It is 45 degrees, and there’s so much noon sunlight bouncing off the rock face you can see how Nasser al Hadi has burned his skin a deep chocolate over a lifetime spent facing mountains. You will find the al Hadis in the nooks and crannies of the rock here, sheltered from the outside world at the end of wadis, where the dried remnants of waterfalls come collapsing down the jebels.
Exactly why they are here has been lost over the centuries. But someone, a long while ago judging by the shards sticking out of ancient graveyards, got a channel to bring down water from a natural reservoir in the mountains, and a village sprung to life. That water, still flowing, sustained fields of grass for the goats and a few knobbly onions for man, even the inevitable grove of date palms. But that was in another time.
Now, all that’s left is the memory of past greenery, the stubs of crops arrested midway out of the soil, and the baked and abandoned plots surrounded by barbed wire twisted around sticks. Samakt itself is a ghost town, after an entire generation left home for Muscat. Drive through it during the day and chances are you will be the only one around.
“The young ones go to Muscat, the old stay here,” says Nasser, as we squish through watermelon in his freshly painted majlis. Nasser himself followed the trend, getting a job in the electricity company in the capital, while moonlighting with his taxi after hours. His father used to chop wood and sell it when he was a young man, and attended to matters of the village as rashid. “A rashid is a bit like a sheikh, but for a smaller area, like Samakt. Each settlement might have a rashid, while the tribe as a whole has a sheikh.” A rashid is appointed either by the sheikh or by the government, holds the position all his life and passes it on to his son. If the villagers aren’t happy with him they can vote to have him removed, and a new one is appointed. Like the sheikh, he actsas a bit of a middleman between the people and the government, putting his stamp on papers like passport applications, getting births and deaths registered and passing on disputes to higher authorities if they are beyond his scope.
Nasser will become rashid one day, but there might not be anyone to administer or look after by then. There are only ten young people in the village, two old men and a few children. After hundreds, if not thousands of years of settlement, water diversion and agriculture, the village is down to 12 adults. It is so small and so much an old story it never was worth a clinic, or a school. Both are kilometres away, down another offshoot closer to Muscat at al Hajar.
But the fortunes of Samakt might be rising again. Barely a handful of kilometres away, millions of rials worth of new road has just been laid out, on its way from Muscat to Quriyat where it will join the new highway to Sur along the coast. “Five years ago no one would take this land if you offered it free. Now, a 600 square metre plot sells for RO20,000. In time, this won’t be a village. It’ll be a city.”
You never know. For now, though, that seems laughable, a tale that echoes hollow against the wadi walls, bouncing off locked doors, goats huddled in the shade of a thatched porch, goatskins hanging from thorny trees like some horror movie left too long in the sun, a pair of lithe, very wild donkeys around a few corners, and the scratchings of gazelle hoofs in the wadi dust. All this is just a minute’s drive away as the road turns to dirt behind Samakt, following a wadi at the edge of the mountains.
At the base of the jebel is a little stone room, its back to the rock face and its walls constructed layer upon layer with that flat, flaky stone that you will find all around the area, over many square kilometres. It never had a roof and it faces the other end of the wadi, the one you would have to enter from if going to the fields. Too low to be a watchtower, too thick to be a goatherd’s night shelter, it might just about be either. There are no clues, only a natural hollow in the mountainside about 30ft to the right and slightly above, a hollow partially walled in to make room enough for a person to huddle in. These could be five years old, or 500. The wadi leaves no clues; only a hot, dry wind that swirls around and doesn’t seem to go anywhere in particular.
But the real treasure of the village that no one wants to live in is just outside, before the road reaches the houses. There, to the left of a turn, you will find Wadi Creepy, that we explored and named in February 2007. This is where you will find a greenish stone carpeting the wadi floor, the wadi itself seemingly mellower with such colours, especially in twilight. While bare-boned now, this landscape is transformed after winter rains, each metre carpeted in green fuzz.
The first part of this wadi is a largely flat undulation of dry shingle riverbed, a few feet across, meandering through a landscape of hillocks that rise into mountains later on. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, and the lack of grand adventure will force you to seek out the little details that you would normally miss out on grander trips. There’s the knotted, weather beaten roots still clinging to the wadi floor, the little flowers sprouting out of seemingly dead branches and, under everything, ever present rock: dull green, brown, crumbling, cut into layers.
Further on, you will be funnelled by narrowing walls into the deepening gloom. Where the broad wadi narrows to the point where it starts to climb, you’ll find the remnants of a stone dwelling, and, a few feet above, a cave with animals bones in the dust. From this point on the wadi becomes more interesting – you’ve got steep walls on either side, you’re constantly climbing from one level to the other and you can’t see past the next curve.
Higher up, somewhere over the peaks above Creepy and Samakt, is a plateau that stretches out a long way. “It is about an hour’s climb,” says Nasser, but it looks at least double if not triple that to us. “We used to climb up when we were young, and sleep on the plateau. There is no one and nothing on top, not even ruins. Somewhere beyond these mountains is Wadi Tayyin, but we never walked that far.”
Both Samakt and Wadi Creepy give few secrets away. You have to chip away in the sun, and, in the emptiness that has kept this area secluded and sent its few people away, you might just find something.To get to Samakt (sign-posted as ‘Samkat’) head past al Amerat, and turn left from the last roundabout, towards Quriyat. A few minutes later, turn right on the road to Samakt. It runs on for 6.5km till the village. The road turns to a dirt track from here, and loops back to the tarmac. Creepy is a curve before Samakt, on your left.
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