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The mystery of the fluttering dishdashas

Who stuck five white cloths in the middle of nowhere and why?
Written and photographed by Pinaki

Somebody was waving at us in the distance, on the top of a hill that overlooked a wadi that crept out of the unexplored mountains south of the Quriyat road. We hadn’t seen another vehicle in an hour of exploring the dirt track, and had left the last collection of village huts far behind. The wadi below us supposedly lasted 90km, forming, at the minimum, Wadi Sareen, that ran through the wildlife sanctuary; Wadi Hareem, which meandered around nothing in particular, and, after ducking under the highway, Wadi Mijlas, which can take you into Quriyat if you’d prefer to go off-road.

And now, in the late afternoon breeze, a man in a dishdasha seemed to be waving at us in absolute abandon from the top of an unnamed hillock in an unnamed point along Hareem. Looking a little harder through a telephoto lens revealed that it was indeed a dishdasha, but instead of a man within, it was fluttering around a stick, forming a flag, marking the point for some purpose. In a bare landscape of no people, a fluttering flag jumps out like a neon sign on fire, certainly reason enough to warrant a closer look.

Separated by a curve in the wadi, we started walking down into it, before climbing up the other bank. It seemed, almost immediately, that we were treading on an old path, that the grass had grown around stones thrown up, that there almost seemed to be a pattern forward in the leaves and pebbles if you looked long enough. And then, after slipping maybe 20ft down, a ledge lower, an abandoned wreck of a settlement, just a few pieces of wood, a pole or two, naked nails sticking out. Natural pockets in the wadi wall nearby, too shallow to be called caves, seemed dark with soot. Whoever was here had long gone, leaving behind scraps – and one lone dishdasha high above.

A couple of minutes more and we were down in a bend on the wadi floor, all predictably smooth rock bordered by vegetation. The opposite side seemed too steep to climb, so we walked along until we got to a good spot, and started climbing. Again, strangely, we seemed to be on a track and yet not quite, following a hint of a parting in the undergrowth. Someone might have been here.

These lower folds of the mountains held another surprise: more greenery than you would normally find in Oman. This wasn’t the lush tangle you’d get during the khareef in Dhofar, but rather a light sprinkling of fresh grass, the occasional shrub and even, deep in the folds below, the knotted collection of low tree branches. Higher up, where the climb flattened out at the top, past a shallow donkey pit in the dirt, was the flag: a full-length white dishdasha, fluttering gaily in the wind.

But what did it mean, whose territory did it mark, which path did it point to? The suggestion of a track we had been on had ended at the flag, and the flat bit we had reached rose too sharply ahead. We sat down in the wind and dying light, and sipped on water. And then we saw it, perhaps half a kilometre off, on another hill: another dishdasha, identically placed. Were we supposed to follow them, one to another, and then perhaps come to a third, like a trail of breadcrumbs that would lead us to some to-be-discovered secret? We looked around for more, and then – this was getting predictable now – found a third, this one deep in a fold of the mountain, just before the slopes rose too high.

One thing was certain: this wasn’t a path to follow, for the flags formed a triangle, at too sharp angles to each other. This couldn’t really be someone’s land either, because a triangular plot over a collection of hillocks and slopes didn’t make sense. And it couldn’t have been a joke, because the children of the villagers would have to go to too much trouble, walking too far, and such antics are usually the luxury of city folks. So what did that leave us with? Nothing. We turned back and left, promising to come back and investigate the other two.

We did return, weeks later, but decided to go down into the wadi another, easier way. A few feet away came the predictable surprises: another suggestion of a path – this one even seemed to have been used by vehicles – and, best of all, a fourth dishdasha, fluttering like the other three. Hours later, scrambling upwards on the slopes above, we spied a fifth example, this one furthest away from the road. And still the shape they would form on a map, and everything about each of them, seemed so pointless it didn’t warrant hours of hiking. There was nothing here except five dishdashas, mysteriously put up.

Leave Muscat in the afternoon, and spend your time in the emptiness between wadis, patches of mud worn out where donkeys have slept and the ever-present charm and mystery of low hillocks.