The relationship between Christian western Europe and the Arabs has been one
of the most complex and pyrotechnically hysterical international love
affairs. It's been marked by both avid adoration and cringing distaste. The
communities that have sifted a hard, elegant living from the undulating sand
have fascinated and repelled the West.
Arabs live on the edge of our old world in an older one. They inhabit the edge
of our imaginations and are the antithesis of the secure Europe of
mud-and-brick road signs, wet weather, wool, sausages and a grand, decadent,
fleshy culture. Out of the Arabian desert rode a ferocious astheticism, the
whirlwind of Islam, the fury of prophets, a cruel absolutism and the
implacable belief in a religion of iron practicality and brass nerve. They
made a civilisation of infinite, hard-edged abstracts. But there is also
immense hospitality and the highest forms of moral masculine etiquette:
bravery, loyalty, self-respect, self-restraint and harsh fatalism.
Images of Arabs and the desert salt western art. In the 19th century, pictures
of palm trees and belly dancers outnumbered thatched cottages and milkmaids
on the walls of the Royal Academy. There were burgeoning schools of
Arabists. And in the chilly foreign offices of dark Europe, young men would
look out of lachrymose windows and imagine the keening, shadowless sands
with a desperate yearning from Richard Burton, the translator of The
Perfumed Garden and one of the first westerners to travel to Mecca, and
Edward FitzGerald, whose translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat is still one
of the most reprinted and recited poems in English, to T E Lawrence and his
Seven Pillars and Wilfred Thesiger wandering in the empty quarter and the
multitude of overheated young remittance men who escaped the social
straitjacket of home to relax in souks and marbled halls.
The desert nomad has seemed the paragon of manliness. He represents what we
must once have been: lawless, a wanderer following his flocks, responsible
only to his family, governed by an unwritten law of steely formality guarded
by a spring-loaded temper, never forgiving, never forgetting, bowing to
nothing less than God and the crescent moon. We are going through one of our
periodical rows with the Arab world. So it seems like a good time to go and
visit Arabia and take the kids. I don't mean that facetiously. The more I
travel, the more I am convinced that the search for sybaritic indulgence is
morally prolapsed. It's a demi-sinful waste of privilege and opportunity.
Travel should question, not confirm. It should excite, not relax. So I took
Flora, 14, and Ali, 12, to Oman for half-term.
Half-terms are a bore break, too short for a serious trip and too long to be
given over to cinemas, interactive museums, Pizza Express and Legoland. I
wanted somewhere that was a doable travel time, but that when we arrived
would be radical, different and exciting without being dangerous. There
needed to be lots of things to do, but most importantly, I wanted the
children to see something worth seeing and to question our society's growing
fear of foreigners, particularly Muslims and Arabs.
Family holidays are precious: the opportunities between toddling bucket and
spade and the gap year are numbered. I probably only have a couple of years
left when Flora will want to be seen out with me. I want my kids to travel
well when they travel on their own. I want them to go with optimism and
purpose. Oman isn't one of those hasty, exit-strategy nations made up of
colonial patches and desperation. Neither is it just a collection of oil
wells with a hankering to look like Singapore on the Gulf, whose highest
aspiration is to be a holiday resort for footballers, drunk expats and
Hello! shoots.
Oman is an ancient kingdom that was once an empire that included Zanzibar and
the Swahili coast of Africa as well as ports in Persia. The Omanis were
famous sailors and traders who imported ivory, gold, precious stones and
traded slaves from Africa. At home in the Arabian Sea they had the beds for
the finest natural pearls. For a century and a half they have had a
particularly close relationship with the British. First as a stabilising
force in the Arabian Sea when the protection of trade with India was vital,
then with a stream of idealistic young men who wanted to go outward bound,
and finally, 30-odd years ago, the British covertly facilitated a coup that
put the present incumbent on the throne at the expense of his father.
The capital, Muscat, is a modern and attractive city when compared with the
neighbouring metropolises of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But the ancient capital is
Nizwah, a market with a fort and a winding souk. We arrived there in the
middle of a cattle market in Ramadan. Markets are a worldwide fundamental.
All societies have organised somewhere to trade in public. They all have
that comforting, bartering, capitalist familiarity, but they are also an
unfakable indicator of the style and emotion of a country.
The cattle market at Nizwa was crowded, loud and hand-waving, but
fundamentally considerate. All the men wore dishdashes and characteristic
embroidered caps which are carefully creased and dimpled. The women wear a
selection of billowing abbayas that are all-enveloping; most, but not all,
are veiled. Their burqas are open and see-through, not the ferocious,
medieval structures or shrouds of some cultures. The Bedouin are believers
but they're not political fanatics. There's a lot of bargaining but nobody
loses their temper it's too hot and everyone's thirsty and hungry, not
least the sagging animals. Small boys drag reluctant sheep and truculent
goats into the back of Toyota pick-ups. They'll be fattened for the great
feast of the new moon. Toyotas are the real iron workhorses of the
developing world. We pass a camel that's been folded into the back of a
pick-up. Its haughty face is held high, eyes closed as if pretending not to
notice the ignominy of being bussed in the back of a metal box.
In the shade of fruit trees, traders sell bottles of desert honey that ranges
from straw-coloured to mahogany, depending on which tiny, hardy flower the
wild bees have made their garden. In the souk, kiosks sell dusty metal
jewellery, the silver ankle bracelets and earrings of Bedouin brides. I pick
up a necklace of trade beads that has in it Venetian glass, Baltic amber and
Chinese jade along with the thick imperial Hapsburg silver coins that were
the international currency of herdsmen who had no knowledge of banks. Their
silver content is the same as their face value. There are also racks of the
curved knives that are the masculine motif for Omani men. Their handles are
carved from horn, a depressing amount of which originally graced rhinos.
The great forts that dot the trade routes and wadis of Oman are thick-walled,
mud-bricked organic edifices that were the basis of clan thuggery and
dynastic intrigue. I particularly like one where the comfortable guest
quarters were stuffed with concealed holes for hiding eavesdroppers and
where the treads of stairs could be removed at night to break the ankles of
anyone who decided to go visiting. It's very Arab to welcome all and trust
none. In the basement were the stores for dates. The walls stained black,
the sugar syrup would run out of long channels and be bottled as a
preservative, and boiled to pour from the battlements on enemies.
Oman is a devoutly observant country, and travelling through Ramadan, the
children had to learn to be particularly considerate of other people's
effort and to be careful not to eat or drink conspicuously in front of those
who can't. Not that they would ever be denied or confronted. Fasting is to
make Muslims strong; the fact that we eat and drink shows that we're weak.
Without exception everyone we meet is polite, helpful and courteous. There
is no undercurrent of the anger or resentment that has infected so much of
the Middle East. I want the children to see that this is what's normal for
Muslims, not the daily horror of the news.
The other more prosaic reason I chose to come to Oman is the surprising
variety of environments that you can travel through in a couple of days.
It's not like the Gulf states where it's either air-conditioned tinted glass
or wind-blown baked scrub. Here the oasis wadis have a miraculous beauty.
Fresh, cold water frets down from high mountains through beautiful
waterfalls into narrow canyons, and causes dense emerald patches of intense
coolness.
From a distance in the desert they look unbelievably inviting. Farmers dig
intricate waterways and little canals that are full of self-important frogs.
On the banks, herons stand regarding their reflections with insouciantly
cocked heads. I caught sight of the flashing iridescent turquoise of an
Egyptian roller. Normally it's difficult to get the kids to walk anywhere,
but these wadis are so entrancing that they dash on ahead. There's magic
here like the drawings in bedtime stories; these are places of enchantment,
the secret homes of djinns and genies, flying carpets and three wishes. We
swam in the still water through the green shadows while small fish nibbled
our toes.
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Oman's mountains are stark and impressive. New roads double and redouble up
their precipitous heights. On the very roof of Oman there is an astonishing
and ancient market garden stepped over what they say is the second deepest
canyon in the world, after Colorado's grand one. Up here they grow fruit and
roses; there are thousands of rose bushes for perfume. Arabs like their
smells deep, rich and opulent. Flowers have been planted here for thousands
of years.
Beneath us in the dead fall of the valley, huge eagles twist and hang. Back
down at sea level the coast is an empty strip of clean, white sand that
stretches for 5 kilometres, a beach on which we see nobody. The Indian Ocean
lunges at the shore and behind us mountains shiver in the heat haze. It's as
fine a beach as you'll find six hours from Slough. Further down the coast,
towering with gantries and spires and shining, curling ducts steaming with a
raw purpose is a natural-gas station.
Oman, like the rest of Arabia, has harvested the bounty of combustible
prehistoric shrimps. But it doesn't seem to have turned into one of those
warped, repressive and decadent countries of the petroleum age. The money,
it's true, supports an absolute royal family and a top-down largesse and
philanthropy, but the dividend seems to have been used to build an
infrastructure that fits the character of the nation. It hasn't made Omanis
into the spoilt, graft-phobic whingers with inflated sense of entitlement
that has so softened the rest of the Gulf. Oman still feels like a country
rooted in its geography, history and heritage that has a purpose beyond
petrol, Ferraris and air-conditioned Starbucks.
One of the things that have all but vanished in Oman is its great sea power.
The dhows that sailed the length of Africa are now only made in one
shipyard. Their curved prows and elaborate fo'c'sles lean in lazy
decrepitude on the shore. And the last artisans who still know how to sew
planks together labour slowly in boat sheds. This was the fleet that rode
the high watermark of Arab achievement, taking Islam round the ancient world
along with mathematics, astrology, applied arts, geometric craft,
soldiers, pirates and holy men. This is the place from where Ali Baba set
sail.
That night I had a surprise for the children. After dinner we drove back to
the dark shore and waited for 20 minutes listening to the crashing surf.
There was a flash of headlights and out of the dark people began to emerge.
We all huddled round a small excitable Omani with a torch who led us out
onto the sand. The ocean thudded and the shore hissed as we stumbled in the
silver light, and all of a sudden there she was: one of the reasons I'd come
all this way. A great greenback turtle heaved ungainly on land to dig a
damp, gritty cradle for her eggs. Twenty of us crowded round while the
expert lectured in fractured English, lifting her flippers and intruding his
torch like a gynaecologist instructing first-year medical students. We were
invited to pass round one of the heavy ping-pong eggs. It was all both
intrusively voyeuristic and inexplicably tender and moving.
It's difficult to empathise with a turtle, we have so little in common but
the enormous power that has dragged this creature back to this beach from
across the world after five years at sea to thrust the investment of her
future into the cool darkness is really memorable. We stumble and fall into
the holes left by other mothers on the beach in a stream of exhaled
expletives in half a dozen languages. In the torch light I can pick out the
eyes of desert foxes hungry for a meal of turtle eggs, keeping their
distance from the clumsy humans. Tourists have probably done more to turn
round the fortunes of turtles than anything else. On the shining tide line
where phosphorescent krill sparkles like fairy rhinestones, there are half a
dozen little clockwork hatchlings manically working their way to the
relative safety of the surf.
Next morning at breakfast, beside the cornflakes is a bowl of orphan turtles
who have walked towards the wrong light. Oman is a desert kingdom and the
Sahara is the point here. It's the beginning and the end. If you think
deserts are big, dusty spaces with nothing in them, then there's still
plenty to see and do in Oman but it's a bit like going to Aspen without the
snow. On the other hand, if you think that deserts are wonders full of
awe-defining emptiness, then this is the desert's desert.
We drove out into the red sand to spend a night with the Bedouin and their
absolute hospitality. There is a ritual exchange of greeting, praising God and
then asking for news: the reply is always good news. The rule is that it is
either good news or no news. To be the bringer of bad news would
be unlucky and make you a very bad guest.
People will tell you that the best thing to do in deserts is to scramble
across them on quad bikes and 4x4 trucks, or to slide down them on
sandboards or tea trays. Don't listen. This is not being in the desert, it
is simply being all over it. The best way to see the Sahara is from a camel.
Children love camels; grown-ups can abide camels; camels hate everyone. And
better than a camel is your own feet.
The best thing is to climb a dune at sunset, sit and watch the colours change
and hear the wind play the curves of the limpid dunes and be aware of that
still, small voice of calm. The song of the desert. The Bedouin share dinner
and sing and dance, and we dance back and giggle and clap in the skittering
firelight. They have lived much like this, tending their sheep and goats,
breeding camels, pigeons and chickens and searching for water for thousands
of years. In the darkness the handsome faces are lit up by the ghostly light
of their mobile phones. We make our beds out on the desert, lying side by
side on the cooling sand. We all stare up at the unsullied, pristine sky,
the milky way, our solar system, the distant stars. You have no idea how
much is hidden from you by progress. How much hides behind a veil of our own
reflective glory. Lying in the Sahara with your children, watching for
shooting stars, is one of the great unexpected and unadvertised pleasures of
a half-term break.
How to get there
A A Gill went to Oman with Original Travel, tel: 020 7978 7333;
www.originaltravel.co.uk. Safaris start from £835, including flights with
Gulf Air and a three-night safari based on four people in a 4x4, B&B
accommodation, full board with the Bedouin. Additional nights from £70 per
person per night.
