Surviving the sands
The desert, seemingly barren and unforgiving, has long beguiled our correspondent. She returns to Mleiha to unearth more of its secrets.
By Nicola Chilton
Abdullah Moosa snaps a leaf off the milkweed plant and breaks it in half to reveal a sticky white sap. It’s so poisonous, he tells me, that no animal will eat it. Only one type of moth lays its eggs on it, and when the caterpillars hatch and start eating the leaves, they become poisonous, too. “It’s protection against predators,” he says.
Moosa knows his stuff. As educational coordinator at the Mleiha Archaeological Centre, one of the main areas he focuses on is desert survival. “When it comes to survival, that sap can save your life,” he says. “If you can’t stop bleeding, break a leaf and put the milk directly on the wound. It will cause an immediate blood clot, and your bleeding will stop.”
We’re out in the Mleiha desert, a place that keeps drawing me back. Perhaps it’s the shape of the mountains that look like the spine of a sleeping creature. Or the iron-rich red sands that crawl up the mountainsides. Or maybe it’s the fact that this stretch of desert, halfway between the UAE’s two coasts, has long supported human life, with people farming, trading and travelling through here for millennia.
The Mleiha desert holds secrets, in the caves hidden in its mountains, in the rocks underfoot and in the flora that clings to life.
While it may be desert, this isn’t barren land. Moosa shows me the firework bush tree, a shrub with tiny white flowers that’s an excellent source of kindling. When I rub its twigs in my hand, they form fine fibres that can easily catch fire. Then there’s Miswak, the toothbrush tree, whose sticks have been chewed to form teeth-cleaning bristles for thousands of years. It even has tiny, bitter berries that burst in the mouth as breath freshener. As we chat, Moosa pulls a couple of fronds from a date palm and deftly weaves them together—twist, twist, fold, twist, twist, fold—into a rope. No amount of pulling can stretch or break it.
Earlier that morning, I set out to discover Mleiha’s ancient history on an ArchaeoMOG tour. We set off in a Unimog adapted for the desert. Originally a German agricultural vehicle used for harvesting and forestry, these huge trucks handle off-road tracks well, an advantage that becomes apparent as we head towards the Valley of the Caves.
Were it not for a favourite picnic spot in Jebel Faya that archaeologists began excavating, we might still not know that Mleiha’s mountains hold evidence of some of the first anatomically modern humans outside Africa. The archaeologists unearthed sophisticated bifacial stone tools dating back 125,000 years, with nothing found in older layers. This means that the people who made these tools had no local roots and must have come from somewhere else, most likely East Africa, when the first waves of humans started moving north.
The caves that we’re heading to are officially named FAY-NE-09, 10 and 11. It would be easy to miss them, they are hidden in the folds of the mountainsides. Most of the rocks here date back to the Late Cretaceous Period, approximately 100 to 66 million years ago. Sandstone is predominant but I run my fingers over other rocks, feeling their textures, some smooth, others pitted like orange peel and sharp-edged, like flint.
The Unimog, a German agricultural vehicle that has been adapted for the desert, deftly handles Mleiha’s rocky tracks. Date palm fronds can be woven together to create a sturdy rope.
The area’s Stone Age inhabitants relied heavily on flint, using it to make tools and weapons, and with each step I take, the ground clinks beneath my feet. A large number of “waste flakes” have been found here, evidence that the caves supported a flint-knapping workshop between 5,300 and 4,700 BCE.
I’m intrigued by one rock that appears to have a seam of metal running through it. Nirmal Rajah, head of tours and an expert on the area’s geology and palaeontology, explains that it’s actually a vein of radiolarian ooze, the microscopic skeletal remains of zooplankton that lived here when this area was covered by a shallow sea, and that formed in a cavity in the sandstone. This ancient sea also explains why there are so many marine fossils in the area, even though Mleiha today is about 60 kilometres from the coast.
Back in the sand, Moosa is waiting to teach me more desert survival skills. Arab nomads have long been experts at using stars for navigation, but in the daytime, the best tool is a solar compass.
“Take any stick you have that’s about a metre long,” says Moosa, reminding me of the many times I’ve headed out to the desert stickless. He uses a hiking pole, standing it upright in the sand, with a tent peg at the top of its shadow. As the shadow moves, you track it with different items—tent pegs, stones, anything solid you can find. The first item you placed will mark west, the others will mark a progression towards the east. And from there, you have your cardinal points.
Desert plants have unexpected uses. The sticks of the toothbrush tree, or Miswak, have been chewed to form teeth-cleaning bristles for thousands of years.
Next, we set about making fire the old-fashioned way, with flint. I thought we’d be bashing two stones together, similar to the flint tools found in Mleiha’s caves. But there are more modern ways.
“You can buy this on Amazon,” Moosa says, taking out a combination of flint rod and scraper to produce sparks.
Preparing a hollow in the sand, he pulls out another trick of the trade—cotton wool balls. “These catch fire really quickly,” he says, dropping one into the hollow and handing me the flint. But I can’t get the spark to catch. Moosa strikes it for me, and a tiny flame appears, to which we add kindling and dried roots foraged from the desert.
The desert out here isn’t particularly remote, and even if I were lost it seems it wouldn’t take long for a dune buggy or a camel herder to pass by. But there’s a tendency to treat the desert as a playground, and people often head out unprepared. Later that afternoon, speeding over dunes at the controls of my own buggy, my face full of fine sand as I took a curve too fast, I momentarily lost sight of the lead car. And I realised that, as much as this desert may be less remote than others, lose your wits for a moment and survival is a serious matter.
Could I survive the desert on my own? Not for very long, no. But what I have learnt is that even in January the sun is unrelenting, never to venture out alone, and always to keep an eye out for a landmark, a road, or the nearest settlement.
And I might also keep a lighter and some cotton wool in my pocket from now on, too.
Dried roots foraged from the desert make ideal kindling for a fire. But starting the fire needn’t rely only on time-old techniques.
Photographs by Shukhrat Gafurov
