Gold, frankincense and seven star-hotels

 Impressions of  the United Arab Emirates and Oman

by Sophie Masson

first published in ‘Kalimat’ Number 17, March 2004

I used to love reading the Arabian Nights as a child. Our copy of it was near the Arthurian legends, another great love, and both of them spoke to me in similar if also strikingly different ways. It wasn’t just their fabulous panoply of otherworldly creatures, fairies, ghosts, demons, wizards, monsters which as a magic-believing, miracle-loving child thrilled me almost beyond bearing; not just the treasures, the glorious depiction of riches and power beyond all imagining, the love stories, the deeds of knightly valour, the tales of terror and the fight against evil which moved me; not just the funny, wise side-stories of the pettier or less glorious human emotions and situations which made me understand, even if inarticulately at that age, a great many things about human nature. But it was also because each of these great cycles of stories had their own unique voice, or rather, voices. They both, the Arabian/Persian and the French/British/German, came out of that world we call the medieval, a strange, savage, beautiful, God-centred yet generally not pharasaically or fanatically pious, individualistic yet not self-obsessed, sardonic, magical world of tragedy, humour, love and death. These stories were not myths, they were both more and less than that. Medieval people, whether of East or West, knew they were not immortals. They had a certain humility in the face of life because they knew they could not control events, the world, history. And strangely, that seemed to liberate their dreams, dreams which became embodied in stories that have survived for centuries, because every year, every month, every day, some new reader will come to them and be thrilled, changed, plunged into pure, deep, all-enveloping story. They wrote down both what they saw, and what they dreamed; what they knew, and what they imagined. They  lived, in short, in a pre-ideological world; though they analysed and philosophised a great deal, they did not seem as desperate for answers as later, post-ideological generations, whether that is in the West or the East. And so their stories and thought are full of complexities and ambiguities, and escape full analysis of the modern kind. Temperamentally, for me, that is the greatest thing of all, the greatest aspect of true, deep  storytelling. Not giving answers; not blocking off meanings. Just presenting that wonderful pageant of life and the world, and taking from it what we each need and can bear.

This is what I mean to do, in a small way, with this piece. No analysis, no answers. Impressions, the full flow of what I saw, and maybe a little of what I dreamt, in that small corner of the Arabian peninsula which gave me my first taste both of what the world of the Arabian Nights had become--as knowing France and Britain have given me a deep understanding of what the world of King Arthur has become--and also my first coming to grips with the sensuous reality of the faraway, deep Abrahamic origins of the Semitic religion I was brought up with--Christianity. Everyone who was brought up with the Book, whether that is Christian, Muslim or Jew, and all the myriads of sects and philosophies clustering within those three baggy descriptors, carries around with them rich, powerful images which in many ways both reinforce and militate against the images carried from such stories as the Arabian Nights and the legends of King Arthur. Many of us carry both within us, quite comfortably; it is only the fanatics, whether religious maniacs or the aggressively atheistic, who cannot bear the complexity of such a mixture. Anyway, enough of that, and on with the story..

We arrive in Dubai very early in the morning, to a grey sky full of a hazy glare. That was the first surprise. I’d imagined a clear, fiercely blue desert sky. But we’d have to wait for that. Dubai is on the Gulf; its humours are as tied to the sea as to the desert. Later still, we’d learn it could be as humid as Indonesia on a Dubai evening..

War had broken out a few days before we left Australia, and many of our friends and relatives had rung us to tell us we shouldn’t go. But my brother and his family have lived in the Emirates for quite some time, and Saudi Arabia before that, and they were cool and relaxed about it. London, where we’d go next, was more dangerous, said my brother, with a shrug; and though for the first few hours, fresh from the hysterical atmosphere of Australia just before the Iraq war, we were wary, looking at people in the street as though they might take sudden offence at our being there at all, within an afternoon we were, if not cool, relaxed. Not cool, because of course(no surprise in theory, but always a surprise to my cool-loving self!)it was very hot in the Emirates. Not just dry heat, either, as I said earlier; sometimes a crushing, sticky humidity, yet no rain..

My brother lives not in Dubai but in Sharjah, the smaller, poorer, more Islamic emirate next door to the big flashy flagship city. Dubai’s too expensive, too pretentious, too many Westerners, he says with another shrug, manouevring his huge 4WD; he and his family had to live trapped in a Western compound in xenophobic Saudi; why the hell would they want to do that here? His neighbours, in the middleclass district where he lives,  are Lebanese and Indians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Emiratis, as well as a few French, Russians, British, Americans and Australians, for one of the Emirates’ greatest distinguishing feature its its amazing cosmopolitanism. My eldest nephew’s best friend Hassan.  who lives next door, has an Iraqi father and an American mother: the Emirates was one of the few places in the world where they could both have a good standard of living(they own a very nice fish and ship shop) be left in peace yet also feel a part of the region. There’s an Afghan baker up the road with piercing green eyes who makes flat bread in front of you; Indian and Pakistani and Lebanese restaurants serving cheerful, but not always cheap, tucker; there’s the animal and bird market, where the kids squeal over pink and blue and green dyed day-old chicks, little, coloured, doomed balls of living fluff..There’s the wonderful Blue Souk, where we spend hours and many dirhams bargaining with shopkeepers from Indian, Pakistan, Lebanon and Iran. The Emiratis rarely seem to work behind the counters, though no doubt they own many of the shops; splendid in pure white thobes and gutras, the men stroll about disdainfully, or watch indulgently as their black-clad wives argue volubly over the rivers of gold they are tussling for with businessmen who claim that they are trying to beggar them..

But though Sharjah is not as developed as Dubai, it’s fast catching up; there are building sites all over the place, housing and shopping developments mushrooming like genie’s gifts in white and pink and pale blue and gold and glass and steel all over the emirate’s pale sands. We go for an entertaining walk one early evening through a new housing development not far from the Sharjah beach, such as it is(Sharjah has yet to learn to welcome Western-style ocean fun): and are showed over one amazing property by a sardonic Lebanese guy who knows full well we are just stickybeaks, and not customers at all. The place is amazing not because it’s opulent, which it is: marble everywhere, gilded taps and other such details, mosaics and interior courtyard with fountain, swimming pool and spa; but because it’s an ordinary property. It’s not like the one up the road from my brother’s, which belongs to a brother or cousin of the Sheikh of Sharjah—a palace of a place, a walled white compound that occupies several blocks,  with birds of paradise and peacocks and chained leopards in its massive gardens..No, this house is certainly not for  a ‘roi du petrole’ as the French saying has it of immense wealth; no, not even a baron or a knight or gentleman of oil--it’s just for an ordinary Emirati, just a common or garden guy with his mobile phone glued to his ear, his snazzy sunglasses and shiny new car.

It’s one of the things that makes you understand what wealth really is. My brother tells me that the Gulf Arabs are often disliked and patronised by other Arabs, called Gulfies and other much more insulting terms, not only out of envy or annoyance but because it seems ridiculous. Ridiculous, because it shouldn’t have happened in reality. It’s a story right out of the Arabian Nights. Poor as dirt, hard-scrabble camel-herder/fisherman/date farmer rubs the oil lamp, the genie appears, and hey presto, entire cities spring up, everything that said camel herder etc touches turns to gold, rivers of it, floods of it, oceans of it.. For an outsider like me, it IS sort of ridiculous, sort of thrilling, sort of marvellous, sort of frightening. Along with the joy of seeing people enjoying themselves, revelling in their good fortune, come other, sterner adomnitory inner voices, like the idea of castles built on sand and the like. And images of the slaves of the lamp, needed to maintain the marvellous wealth..In some lights, you might think so of the huge numbers of people from dirt poor hardscrabble other parts of the world, whose sweat and silence is the grease that keeps this whole contented machine running for the greater good of the deepest pockets. But that’s a false light, too; everyone’s here because they want to be. Because, Westerner or Easterner, from whatever nation they’ve exiled themselves from, they can earn heaps more here  than they ever could in their own country, and thus get for their families, if not themselves, a much better standard of living. Doesn’t stop people whingeing, of course. A young Filipino checkout girl told me in a whispered aside as she packed up our groceries in a sleek supermarket that she ‘couldn’t stand those Emiratis. They think they’re better than everyone else. They’re stupid..’ But when I asked her if she was leaving, she shrugged. ‘Course not. Stupid people, but they pay.’ A taxi driver from Peshawar told us with a curl of the lip, as he took a corner too fast, verse from the Koran swinging merrily at his rearvision mirror, that the Emiratis were ‘bad Muslims, very bad.’ He missed his family, his green garden, his house, the sense of struggle in the world. But he stayed here, because, he said, with an engaging grin, the money, the money’s good. Bad Muslims, good money. You might think happily that Osama’s cocking a snook at all those rich Gulfies and those Yanks, but you knew which side your bread was buttered on, nevertheless. You don’t really want Osama’s goons here, not really. Those extra rooms in the house in Peshawar, that new plough, the silks you could bring back for your wife: it counted for something. The siren call of nihilistic, millenerian fanaticism only really reaches the ears of those who are too rich to have anything to lose, who think they have the answers, and those whose aspirations have been disappointed and confounded...Trying to stir up crowds here falls on deaf ears. Everyone aspires, Emirati or  foreigner.  It’s still fun, still worthwhile, both being rich, AND scooping up the golden crumbs from the rich man’s table. Little sign of existential angst here..

Besides, the Emiratis, not hamstrung like the poor old rich boys of Saudis by the burden and blessing of being the guardians of the holy places, don’t have to care what people like Mr Peshawar thinks of their Islam. Being a newish federation too helps--you don’t just have one family controlling everything. You can also work subtly and carefully, keeping your people happy, putting money into public works as well as the grandest and splashiest of all Arabian Nights fairytales. So you have both good education, free for all your natives,  and seven-star hotels where laws of physics are apparently broken: fountains of fire and water, underwater restaurants..You have fantastic roads with enormous roundabouts where fleets of great gas-guzzling monsters driven by descendants of Bedouin warriors, veiled women, Lebanese and Indian businessmen, and Western expatriates charge at terrifying speed, with flimsy Pakistani taxis nipping recklessly in and out of their great shadows. You keep a discreet eye on all that goes on, and keep in well with great powers whilst not being averse to playing off various parties. You make yourself indispensable to the rest of the Arab, and maybe even Muslim, world by being a combination of Singapore and Switzerland—after all, even terrorists and radicals need bankers, and will respect the neutrality of such places..

Here, you are in a country where you can go down to a modest little Lebanese cafe called Popeye’s on the Dubai waterfront, sit at plastic-covered tables  and eat Iranian and Russian caviar slathered thickly on toasted Turkish bread. You are in a country where a woman will wear full abaya and veil and yet drive, drink milshakes at Mac Donalds and shop openly for lingerie that would not be out of place  in a Moulin Rouge lineup. You are in a country where Pakistani muezzins are often not allowed to issue the call to prayer, because their South Asian accent in Arabic makes people laugh, not reflect on their prayerful duties, and thus inadvertently blaspheme. You are in a country where the religious ministry issues sermons to the mosques for Friday use, you can buy solid gold statues of the baby Jesus in his crib, and diamond crosses, and golden mandalas, and T shirts featuring the doe eyes and beret of Che Guevara. About the only religious symbol you can’t buy is a Star of David..

My brother takes us on a walk at Sharjah harbour.  Here, blue and green and yellow painted dhows and sambuks jostle each other, bumping in the littered water. This is not where the rich people’s goods come in. A crew of dark, shirtless Indian labourers is humping huge bags of salt from a ship onto the quay; further on, a crew of Iranians resting on a square of carpet, call out to us; a crowd of men covered in soot stacks bags of what looks like charcoal by the side of the road; a little further on, old fridges, bikes, washing machines, furniture, is being loaded onto another ship. There is a sailor having a bath in a little wooden tub on another ship; he is singing to himself, soaping his armpits, apparently oblivious to his surroundings. These are ships that for centuries have been going up and down the Gulf, and some on to India; despite the UAE’s newfound oil wealth, trade and  ‘re-export commerce’ as it’s put, still is a good part of the Emirates’ wealth, and this is the more modest, yet essential, end of it.

As we go along the quay, we are hailed by a man in a long grey robe, a big smile and a glossy beard: ‘hey, friends, friends, you come here!’ His name’s Ismail, he comes from Iran, he’s from that ship over there..see? ‘Come, you come,’ he insists, so we climb over the rail and onto the deck, where the rest of the young men in the crew, and the rather older captain shake our hands, we take off our shoes and stand on the carpet, and little glasses of mint tea are handed around, while we all smile in unison and try to have conversations in a mixture of broken English and Arabic. It’s amazing how many subjects you can actually at least touch on! Ismail, inquiring as to where we’re from(both France and Australia), smiles widely. ‘France, Australia, very good, yes? Iran, very good friends with Australia and France!’ He then looks sideways at his captain.’We from Iran, but he from Iraq.’ He grins, the others grin too, but not the Captain, who’s a fine-looking, small slim man with a hawk face, a splendid set of grey moustaches, and a resigned expression. He knows a joke is coming; he’s patient about it, but..’Iraq, boom-boom!’ says Ismail, with a big, gusting laugh, and his friends all giggle, except for the Captain, who looks sad and patient and not in the least annoyed. We say nothing, though we smile; hard to know what to say. But fortunately Ismail and the others are intrigued and impressed by the fact I’m the only woman in an all-male party, especially when told this party consists of my husband, my brother, my sons and my nephews. What a fortunate woman I am, surrounded by such male splendour!

One afternoon, we go with the children to the Wafi Centre in Dubai, an amazing palace of consumerism, modelling itself on the splendours of Egypt. Massive columns, Sphinxes, rooms called after Cleopatra and Caesar, combined with flashing lights, crystal chandeliers, fast food joints, a huge electronics games area(along with discreetly-positioned prayer rooms)  give you a feeling not so much of Arabian Nights, but of Las Vegas. While the children plunge into the entertainment arcade of computer games, simulator battle jets and racing cars, and indoor skateboarding park, we go to gawk at ‘Goodies’, a truly splendid deli cum café, whose opulent elegance reminds me of certain food shops in Paris. It is full of Emirati men. (We saw very few Westerners shopping at Wafi City; it’s not exactly cheap there.) We wander in under the eyes of eagle-eyed, immaculately-attired staff, who with impeccable courtesy never ask you that annoying question shop assistants in Western luxury stores too often patronise you with, ‘Can I help you?(with the unspoken ending being, ‘help you out of our exclusive store, you peasant, how dare you even darken our door!’) We waft as discreetly as possible past tables of gossiping men with plates of baklava and dates and cups of coffee in gilt cups in front of them; I stare with sensuous delight at the multicoloured goods on display--sacks of the finest lentils, chick peas, spices; beautiful presentation cases of figs, dates, nuts, glaced fruit; glass cases of all kinds of Middle Eastern food, from the freshness of Lebanese to the richness of Turkish..It’s like being in a dream of plenty, a cornucopia worthy of a pasha or a sultan but accessible even by humble ex-nomads with gold credit cards..

Talking of gold..well, doesn’t everyone talk of gold in Dubai?--I am flabbergasted, amazed, every adjective of befuddled gasping google-eyed amazement, in the Gold Souk, the great bazaar of the yellow metal so beloved by mankind over the ages. Australian and even European jewellery shops look pretty flimsy and mingy by comparison with this amazing flaunting of Bedouin good fortune. Though many of the pieces are made in India and Pakistan from gold mined in Australia and South Africa, among other places, they are made for Gulf tastes, and Gulf purses. There is the odd thin little chain and discreet bit of jewellery for those killjoys of Western sophisticates, but mostly it’s big, big, big, and encrusted with precious stones. No more need for the old Bedouin silver wedding jewellery, passed down carefully; today it’s massive gold necklaces and belt pieces of World Wrestling Federation size. A loyal servant will sometimes be retired with a massive gold piece as a wedding gift; there are massive sculptures in gold and crystal, as well as those accoutrements for rich pious Christians I mentioned earlier--gold holy statues, and crucifixes, and things for the children too, Disney-faced cute deer and birds and such in bright gold. Pressing your nose against the window of one of these shops is like looking in at the cave of Ali Baba; going in, and trying on various things under the polite disbelief of the assistants, who know full well it’s more than likely you’re just a looker, not a buyer, is like dressing up and dreaming childhood dreams, all at once(though there’s so much, it makes me feel a little sick, and a little like laughing, just because of the sheer AMOUNT!) But there is not one shop of that kind, but ten, twenty, forty! So much money flows through the Gold Souk it’s easy to see why it’s been fingered as a place not only for ordinary criminal money-laundering but also for washing whiter than white the blood money of terrorists...

But even in this place, there’s the little guys trying to make a living in the niches of great wealth, especially from Western tourists who are too tightfisted or too poor to buy the gold on display. They sidle up to you with a glancing smile, whip the sleeve up their arm to show you a panoply of watches twinkling there on the thin flesh: ‘Rolex, Rolex, sir, madam? Good Rolex..’  They speak softly, humbly, as if expecting to be batted away, and don’t complain when you don’t even look at them, or the not-so-cheap imitations they bear on their arms.

At the Karama Centre, in Sharjah, which is not at all like the Gold Souk but a collection of cheap shops, like a kind of Paddy’s Market, we eat mini shawarmas, made on the spot, and drink Fanta, and the boys buy dozens of imitation big name brand T shirts, little daggers, and all kinds of other bits and pieces. A little guy accosts us here too, targeting the boys this time, ‘DVDs, DVDs, new DVDS,,’ He leads them and us over to a stairwell where another guy is sitting with a big sack into which, like Santa, he dips his hand, pulling out more and more goodies..The films haven’t even come out yet on the screens--yet here they are, pirated and for sale in Karama..

My brother and my husband’s restless with all this shopping; we’re going up country, to the desert, and to the great city of the oases, Al Ain, in Abu Dhabi, the city where the present paramount ruler of the Emirates, Sheikh Zayed, was born. We go briskly up the smooth desert highway in the 4WD, jaunty Arabic and Western pop doof-doofing from the car radio. The desert, in its original form, appears very quickly after the genie’s magic cities trickle to an end; and suddenly my brother turns the wheel and goes off the road. ‘You’ve  got to at least put your feet on it,’ he says with a broad smile; the desert’s one of his favourite places and he has no fear of it at all. But I do. I’m temperamentally a creature of green forests and little streams and sunny walled gardens and stone villages; the desert is like the sea to me, magnificent but feared. I respect the fortitude and courage of sailors and nomads, but I have no desire to follow in their footsteps. A thousand silly stories and imaginings of dying of thirst and losing our way fill my all-too-imaginative mind as I follow the men reluctantly into the desert by the side of the road.

It is hot. So hot. Why should that surprise me, it’s absurd to be surprised! But there you are; it does. Hot sand, hot enough it seems to me to melt glass, fills my shoes, and I can hardly walk. It’s difficult to walk in too, not just because of the heat, because of the way it keeps sliding and slipping. There’s one tree on the skyline, a twisted thorny-looking thing; my brother says we’ll walk there. He sees my face and laughs. ‘We’ve got lots of water, it’ll take five minutes and from there we won’t see the road..You’ll think you’re really out in the desert.’ Heck, I WANT to see the road. The more I’m here in this sand, the more I’m frightened. My estimation of the Bedouins of old goes up even more. They were tough. They were mad. Well, both maybe. Their descendants still go out in it; but many like to see it these days from behind the tinted windows of their 4WD. Well, at least the sky’s neither grey nor hazy here. It’s a bright, glorious, gilded blue, and the dunes of sand, the hillocks are a bright bright gold. Light. It’s all about light here.Light. But oh, how it scorches and burns, in the utter silence. You can’t even hear the road anymore, only a few metres away from it. A hawk swoops and plunges in the gold and blue air..whatcan he see to eat here? It’s beautiful but I long for the cool shadows of forest, the swishing of a rushing stream, the perfumed beauty of a rose garden....I’m a softie, that’s what I am, not one for the hot clarity of the desert from which our father Abraham derived his first visions..

 Or maybe it’s a male thing, because my male family, brother, husbands, sons, nephews, seems to be enjoying it, rushing up to the top of a dune, laughing..My sister in law opted to stay behind at home, ostensibly to study, but maybe because she doesn’t like it here..I am relieved when we come out of there and head off to the oasis city..

Al Ain is announced by big broad flowery avenues, a spick-and-span restored fort, the long walls of one of Zayed’s palaces, and large portraits of the Sheikh in his younger days, his handsome, black bearded face bearing a direct, yet pensive expression. We stop at an old oasis near the fort; it has rustling shadows under the palms, swishes under leaves which might be snakes or might not, and an irrigation system that the Iranians claim they invented and the Arabs claim they invented. Who knows who, but it’s pretty nifty nevertheless. We eat at a big Lebanese restaurant where a succession of green and blue eyed young waiters, brothers and cousins from the Bekaa Valley, bring us a succession of plates, each decorated with greens and tomatoes and cucumbers.  I’d be quite happy to go and sit in a rose garden now, but no, my brother wants to take us to another desert! A stone one, he says, conciliatory, when I look aghast; they’re different!

So we drive into Oman, to a wadi my brother knows. And guess what; a stone desert might be different but it’s still hot as blazes, and every bit as scary. It looks rather like a smaller version of the hills of Aghanistan here; or like a spoil heap after a huge mining operation. My brother lures us with rhapsodies of the beautiful waterhole down the bottom; but doesn’t exactly explain that to get there you have to crawl and teeter on the edge of an irrigation channel that snakes down from the date plantation above to the wadi down below. Sometimes you can walk on the side of the irrigation channel that’s nearest the hill; sometimes you have to walk on its outer edge, near the drop. I hate every minute of it, though I also see, like a disease or a glory in my constantly-observing, always-marvelling mind, that the stones are of different colours, that there’s wild pink flowers on sparse bushes in impossible crannies here and there, that there’s a mirror(a mirror??) lying face up on the other side of the wadi. It’s grand, savage, cruel, beautiful country. The waterhole is as lovely as my brother’s claimed; but it’s also slippery, deep, full of rocks and I’m afraid who-knows-who might come around the corner and shout at us for being infidel bathers. So I stay huddled on a rock, watching my men splash and shriek..

I’d taken all my worldly goods with me from the car, being of a nasty, suspicious or maybe just imaginative turn of mind. My brother had laughed at me for that, saying it was so remote so deserted here and that anyway people were honest as there was sharia law and so on..I don’t say I told you so when we return to the car and a side window’s been forced open, and his wallet, phone, and camera vaporised...With him fuming at the wheel, we head off out again, to the little Omani market town of Al Burami, and go straight to the souk, to buy the frankincense my brother says you can find here. It’s certainly there; it’s weird to pick up the box one seller hands me and smell church inside. This is the stuff the Three Wise Men brought to the baby Jesus; it makes my head spin. There’s some other thing some people are smoking; the man selling that looks rather stoned, but I have no idea what it is. People laugh when we ask. It looks much less rich in Oman than the UAE(and is); much slower, quieter, more traditional. But there’s a relaxed feeling here too. A nice young guy, finding out we’re from Australia, rushes over to us with a watermelon. ’Welcome to our country,’ he says, and won’t accept any payment, though he wants a photo with our boys...

We spend some time in the little covered souk near the open market, especially in the weapons shop where a very kind Omani with a beautiful moustache and a tailed white turban shows us his wares: magnificent Omani and Yemeni silver daggers, more modest ones in metal, with camel-leather scabbards; beaded and embroidered gun belts and all kinds of guns and rifles. ‘Everything for the modern bandit,’ my brother murmurs. We get asked to take more photos, and pose in amongst the guns and daggers and belts, with the shop owner..

It’s back to Al Ain to the police station where we spend a couple of hours as my brother fills in forms for his insurance, the car is dusted over for the miscreants’ fingerprints by the plain clothes squad(in thobe and gutra, naturally)while uniformed branch, in smart green uniforms, stands watching..Apparently the wadi is a bad place for thieves, the police tell my brother; but alas, sir, as it’s in Oman, we can do little, unless you really want to press charges..

No, no, it’s just for the insurance, my brother hastens to say. He’s still imprinted by his experiences in Saudi, where it was bad news indeed to become involved, whether innocently or guiltily,  in anything like this and where most people kept thefts quiet, and tried to deal with it themselves.. Though things are different here, he’s still cautious.

We cross into Oman again another day, to Wadi Bih, in the mountains in the north of the Emirates, where the border between the two countries snakes in and out. This is even grander than that other wadi, very Biblical in feel, to me: massive loose-rocked hills, not a blade of grass, black and white goats running around, and the ruins of medieval stone villages everywhere..We have a picnic of chicken and dates and tabouleh under a large thorny tree in the middle of an archaeological site, surrounded on all sides by swooping sky and wild hills; the sight catches at my heart, and my nerves. ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills’, I murmur to myself, ‘the goats scramble down the slopes of Gilead..’ I understand in my body, deeply, the fear of God, and the wild glory, in this harsh, harsh place. There are jinns, too, I’m sure, hiding near that rock; that snake there, that came so suddenly, it suddenly appeared, didn’t it? Leaving behind that place, I feel a sense of relief  but also regret, much more than in the sandy desert; and going into the narrow defiles down out of the mountains, places where you could expect anything: an ambush, an angel..makes the hair on the back of my neck rise again. That, and the glorious swim we have in the Arabian Sea, just beyond, a sea of the most beautiful turquoise blue, filled with strange jellyfish, some like little eyes in clear bodies, others like big pale brown clear doughnuts. And as we sit on the deserted sands of the beach near the little town of Diba, my family around me, looking over the sea towards Pakistan, far away, I feel an odd, thrilling happiness that I can’t quite pin down, cannot  properly articulate. Maybe one day I will. But for the moment, it’s enough just to be sitting here, feeling like this, under this sky, facing this sea.

© Copyright Sophie Masson 2004