Quite apart from the huge tax at source, the costs incurred in transport overland were substantial. The camel convoys for journeys over a thousand arid miles, often through lands roamed by brigands demanding exorbitant protection money, had to be financed. Finally, on reaching Alexandria, the embarkation port for Roman and Greek destinations, heavy export taxes were exacted.
My own Andhur outing to gather incense ended in failure because when, several months later instead of the recommended five days, I next visited the specific trees we had slit, the four of us disagreed as to which trees we had incised. So I went to Salalah where I bought several packets of cured frankincense and, back in London, tried to sell it at a profit to shops catering for standard church goodies. I was politely told that ‘nowadays our incense is made from fish glue.’
My entrepreneurial failure notwithstanding, the global incense trade in the twenty-first century is booming. Twelve per cent of upmarket perfumes and skin care products use it as a highly marketable ingredient.
American chemists analysing frankincense have isolated anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic and antiseptic properties with numerous curative and preventative uses, including therapeutic massage, aromatherapy, control of arthritis, and even DNA repair functions.
Production of frankincense is, at the time of writing, negligible in Dhofar and is confined to satisfying the market for gift-wrapped luxury packs sold at mouth-watering prices in five-star hotels in Muscat and Dubai. This does not, of course, worry Omanis because black gold from Fahud has more than compensated for the old white gold from Dhofar.
I treasure the memory of that night at Andhur by the incense troughs. The sky was crowded with stars and edged by a crescent moon. A wolf howled from the east where the labyrinthine canyons of the Wadi Thawbah cut through the nej’d.
From the high crags of the nearby Valley of Maghtabara the reply came from other wolves, and I thought of Thesiger who had camped here some years before. He had written of wolves on a journey he had made from Salalah to the Yemen . . . A bedu had left his two young sons at a well with bags of sardine fodder for his camels. He was gone for only a day, but during that time wolves ate all the sardines and killed the children. Their father found both his sons’ partly eaten bodies.
While in the nej’d I heard many wolves, but saw only two in all my time there. On both occasions we were moving silently in file and the wolves fled as soon as they saw us.
At about this time my signaller gave me a note of a Morse code message just received from Patrick Brook, the Muscat Regiment adjutant at Salalah headquarters. A week previously I had sent back on the Beaver a Zingibari soldier who had briefly been ‘taken over by a djinn spirit on Dehedoba duty’. He had stayed terrified after the djinn had left him, so he was of no use to Fiend Force.
Patrick’s message was brief. ‘Ref Spooky Man, Salim Mayoof, he claims that your Said Salim has stolen his soul and he cannot return to [north] Oman until it is released. Suggest you send a signal back to me saying that “Soul has been released”. All ideas welcome.’
I checked with Said Salim, who shrugged, smiled and commented, ‘Mayoof magnoon’ (Mayoof mad). He agreed, however, that he would very happily release Mayoof’s soul if he had inadvertently and unknowingly removed it at some point. I confirmed this to Patrick and never again saw Mayoof.
From Andhur we drove back west, took on water, supplies and six goats from our base by the pools of Ayun, then headed west with Hamed al Khalas to check waterholes.
Hamed led us first by way of the Wadi Ayun and, in places, tracks beside it to a little-known spring by the confluence of the Amkun valley and another at the Ayun’s juncture with the Wadi Harazon, at which point Mubarreq Obeid killed a gazelle which made a tasty change from goat.
About two miles north of the last spring, called Abkah by Hamed, we came to an important camel trail crossing the wadi and an underground spring called Umm al-Shaadid or Maashaadid. Hamed was full of praise for the water here, as a French waiter might discuss a favourite wine. ‘The sweetest water in the world,’ he called it, and he reminded us of his reputation for identifying the source of any water in the Dhofar nej’d by smell or taste alone. He could thus assure me that this Shaadid water came from the pools of Ayun.
‘Then, listen well, Bakheit, for you wish to find the place called Wabar, and this water flows on by way of Hayla and Khadim to the distant well at Shisr.’
This was indeed good news on both the military and the Ubar fronts.
Curious to see how bedu watered camels at Shaadid, since the water surface was said to be 45 feet down a narrow curving shaft, I let myself down this shaft using the bucket rope, a tattered length of hemp. The drop seemed greater than predicted, the heat was stifling and the shaft descended in separate lengths with bottlenecks between them where the original diggers had gone off at tangents to avoid boulders or had dug deeper as the water level dropped.
Hamed had warned me, ‘Shekohf! Ghool!’ (Beware! Snakes!) but I was more disturbed by the bats that clearly nested in holes off the shaft. My head-torch shattered en route, and in the gloom I found the flutter of the bats’ leathery wings and the stench of their dung disturbing. Relieved to escape the suffocating oven, I was greatly impressed at the bedu who must spend hours down at the water’s surface filling a great many buckets for their thirsty camels.
At times we swapped duties within our other Fiend Force sections after meeting up at Ayun or Fiend Field. We lived permanently on the move when not on Dehedoba Watch.
The dead wood with which we cooked was quick to turn to redhot embers, giving out little telltale smoke and only the faintest of glows in the dark. The trees that provided most of this hatab were sam’r, acacia, euphorbia and camel thorn.
Various large carrion birds, including buzzards and kites with their shrill keening mew would circle and indicate the position of some new and edible corpse, more often than not in wadis with scrub and hatab. We often camped in these places since we had limited space in the Land Rovers to carry hatab for the evening fire. This wadi-camping was a dubious advantage, from my point of view, since, where there was hatab there were also spiders, and I had had a spider phobia since childhood. Keen to avoid showing fear in front of the men, I had a problem trying to hide my instinctive panic when approached or, worse still, crawled over by even a small spider.
The incidence of camel and wolf spiders in these hatab wadis was, unfortunately, quite common. The camel spider can jump as much as a metre, is difficult to squash, being squat and strong, has large eyes and a beak with which it can cut into and eat the flesh of animals or humans. Hamed told me that these spiders will often wait until an intended victim falls asleep and then inject them with a local anaesthetic so that they don’t feel their flesh being eaten. On waking they find an area of skin peeled off and the surface flesh beneath gone missing. This never happened to any of us and by the time I left Arabia I had lost my fear of spiders through the frequency of forced confrontation with them.
Scorpions were everywhere in the nej’d, especially the sand-coloured six-inch-long variety, which were difficult to spot if motionless, and it was always advisable to look before picking anything up or sitting down. I always slept with my clothes and shoes on, despite the heat, and always, on feeling something crawling over my exposed parts in the dark, made to brush it off rather than squash it.
Hamed al Khalas lectured us on which ‘nasties’ were best avoided. Of the scorpions, large and small, whether green, black or light brown, none were deadly although their sting could be very painful and even incapacitate a strong man for several hours.
The snakes we saw most frequently in the nej’d, especially in the hatab wadis, were the horned viper and the puff adder. ‘If they bite you,’ Hamed advised, ‘kill an oryx and rub its blood on the bite. Then you may live.’
Of larger creatures, we spotted a few hares which, like the scorpions, were well camouflaged and often stayed motionless until we were very close. Lizards and skinks were, jud
ging by their tiny trails in the sandy stretches, very common but seldom seen.
Few days passed by on nej’d patrol without spotting small herds of Thomson’s gazelle, the occasional ibex and oryx. In two years I saw only three hyena, one wild cat and two wolves, although we heard the calls of many of all these species, especially at night. Hamed assured me that mountain lions and leopards still wandered the Qara and the nej’d, but I never spotted them even during ambushes when we remained silent and motionless for many hours.
How any creatures survive in the great heat of the nej’d along the edge of the Sands was a mystery to me, but one of the books that Ginny had borrowed on long loan from the Royal Geographical Society listed the heat-survival tricks of various species in various deserts.
The feathers of birds keep heat out as efficiently as they keep it in when conditions are cold, but in great heat they flutter their throats which creates currents of air across the moist insides of their mouths. In temperatures higher than 70°F (21°C), desert vultures urinate on their own legs to cool them down.
Some desert gazelles can extract enough liquid from their food, such as leaf sap, in order to survive with no water. Jackals can do likewise with the body liquids of animals they kill, and all desert creatures have extremely dry faeces (which is why camel turds, along with hatab, are excellent fuel for fires). With both small and large animals a 10 to 15 per cent loss in body weight due to water loss will cause functional deterioration, and a 20 per cent loss often causes death.
Even the deep sea creatures in the ‘black smokers’ (volcanic underwater vents) of the Indian Ocean have learnt to live with great heat. Their homes in hydrothermal vents demand their ability to survive in termperatures hot enough to boil water.
Like the bedu, all animals try to remain inactive by day in whatever shade they can find and, when feasible, travel and hunt by night. The oryx has no clever anti-thirst mechanism so it survives by sticking to a strict daily routine of commuting forever between known grazing areas and the nearest available water source.
Larger desert animals, including the oryx and ibex, have an advantage in that they heat up more slowly than small creatures, a process known as thermal inertia.
Humans are quite good at keeping cool but lousy at conserving water. Sweating is their chief cooling function but, during very hot desert days and on the move, they can lose up to 3 gallons (12 litres) of water a day.
Because they have large-size brains, the blood cooled by evaporation of sweat on the face and head penetrates the skull via tiny veins which deliver freshly cooled blood to the brain. Other primates lack this function.
The chief advantage of the human design is that we stand upright and when the sun is high in the sky, only our heads are exposed to maximum sun heat, unlike four-legged animals whose entire back soaks up direct heat. Only our lower legs are close to the heat rising from the hot desert surface and our upright stance receives maximum cooling from any breeze. Since we have virtually no fur or feathers, we lose heat more quickly through convection and sweating. Our hair, for those who still have some, shades our heat-sensitive brains.
Tim Landon sent me money in the shape of heavy silver coins, known as Maria Theresa dollars, which were acceptable all over Oman and could be used to bribe bedu for information as to adoo uses of old camel trails well north of the Dehedoba, because Tim’s informers had suggested that this was happening. He mentioned the names Mudhaghadhak and Amilhayt (which later turned out to be a corrupted version of Umm al-Hayat).
The money arrived along with our next scheduled goat supply at our Fiend Field airstrip, and I headed north with three vehicles and twice our normal load of fuel and supplies.
On reaching the abandoned Sultan’s 1950s fort and the waterhole at Shisr, we drove north-east up the Wadi Ghadun, whereas previously our patrols had headed north-west into the edge of the Sands of Fasad.
The water at Shisr was reached by a sandy slope some twenty feet down and was, as Hamed had assured us, a continuation of the Wadi Ghadun aquifer and the springs at Ayun and Maashaadid. Shisr means cleft in the Kathiri dialect and clearly refers to the sinkhole leading down to the water. We topped up our water cans here and, heavily laden, bounced or often enough pushed our way along the Ghadun valley past a stark rock ridge that Hamed called Maliss.
That afternoon Murad’s engine overheated and we stopped, exhausted anyway by the hottest few hours I could remember, in a confusing maze of wadis, to the immediate north of which great sand dunes reared up.
Hamed wandered off. I realized that he never seemed to notice or be affected by the heat. He returned in half an hour and beckoned to me. I did not want to walk anywhere, but could not admit this so I went with him to a corridor of sand where the tracks of a great many animals were clearly visible. Hamed squatted down and gave me a lesson on the prints which was so interesting that I forgot the heat. There were tracks of gazelle, oryx, hares, snakes, lizards, birds, locusts and, quite fresh, of camels, which Hamed said were heavily laden.
By way of this track, which Hamed explained would lead us soon to Tim’s suspect Amilhayt trail, the adoo might indeed be gaining access to the Qara without our knowledge. We would soon find out. Wilfred Thesiger had once travelled by camel from roughly where we were for six days to the spring of Mugshin, assured by his Rashidi bedu guides that they could survive for up to seven days with no food or water so long as their camels kept going.
Once Murad gave me the ‘all clear’ on the vehicles, we continued north until the labyrinth of diverging wadis opened up into a single wide valley completely blocked to the north by an abrupt line of high dunes, reddish in colour and stretching away to the north-east as far as the eye could see.
‘This is the Wadi Umm al-Hayat,’ Hamed announced. We trudged slowly to the ridge line of the nearest dune, some 200 feet high, and I noticed that on the north side the sand fell away at a far steeper angle, to the point where, presumably, the sand grains would begin to slide away in response to gravity.
This was the southern edge of the Rubh al Khali. From here the world’s largest unbroken expanse of sand stretched north into Saudi Arabia, dune after dune, some 580,000 square kilometres of nothingness, the cruel and arid conditions of which had spawned and cradled Islam. Here mountains of sand are constantly formed by the wind, only to be battered and engulfed by larger masses in the great summer storms. All life here is soon smothered by sand and sucked dry by the pitiless sun. Petrified ostrich eggs have been found here but little else, for billions of tons of sand shift annually, huge ranges alter their geography over the years and if fabulous cities ever existed, they would, I shrugged at the thought, be uncovered by chance changes in wind patterns and not by the shovel of an archaeologist.
To me, the surface of the dunes and of the hard ground between many of them was merely sand or gravel, but Thesiger had identified quartz conglomerate, porphyry, rhyolite, jasper, granite and limestone.
We drove seven miles to the south-west to the western end of the line of dunes and, finding for a while a hard gravel surface, continued north to check for further camel tracks on the far side of the dunes. We camped the night beneath a towering dune which Hamed called Yadhak.
Assuming that there was no need for silence so far north of the jebel where a single jet could kill a hundred adoo at leisure, the men were openly cheerful. There was nowhere for an adoo to run, and if their food or arms convoys were indeed using this area, they would be accompanied by innocent-looking youths, not armed PFLOAG fighters.
So the men talked into the small hours, squatting in the sand about the glowing embers of our fire, the Baluchis at ease with the Omanis. They were so different from the British soldiers that I remembered around the tank squadron fires on exercises in Germany. Nobody spoke derisively of their colleagues, trying to score over their neighbours in conversation. They expressed themselves without the need for constant swearing and an endless supply of beer cans. I felt happy with these Muslims without the superficial officer-sold
ier barrier of European armies. I was just Bakheit.
One by one the soldiers slept where they lay, and there was silence. Occasionally the plunk-plunk of cooling metal from the vehicles cut across the soft background sound of moving sand, tiny particles falling with the perpetual motion of the dunes. I remembered an old saying of Sultan bin Nashran, ‘When the desert wind stops blowing, it will be so quiet you can hear the turning of the Earth.’
I lay awake, all thoughts of the adoo for the moment eclipsed by the excitement of searching for Ubar. It could not, I felt, be far away now.
On my map I measured exactly 70 nautical miles to the point where, a decade earlier, the American archaeologist Wendell Phillips, with the Sultan’s permission, had located a deeply incised series of ancient tracks leading into the Sands to the north-west of Fasad. Once we had finished checking out this Umm al-Hayat area, I determined to head west to the grid reference that Phillips had recorded for his ‘significant tracks’ (52°30’ West and 18° North).
I had read over the past year all the books and articles that I could find about the early explorers of Arabia. Al-Ya’qubi (AD 897), Al-Mas’udi (956), Al-Qazwini (1283) and Ibn Battuta (the 1320s). Later on came Ibn Majid (1470), Ludovico di Varthema (1504) and, in the nineteenth century a plethora of Europeans starting with the Swiss Johann Burckhardt in 1811 and Richard Burton in 1853. Burton was eager to cross the entire Arabian Peninsula but never made it due to ‘the fatal fiery heat’. Three other notable Arabian explorers of that century were William Palgrave, who crossed Arabia from west to east (1863), Charles Doughty (1876) and Lady Anne Blunt (1879). All four made their journeys in the northern half of the Peninsula, the Nafud Desert, well beyond the Empty Quarter which was considered to be impenetrable.
Not until the 1930s did three very different and individualist characters, all British, decide to traverse the sands of the Rubh al Khali. First came Bertram Thomas, financial adviser to the Omani Sultan, who made the first south–north crossing of the sands in 1930. He was followed a year later by the colonial administrator, Harry St John Philby who, with Saudi royal backing, completed the first north–south crossing.
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