ABSTRACT
‘Is this Arabia,’ wrote James Wellsted as he climbed into the highlands of the Jebel Akhdar late in December 1835, ‘this the country we have looked on heretofore as a desert?’ His reaction echoed that of many desert travellers who came upon Oman, and found there a cornucopia. Wellsted described: ‘Verdant fields of grain and sugarcane, stretching along for miles, are before us; streams of water, flowing in all directions, intersect our path.’ On the coast of Muscat, the same plenty could be found: the great groves of date palms stretched along the shoreline of the Batina from the capital in the direction of the rocky tip of the horn, Ras Musandam. The vast area of Muscat and Oman contained, in addition to the bountiful lands, great tracts of bare rock and desert, as Wellsted found later in his travels:
From the summit of the Jebel Akhdar I had an opportunity during a clear day to obtain an extensive view of the desert to the southwest of Oman. Vast plains of loose drift, across which even the hardy Bedouin scarcely dares to venture, spread out as far as the eye can reach. Not even a hill nor even a change of colouring in the plains occurs to break the unvarying and desolate appearance of the scene.
