Page 243 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
had passed it on to us, who have made it tick a thousand-fold faster
and barely have begun to sec our own fallacies which we now send
out to all customers at the ends of our roads. A1 Hamra had been
built on rock and the impressive buildings will survive to be seen by
generations of tourists who may come to future Oman. But the
houses will appear like empty snail shells on the beach, for not even
an omnipotent Sultan can drive young men backwards along the
road built to the streets of Muscat.
The living past we experienced in some of the still inhabited
towns and villages of Oman’s mountain valleys gave warmth and
meaning to the empty prehistoric ruins we were shown in their
immediate vicinity. Most significant to us from Tigris were the
remarkable vestiges of former activity at Tawi Arja, in the dry river
plains of Wadi al Jitti in northern Oman. To get there Paolo Costa
drove us in his Land Cruiser northwards along the Batinah plains,
the coastal lowlands we had seen from the sea. We recognised our
anchorage off Suwadi islands, and continued northwards on a good
road until we reached the modest outskirts of the one-time capital,
Sohar, about three hours fast driving from Muscat. Here another
new road left the coastal plain and led straight inland towards the
wild mountains we had first seen from the opposite side, while
sailing to escape from the gulf. Rolling hills began to rise around us
and we saw to our excitement that all were capped with rows of old
stone towers strikingly like those of Bahrain. Costa confirmed that
many of these round towers had now been opened; they were burial
mounds, and dated from the third millennium bc, Sumerian time,
as on Bahrain. Not only were they contemporary with those of
Bahrain, they even had the
—same cross-shaped inner stone cham­
bers. These prehistoric towers almost seemed like cairns set on
either side of the wadi to mark the road inland towards the
temple-structure to which we were heading.
Before long Costa drove sharply off the road and we bumped
along the bottom of a canyon with nothing but camel tracks that
wound ahead into a hidden world of dried-up river beds and small
alluvial flats where nothing grew except some sparse and twisted
thorn-trees with inedible berries. In the whole area we saw not a
single house, but in a few places far apart we passed semi-nomad
families living in a sort of symbiosis with a desert tree. Their
primitive dwellings consisted of simple platforms suspended
among the crooked branches of big thorn-trees and walled in like a
nest by smaller branches. All the sparse clothing and utensils of the
residents hung about on the branches safely above the reach of the

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