Home: Middle East: Oman: Longing in Limqasil:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this, /
How little that which thou deniest me is ; / It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, /
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be. / Thou know'st that this cannot be said /
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo, /
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ; /
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.
John Donne, The Flea
Limqasil is so remote some people have never left it. Wedged tightly between canyons, teetering on the precipice, with the wadi falling suddenly, deep down into recesses you cannot see. The furthest Khamis bin Rashid bin Khalfan al Nasibi has ever been is Rustaq, four hours of hiking and crawling and tiptoeing over rock away. There wasn't anywhere else to go, and it was much too much effort anyway.
Stuck on the far side of Jebel Dawi, under the crooked rock finger of Qarn Dawi, somewhere between the anonymous northern slopes of the Western Hajar, above the dusty innards of Wadi Sahtan incessantly hammered into dust by 4WDs, Limqasil is a spot even the goats might miss. This is how it got its name, which translates into ‘the place between mountains that no one can see.’ Or something like that.
But Khamis calls it home, and his ancestors, originally from Fasah in Wadi Sahtan, bought it from the Dawyani who lived here originally. It is from the Dawyani that the mountain Dawi gets its name, a tribe that you will now find in al Hamtain and Jamma. There seems to be some confusion about when this was, because Khamis first said it was his grandfather who bought it, and then, a couple of sentences later, said it happened 2,000 years ago. "My family paid 100 karshes for it," he says, "for the farms and goats."
Those farms — a handful of mud terraces held from disintegrating into the abyss by stones — are the reason why people squeeze themselves between the rock here, eking out a living in the nooks that no one else wants. And that few knew till a road was scraped over the mountain as recently as 2004, or 2005 depending on whom you speak to here.