by Joe Bennett
12
Where’s the Dugong?
I’ve never seen a dugong. I’d like to see a dugong. Which is why I’ve driven south from Fujairah to this shallow lagoon. Dugongs are supposed to frolic here.
The dugong is as odd as its name. With the tail of a dolphin, the flippers of a seal, and a snout designed to graze on sea grass, it looks committee-designed, the marine equivalent of the camel.
According to a desperately thin list of local attractions I picked up at the motel, this playground for the dugong is also the most northerly mangrove swamp on the planet. A few loose camels are chewing at its northernmost edge, fractionally reducing its geographical significance. But though I sit by the muddy water a while and marvel at the quite prodigious quantity of litter floating in it, I see no dugongs.
Back up the coast a few miles I stop at a little fishing wharf where not a lot is happening. A few men are mending nets. A couple of old wooden dhows have been hauled onto the beach, but the fishing vessels are made of sleeker modern materials, little more than enlarged canoes piled high with nets and fish traps. Pick-up trucks that, unlike in Dubai, look as though they do actually pick things up, are parked haphazardly on the gravel, and the men who drive them have gathered at the Al Tizkar Restaurant across the road.
‘O Allah,’ says a fading poster in English on the wall of the restaurant, ‘I repent before you of my sins and I shall never return to them.’ Beneath it another poster advertises crumbed fish fillets.
The restaurant is thick with flies, the small silent flies that seem ubiquitous in these parts. They are impressively unswattable. A tiny tickle of irritation tells you that one has perched on a hair of your forearm, but the fly is telepathic and takes off not when you make to swat it but at the instant you think of making to swat it. The restaurant offers cakes for sale, shielded from the flies by plastic bags, and cans of Mountain Dew and toothbrushes and bars of soap, but like every other patron I buy only a cup of sweet tea and, like every other patron, I take it outside to drink under a straggly tree that seethes with noisy sparrows. They sound like warring mice. My table is crusted with sparrow shit.
A knot of Arab men at an adjacent table discuss the matters of the day with a ferocity that is alarming to my English sensibilities. One man in a grey robe repeatedly removes a sandal and bangs it against his chair for rhetorical effect. He sounds as though he wants to start a blood-soaked revolution. No one seems remotely alarmed. And seconds later he is smiling.
When anyone joins or leaves the group there’s a muttered, unconsidered exchange – salaam aleekum aleekum salaam – and for the first time in the weeks that I’ve been in this country I feel that I am in Arabia. Few of the men are wearing the white dish-dashes of Dubai. Their robes range from grey to olive. Some go bareheaded. But why are none of them doing any work? Perhaps that’s all being done by women. There are no women here. Not one.
When I get up to leave, the sandal-banger eyes me and mutters Salaam aleekum as if by reflex. ‘Aleekum salaam,’ I reply and get a general nod of acknowledgement, which is frankly about as far as I have managed to pierce Arab culture to date.
Hidden around the corner at a palpably inferior table a bunch of Indian youths are playing dominoes with quiet chatter. When I stop to watch them they smile nervously up at me with huge teeth in tiny heads. And they fall silent. I smile. They continue to smile. I move on. They start chattering again.
The township of Kalba, though next door to Fujairah, does not belong to the emirate of Fujairah. It is part of Sharjah, the emirate on the other side of the mountains. In consequence Kalba is dry, but it is only mid-morning so I try not to let that bother me.
The reason Kalba belongs to Sharjah illustrates nicely the British influence in these parts. Kalba had been taken over by the Sharjah branch of the Qawasim, the tribe that dominated the west coast. But by the early twentieth century the rulers of Kalba felt separate from Sharjah and repeatedly asked the British Resident to acknowledge Kalba as an independent sheikhdom. The British Resident said no and no again. But then, in the 1930s, the British decided they needed an air base on the east coast, so they offered Kalba the independent status it craved. Kalba’s rulers accepted cheerfully and signed a truce similar to the ones signed by other regional sheikhs. Such an agreement would, as usual, keep them in power because of the backing of the Brits, and provide them with new ways to get rich.
After the Second World War, however, things changed again. The British were feeling the financial pinch and could no longer afford to look after so many client states. Moreover, planes had acquired greater fuel capacity and range which meant there was no longer any need for an air base on the east coast. So in 1951, when there was a coup in Kalba and a new ruler took control, the Brits simply declared him an outlaw, had him exiled to Saudi Arabia, welched on the trucial agreement, and gave Kalba back to Sharjah in whose possession it reluctantly remains. Albion, in other words, at its most splendidly perfidious.
Kalba consists of an unprepossessing coastal strip dotted with thumping great mosques. Their minarets resemble elaborately carved pencils. The main drag is lined with all the standard little Indian-run businesses, including an inordinate number of barbers and perfume shops. I guess that grooming is one way to pass a drinkless evening.
Kalba seems an unlikely place to find a restaurant called Rehab Cafeteria. But there it is and in I go for breakfast. And I’m an immediate hit with the other customers, namely Saeed, Ali and Mohammed, all of whom are about eight years old, two of whom are chubby little Arab boys, and the last of whom, Mohammed, a clown with eyes as brown as a dog’s eyes and the size of ping-pong balls, is a skinny Pakistani. When I come through the door the three of them stare at me as I might have stared at a dugong earlier this morning, though I would not have said to the dugong in a single breathless unpunctuated sentence, ‘Hello how are you what his name?’ and then burst into giggles. Or at least not without giving the dugong the chance to answer. But they prove to be lively funny kids, who are fascinated by the New Zealand money that I show them from my wallet and by my New Zealand passport and by the freckles on my forearm. It’s always good to be a novelty item and I am in a fine mood as I head back up the road to Fujairah, my belly fuelled by Rehab cakes and tea.
Fujairah specializes in roundabouts. As you approach one a speed bump obliges you to slow. Generally there’s a road sign to alert you to the presence of the speed bump, but sometimes, just for the fun of it, there isn’t. These speed bumps are serious things. Take one at thirty kilometres an hour and you think the underside of the car has been wrecked. Take it at fifty and it probably has.
But the agreeable consequence of the speed bumps is that they give you time to enjoy the roundabouts. For these are no mere traffic devices. They are cultural installations. One features a colossal coffee pot of the traditional toucan-bill design surrounded by cups. Another depicts a giant hand like the one that rose from the lake to seize Excalibur, only this hand is emerging from some ornamental shrubs to grasp a perfume bottle. A third depicts an eagle landing, its wings vertical, its talons spread and the look in its eye suggesting that it’s just caught its rump on barbed wire. All of which is an attempt to brand and theme, and is neither more nor less risible than the efforts of other places that hope to gorge on the tourist dollar. In Ohakune in New Zealand we’ve got a giant fibreglass carrot.
Fujairah has a fine old fort. And on this particular day the number of tourists flocking to it amount to one, me. The original fort was built in the seventeenth century by the local sheikh. For a couple of hundred years it was the only stone building in these parts and a very potent asset it must have been. For, like the whole of the region back then, this was tribal land and feuds were not so much common as a way of life. Power was generally gained by a coup and lost the same way. Few rulers died quietly in their beds.
The fort stood more or less intact until 1925 when the Royal Navy shelled it into submission. The reason was political. Because the main shipping rout
es were on the other side of the mountains, the British did not consider Fujairah to be of great importance. Indeed Britain had more or less arbitrarily decreed that Fujairah, like Kalba, was part of Sharjah. Just as with Kalba this rankled. And just as with Kalba, the sheikh of Fujairah, one Sheikh Abdullah, repeatedly petitioned for independent status. And just as with Kalba, the British Resident said no. And there the matter rested until 1925 when it suddenly turned nasty.
A woman in Sharjah complained that her daughter had been abducted and sold to Sheikh Abdullah. The British Resident upheld the complaint and told the Sheikh of Sharjah to tell Abdullah to return the girl. The Sheikh of Sharjah obeyed the British but Abdullah didn’t obey the Sheikh of Sharjah. So the British sent a gunboat round the tip of the rhino’s horn to make the point more emphatically. On the morning of April 20th, the British bombarded the fort for ninety minutes, destroying three quarters of it. Sheikh Abdullah gave the girl back and paid a fine.
In 1952, however, Fujairah did get its longed-for independence from Sharjah. The reason was oil. One of the conditions of all truces signed with the British was that matters concerning oil exploration had to go through the British Resident, which inevitably led to contracts with British oil companies. In the early Fifties, however, the American oil companies came sniffing and, because Fujairah had no truce with the Brits, it welcomed the Americans.
‘Hold on a minute,’ said the British Resident to the leaders of Fujairah, ‘how about we offer you one of our lovely trucial arrangements that have made your fellow sheikhs in other regions terribly rich? Can’t imagine how we didn’t get round to it before.’
‘Oh thank you very much,’ said Sheikh Muhammad of Fujairah, and so it came to pass that Fujairah gained the independence from Sharjah that it craved. Sadly, no significant quantities of oil were found.
And now Fujairah’s rebuilding its fort, not to repel foreign invaders but to attract them. It looks as a fort should. Brown and squat, it stands on a little rocky eminence with great slappable walls a metre thick. It has slits for windows and its battlements are cut like crude square teeth. It looks exactly like the castles kids build on the beach.
I try the handle of the huge and ancient wooden door. Locked. Pigeons coo and broop in the window slits. A pair of green parakeets chase each other round the walls, swooping and squabbling, then settle on a parapet side by side like lovebirds.
Around the fort stand the crumbled remains of mud-built houses. The few bits of wall look like melting ice-cream. Nearby, new mud bricks lie drying in the winter sun alongside piles of reddish fibrous planks cut, I presume, from date palms. These are to rebuild the original village and enhance further Fujairah’s appeal to the tourist. And it’s clearly working because a plush white coach pulls up amid the building site and disgorges about thirty German tourists and about a hundred cameras. One after another the Germans try the door of the fort, just as I did, then resign themselves to photographing its exterior from whatever cute angles they can find. They’ll be fine photos. The clear air, the blue sky, the bright light and the backdrop of the Hajar mountains will bring oohs and ahs from the living rooms of Düsseldorf. The Germans are done with the place in fifteen minutes. Back onto the bus they pile for the next raid.
I pass through a gate set in a crude old wall and enter a courtyard of sorts, in which I find a pair of elderly cannon, a few distressed banana trees, a formidable quantity of wind-blown litter, a massive plastic storage drum and, in the far corner, barely signposted, the entrance to the Fujairah Museum. From inside I can hear unmuseumish giggling. When I open the door the giggling stops. Inside the ticket office sit five Emirati women in black abayas and headscarves. Four look down demurely at their laps. The fifth gets up and silently accepts my admission money. I step into the first of the two exhibition halls, the door swings shut behind me and the giggling restarts.
In a glass case on the wall there’s a goatskin water bag. I’m delighted to see it because Thesiger wrote of them constantly. They kept him alive in the desert, but he said they made the water taste of goat. It’s now obvious why. A goatskin water bag differs only minimally from a goat. The instructions for making one would not be hard to reconstruct: take one goat. Lop off head. Haul out guts. Sew arse shut. Tie front and back legs together to make a handle. Fill goat through neck. Tie neck shut with string. Attach to camel. Set off into desert and good luck.
The problem with creating a museum here is that although the place has been inhabited by human beings for several thousand years, they left little behind. They left little behind because they had little. And they had little because there was little to have. This was a harsh and empty land.
The men who lived nomadically could carry everything they owned on a camel and a wife or two. Those who lived a more settled life were hardly more encumbered. Most dwellings were either the mud huts being rebuilt outside here, huts that would eventually melt back into the land from which they were built, or else flimsy constructions made of baraisti, which is just a mesh of palm fronds woven onto a frame of sticks. Most of the time in this climate baraisti was all the shelter needed, providing shade from the sun and protection of sorts from wind-blown sand. If it rained you got wet and delighted in it.
They’ve reconstructed a baraisti hut in the museum. The only items inside are some rolls of carpet, a baby’s hammock, and a few cooking utensils, all of which adds up to bad news for museum curators. Most of the history these people carried with them over several thousand years was held in their heads. As it was handed from generation to generation it became both embellished and simplified until it hardened eventually, as it does with human beings the world over, into myth.
But the Bedouin did cherish their weapons. Theirs was a life that valued fighting, because it was a life where little else mattered. They owned no land. They sought nothing but good camels and the glory of war. When Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter to the south-west of here in 1948, he was just in time to record it all. After him came oil and the internal combustion engine and all the material trappings of the West. His book makes a better museum than this museum.
Before the Europeans arrived the locals had had to make do with daggers and there are several of these on display, each with an exquisitely decorated hilt and a blade like a stretched new moon for rootling amid an enemy’s short ribs. But then the Europeans brought rifles. The rifle was a dagger you could stab someone with from a very long way away and the Bedouin took to it immediately. They became experts with rifles, maintaining them with the sort of care that some people expend on their cars or their looks. Thesiger recounts how his companions would make a journey of hundreds of miles across cruel nothing for the gift of a good rifle.
At the far end of the room, beyond the cabinets of weaponry, a video with a musical soundtrack loops in perpetual replay. It stars pretty young white people who charge across dunes in a Japanese 4WD, grinning like gibbons as they do so, then stop the vehicle beside a wadi that runs with sparkling fresh water. In their bright cotton clothing, the happy holidaymakers pile out of the vehicle and wade into the water, splashing each other with squeals of delirious joy. Thesiger, I imagine, would throw up.
Archaeology has only just begun to plunge its trowel into the local sands but already it has found several ancient tombs, here reconstructed in polystyrene. The evidence suggests that the tombs were looted and re-used at intervals of roughly a thousand years.
A display of coins includes a Maria Theresa thaler. Maria Theresa was a remarkable Empress of Austria and her thaler was a remarkable coin. First minted in 1741 it gradually became the most accepted currency of international trade, popular throughout Africa, Arabia, and India. It was also one of the first coins used in America which may have contributed to the Yanks calling their eventual currency the dollar. And though Maria Theresa died a couple of hundred years ago, they have continued to mint her thaler, with every coin being dated 1780, the year of her death.
Until 1971 when the UAE adopted the dirham there was no
official currency in these parts. Most people traded in the rupee, thus underlining once again the massive and generally unacknowledged influence of India on the trade of this region. But in the Sixties Fujairah minted a few coins of its own and there are several on display here. The currency it adopted was the Saudi riyal. The twenty-five-riyal piece features some suitably Arabic decorations on one side and on the other the hamster-like cheeks of dear old President Nixon. Another coin shows Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon. Fujairah, it seems, in the period of uncertainty when the British were withdrawing from the Gulf and no one was quite sure what would happen next, was keen to suck up to the Americans.
I wander out, leaving the museum deserted once again. The five robed women once again fall silent as I pass them. I emerge into sunshine that smarts the eyes. A kingfisher of startling vividness swoops over the wall and into a forest of dusty palm trees. I follow through a gate into what the dugong-plugging brochure describes as the ‘famous date gardens’ of Fujairah. The trees lean at debauched angles over kitchen gardens. Dotted here and there are little concrete houses, white-walled, flat-roofed, mud-surrounded, litter-strewn, some with a perimeter wall of concrete secured by an elaborate metal grille. Huge-eyed children silently watch me go by.
I amble a while through town, through a meat-market, past countless little Indian businesses, past the coffee pot roundabout and down to the area of seafront dubbed the Corniche. Efforts have been made to smarten it – concrete seats on the prom in the form of half-open conch shells and grouped table-and-sunshade arrangements on the beach. No one is sitting at either. Perhaps, so far, Fujairah’s ambition has exceeded its attraction, but I like the place. Its compactness, its graspability – these qualities are a relief after Dubai.
In a little arcade of Indian shops I finger a pair of trousers, light cotton, cross checked, reddish, the sort of trousers Rupert Bear might have worn in bed.
