi, a Bedu in a small hut with a wife and five wild-eyed children. He offered to take me into the desert in search of trees, a journey that would slowly expand into a full-fledged crossing right to the Arabian Sea. I had lunch in his ramshackle dwelling: hard-packed rice, fried mutton with aniseed and camel milk. Stuffed, we set out into the afternoon, deflating the tires for added traction through the sand. The desert seems like a vast unknown and uncharted sea to most outsiders, a wilderness where you could disappear into and never come out of. But once in with the Bedu it seems full of life, with a network of tracks that crisscross it, leading from one one-hut settlement to the other. Each would have the Toyota pickup that the Bedu swear by and call abu shenab, or ‘father of the moustache.’ It is the only vehicle you will find in the desert, and it is its tire marks that you must follow over the sand.

We filled up both tanks of the vehicle – an accumulated total of around 150 litres of petrol – deflated the tires, put the car into 4WD and set out on the track that lead south of Rakhe into the desert. It was half past two in the afternoon and we had an entire patch of the country empty in front of us. As we raced south and then southeast, we came across clumps of trees against large reddish dunes, their colour characteristic of the northern desert.

We’d stop under, and the desert immediately seemed friendlier in the shade. It should – we were under a ghaf tree – a legendary species that survives 50°C in arid regions across Arabia and the Indian subcontinent. Rejoicing in the Latin name prosopis cineraria, it can form woodlands up to 85km in length and 20km in width. The tree provides shade and nesting habitat for birds and its tiny leaves are eaten by goats and camels. It is evergreen, with leaves present during the driest month when other trees are bare. The ghaf is also excellent fodder, with protein, calcium and fibre in the leaves. Because of a deep tap root system, the prosopis doesn’t compete with other vegetation for water or nutrients. It also stabilises sand dunes and can survive periodic burial. No wonder this tree has gone down in folklore: it can tolerate alkalinity, drought, grazing, heat, poor soil, sand and salt. In 19th century India, lives were saved during a famine when its bark was ground, mixed with flour and made into cakes. This emergency measure is in addition to its other uses in that region: its bark is used to treat asthma, bronchitis, dysentery, leucoderma, leprosy, muscle tremors and piles.

The ghaf is not a particularly good-looking tree: more like a ragged survivor growing in spurts where it can, with patchy outgrowths of foliage. It has a grey, deeply fissured bark and some thorns on the branches that didn’t look very dangerous. We left its shade regretfully, and only because the tire tracks disappearing into the desert promised lots of adventure.

And all we could see was green. We didn’t come across any more ghaf on the route we took, but the sand on either side was covered in vegetation, perhaps sprung from recent rain. It was surprising, of course, even unbelievable, that the desert was green at the height of summer. But then the desert has always been as much about life as it has been about the lack of it. Perhaps in its rarefied atmosphere devoid of most things we take for granted, life seems to stand out. It certainly is a more intense environment. In the late 1980s the Oman Wahiba Sands Project was undertaken by the Royal Geographical Society and Omani agencies. Botanists identified over 130 different plants in the area, about four times more than they’d expected. Added to this were an estimated 16,000 invertebrates and even evidence of early lithic activity dating back 7,000 years. Three species of lichen were found, a possible food source for Arabian gazelle. Beneath the larger ghaf up to 20 species of surface vegetation were recorded. The grey monitor lizard was found to burrow under the roots, while Ruppell’s foxes, sand cats and the white-tailed mongoose were found in the woodlands. Several reptile species were recorded, along with a staggering 87 species of birds and some very interesting little inhabitants like water-basking beetles that collect surface water at dawn and later burrow up to 20cm into the sand.

On we went, driving hard through the sand, skimming over the harder packed stretches and wallowing in and roaring through the softer parts. We’d come across the occasional Bedu hut, just planks of wood, pieces of canvas and some sticks in the sand, sometimes with a herd of camels and always with an abu shenab. The house and its one family were always the only one that you could see from horizon to horizon, and we came across only a couple on our way through.

Finally, after three hours of racing across desert, we made it through to the Arabian Sea. We had seen so much of desert the entire afternoon that the hazy blue in the distance looked like some promised land, a fantastic sight and well worth the effort. Towards the end the desert seemed to change, a monumental heaving and sighing of the earth as it rose into huge dunes, like one last massive effort before tumbling into the sea. But it was going the other way, of course, and we could see fresh white sand being blown over previous layers of deep reddish brown. A million years ago, during a dry glacial period when the sea level was much lower, sand blew inland from the exposed seabed to form the first of a succession of sand seas in Sharqiya. The early dunes contained a lot of carbonates from the shells of marine animals, and when the sea level rose again during a wetter inter-glacial period, those particles dissolved, cementing into the aeolianite formations we find now. These cemented dunes were planed off by strong winds during another dry period, and the sand from this erosion blew further inland.

We broke through on to beach at a Bedu fishing settlement called Ghail, but after the dryness of the desert it felt uncomfortably sticky and humid. There were a few fishermen on the beach with lines in the surf, and they gave Saalim a couple of fish that the Bedu call khanafah. Late that evening, as we made our way back north through the sands, we stopped at a Bedu’s home and sipped on kahwa and chai while our host cut the fish and boiled it in turmeric, or kurkum.

We sprawled ourselves out on the slightly warm sand in the hut, partly open to the sky. This home is just made up of the Bedu man, his wife, daughter and mother. Now, we wait for the fish to be cooked, the only people from horizon to horizon. The only noise is the wind over sand, sand scraping over sand and ragged canvas flapping wildly. Saalim promptly curled up contentedly, enveloped in dishdasha and masar. It might be the height of summer, but the desert and its inhabitants are in full bloom, and there’s nowhere else we’d rather be.

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