Shards of Sand #2

Fortuitous – 2/23/2010

Rising from the center of the roundabout, a giant clock encased in concrete like the Rolex of a species of giants, read 8:30. The sun was beginning to distort the air above the pavement, and closer to the city the traffic was building. When our forward progress stalled near the enormous Mosque named after Oman’s Sultan, I rolled down the window. If this were a street in almost any other city the air would smell of oil and exhaust, but almost impossibly, the fragrance on the breeze was fresh Jasmine. I had entered Muscat.

The highways are lined for hundreds of miles with bushes, trees, and flowers, meticulously planted and maintained with water taken from the ocean and desalinated in huge facilities around the country’s coasts. The labor required to maintain this façade of lush greenery in the arid environment is enormous, and made possible only through importing a full half of the Oman’s population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Slavery may have ended, but wage slaves persist in the Gulf. Many fly over in one of India’s low cost carriers, but many of the people from the subcontinent come in the leaky holds and decks of ships, reminiscent of an earlier era of moving huge populations. The last conquerors of Oman also arrived by ship.

When the Portuguese came to the bays of Muscat they built forts. Crenellated, cylindrical towers with gun ports, which replaced the arrow slits of earlier times, this being the 16^th century after all. Seeing little redeeming value in the arid landscape to the west they didn’t stray too far. The Portuguese built these forts at various coastal locations, but their dominions and opinions did not carry much further inland than that. Oman was and has been a far more strategic military position than a potential colony. There are an abundance of these forts scattered around Muscat, rather than centralized in a single place, because Muscat today is a combination of a half dozen cities of Oman’s past, gerrymandered into a whole. The benefit though goes to all of us who visit this place. There are far more of these forts to see, as they dominate the crags in the night horizon.

Muscat is far from my mind’s eye image of a desert city. This is mainly due to the fact that it wasn’t built in the desert. The city and all of its individual parts are crammed into the flat spaces between the mountains, or between the mountains and the sea. There is little evidence of grids, and rather than traffic lights, the city changes directions with traffic circles. When added up, the city feels very much like a river, everything flows along the coast, and unlike most of the world’s great cities, seems to exist in spite of its surroundings rather than because of them.

When seem from a map, or a plane, or a satellite, the city takes on the shape of the glaciers that carved out its wadis millions of years ago, when the south pole was located in southern Africa, and glaciers swarmed up to the equator. The buildings, which range in color from white to tan, seem to emulate the wadis former resident. But there is something unnatural about so organic and natural an area of urban sprawl. The white buildings spread from the flat areas to the mouths of the bland, treeless mountains. Places like Al Wadi Al Kabir (the big wadi) leave me with the impression of a bacteria culture filling up a pitri dish. It grows as quickly as possible to the sides of the glass, then, reaching that impenetrable boundary, turns back, and refills the spaces in between. There is a kind of timeless quality to the city, aided by the sleepiness with which it approaches the daylight hours.

In the river of Muscat the population does not swim during the day. It is a city without much of a nightlife that comes alive only at night. Encased within their air-conditioned, hermetic bubbles while the sun shines, its empty sidewalks and shuttered malls are like something out of a zombie flick. The occasional woman cloaked in black is almost impossible to miss during the day, while the white clad men seem to disappear into glare. When the moon rises though, the parks and promenades fill with women made invisible by their black Abayas and men made into streaking phantoms by their white dishdashas.

As the population explodes into the perfect temperatures of an Autumn night, the city, bounded by the endless dark of the sea and the black wall of the mountains, glows. The streets, which were dominated with the hues of flowers and shrubs, give way to the cones of light dropping from the equally impressive and endless lines of poles erected by the same slave labor up and down the asphalt covered expanse. The fountains around the ports and parks fire red, blue, and yellow geysers into the air like schools of luminescent jelly fish.

Despite the throngs of parents and children, pick-up soccer games, and enraptured teens in outdoor coffee shops gathered before a Real Madrid game projected onto a wall, the city actually seems to shrink at night. It feels as if we have retreated behind the walls of a medieval baron’s estate, because the most impressive spectacle of Muscat’s long and festive nights reside hundreds of feet above the streets. Even today, with all the triumphs and architectural projects of Oman’s Sultan, it is still easy to be overwhelmed by the feats of long dead Portuguese.

Muscat plays under the watchful eyes of its forts, which do not glow blue or yellow, but white. They seem both solid and ethereal at the same time, like a skeleton moving through mist. It is easy to believe that these forts are not remnants of the past but a place where the dead still walk. From a distance the brown mountains do not reflect starlight so the forts simply float above the masses. They seem like buildings made not from clays and mortars, but hewn from fallen chunks of the moon that keep a slow and sinister orbit around the city; guarding it from the terrible truth it is confronted with every morning. The enemy with which its civilization battles, the greatest war for its survival and progress, is with a ball of fire that will rise from the skin of the ocean and force them indoors for another day.