Page 63 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

6o Arabia, the Gulf and the West

forefront of affairs a problem of far graver significance to the minor states of the
Gulf, and to Britain in her role as tutelary power, than the trumped-up Persian
claim to Bahrain had ever been.

South and east of the Qatar peninsula stretches a desolate region made up of
sand dunes, salt flats and gravel plains. On the north it is bounded by the
waters of the Gulf, on the south by the Rub al-Khali (or Empty Quarter), the
great sand sea that extends from the highlands of the Yemen and the Had-
ramaut in the south-west to the edge of the Oman steppes in the north-east.
The northern and larger half of the Rub al-Khali is made up of towering sand
hills, known to the Bedouin who frequent them simply as ‘al-Rimal’ - ‘the
sands’. A northward extension of the Rub al-Khali, the Jafurah, thrusts up
towards the Gulf coast to the west of Qatar, and is marked off from al-Rimal in
the south by a great depression, the Jaub, which runs eastwards from the
Jabrin Oasis almost to the southern edges of the Sabkhat Matti (see map pp.
62-3). The coastline for about sixty miles south and east of Qatar is low-lying
and deeply indented with khaurs, or inlets, all of them very shallow. Inland
there is a rolling expanse of sand with several wells and some sparse vegetation,
and further east a gently rising gravel plateau, which falls away in a sharp
escarpment to the Sabkhat Matti, a great salt plain which stretches for some
thirty miles along the sea’s edge and inland for about sixty miles. Much of the
sabkhah (salt-flat) is impassable, though across its southern arms there are a
few trails suitable for motor vehicles, and of late years a highway has been
constructed along its northern rim.
Beyond the Sabkhat Matti the coast as far as Abu Dhabi - and beyond, for
that matter - is, for the most part, low-lying and marshy with frequent patches
of sabkhah and occasional limestone ridges. Off-shore an intricacy of islands,
reefs and shoals makes navigation in these waters extremely hazardous. The
region lying between the coast and the northern rim of the Rub al-Khali goes
under the general name of ‘al-Dhafrah’. Towards the coast it is made up of
low-lying, undulating sand dunes, with a number of brackish wells and some
meagre vegetation. Further south there are successive belts of dune country,
the dunes growing progressively higher as they approach the great sand hills of
al-Rimal. In the centre of the dune country lies the Liwa oasis, a succession of
gravel depressions with sweet-water wells and palm groves, extending in an arc
for some forty to fifty miles from south-west to south-east. Scattered among the
dunes are a number of tiny settlements, only a few of which are inhabited
throughout the year, the rest being occupied only during the date harvest in the
late summer. No European had ever set eyes upon the Liwa until the end of
1946, when Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great Arabian explorers, arrived
on its southern outskirts after his epic crossing of the Rub al-Khali from
Mughshin in the far south.
It was across this desolate region that raiding parties from Najd, the high­