The Taxi Driver from Baghdad by Peter Goodchild

Author:Peter Goodchild [Peter Goodchild]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Six

After one of my long desert walks one day, I came across a second crumbling old fortress. Close to it, I found a series of well-like vertical shafts, about ten or twenty meters apart, with water in them about fifty meters down. But some of the land had been excavated, or perhaps recently re-excavated, between some of them, so I could see that the shafts (for maintenance, I later learned, not for drawing the water) all connected underground, forming a falaj, of which the plural is aflaj. Some of the aflaj, even in a small town such as Nizka, stretch for many kilometers, running from the mountains and across the desert to water the palm groves and vegetable gardens.

Starting from the fortress, I went back the way I came, but following an above-ground channel, covered for perhaps a hundred meters with crude stone blocks, each too heavy for one person to lift. That channel also became an underground one, marked by vertical shafts, and it led over several kilometers all the way back to the town of Nizka.

In all that time, I encountered only one person, a woman driving a herd of about fifty goats, and that was near Nizka. I didn’t want to frighten her, so I kept my distance, although it was hard to avoid her since we were both obviously heading in the same general direction. I suspected she was a wife or daughter of Saeed, a man I had once met, who lived on the north edge of Nizka. I had had to go to his house once when I found one of his goats badly tangled in a thorn bush; I’d freed the goat, but hadn’t got all the branches out of its hair.

The desert was like a fairy land, a magical, enchanted place that you might see in a dream. It was all very beautiful sometimes, if you could ignore everything that had been built in Oman in the previous few decades and just looked at the amazing culture that once existed out there. And it was odd that there seemed to be so little written about that ancient culture. But those shafts and so on were such an enormous amount of work, all done by hand. I suppose they weren’t consciously thinking of “building for eternity,” it was just one falaj at a time.

During the Middle Ages there was more contact between Arabic and European culture than in later times. The “-al” words — algebra, alchemy, and so on — entered our language. It’s unfortunate that the high point of that contact was the Crusades, but at least we got oranges out of it. I have no idea when the fortresses in Oman were built, or over what length of time, although it was obviously when Oman was a different world, since no one now could live a pre-industrial life in that land of unrelenting sand and stone. There was clearly once a population dense enough to provide many workers. All I knew

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