This coming New Year’s Eve will mark a year since the devastating bombing that rocked the All Saint’s Church in Alexandria, Egypt, killing 21 Coptic Christians and wounding 96 others in and around the Church. While news of the bombing was carried by all major news outlets, and subsequent follow-up reports indicated the role of Al-Qaeda in carrying out the attacks as religiously-motivated sectarian violence, the explosion was quickly overshadowed by the events of what has been termed “The Arab Spring”, the serial protest, revolutions and attempts at reform that have swept the entire Middle East. Lost in the aftermath was the revelation that members of fmr. President Hosni Mubarak’s own security forces had participated in planning the attacks as a way to remind Egypt’s Christian community of their dependence on the state for protection.

In the months since, violent confrontations this past May between Salafi Islamist and Christian groups and the Egyptian military’s October 8th attack on a mixed Christian and Muslim protest in Cairo raised the spectre of sectarian strife among international media covering the event. While Egypt’s Christian population does face second-class status in a number of areas, particular involving the construction of new churches and religious conversions, it is worth remembering the degree to which any such “sectarian violence” is a tool of political manipulation rather than an outward manifestation of any inbred hatred. It was political struggle, not religious difference, that turned Lebanon into a byword for a sectarian nightmare; it was the machinations of Iraq’s monarchs and dictators that drove one of the world’s oldest and most vibrant Jewish communities from the streets of Baghdad, not innate antisemitism. With that in mind, the translation seemed rather relevant. Naguib Mahfouz was by no means a theologian, and the scene he depicts between a father and his daughter is by no means universal nor the last word on Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. It is, however, by no means a fairy tale, given the wonderful people I have had the chance to meet in the cradle of the world’s civilizations.

Children’s Paradise

by Naguib Mahfouz

-          Daddy…

-          Yes.

-          My best friend Nadia and I are always together…

-          Of course, because she’s your best friend…

-          At school, on break, at lunchtime…

-          How nice, she’s such a pretty and well-behaved little girl…

-          But when we go to religion class I go to one room and she goes to another!

He looked over towards the mother and saw her smile despite being buried in her embroidery work. He smiled too and said:

-          Well, it’s only for religion class…

-          Why, daddy?

-          Because you follow one religion and she follows another.

-          But how is that, daddy?

-          You’re Muslim and she’s Christian.

-          Why is that, daddy?

-          You’re still a little girl, you’ll understand when you’re older.

-          I’m a big girl, daddy.

-          But you still have more to grow, my darling…

-          Why am I Muslim?

He needed to keep an open mind, to avoid undermining the questioning that this modern education was supposed to embrace.

-          You’re daddy’s Muslim and your mommy’s Muslim and so you’re Muslim.

-          And Nadia?

-          Well, her daddy’s Christian and her mommy’s Christian and so she’s Christian.

-          Is it because her daddy wears glasses?

-          Of course not, glasses have nothing to do with it – it’s because her grandfather was Christian too…

He decided to keep going down the line of ancestors until she got bored and changed the subject, but then she asked:

-          Who’s better?

He thought a bit and replied:

-          Well, Muslim girls are good and Christian girls are good…

-          Doesn’t one need to be better, though?

-          They’re each good in their own way.

-          Can I become a Christian girl so that we can always be together?

-          Of course not, my darling, each of you takes after her mother and her father, so it’s just not possible…

-          But why?

With this modern education they just never let up! He asked her:

-          You’re sure you can’t wait until you’re older?

-          No, daddy…

-          Alright, you know fashion styles? One person likes one style, one prefers another style, and your being Muslim is like that other style, so you just stay with what you have…

-          So Nadia is just old-fashioned?

God save him from her and Nadia! No matter how careful he tried to be, he seemed to be painting himself further and further into a corner.

-          It’s all a matter of tastes, really, but each little girl has to stay the way her mother and father are…

-          So should I tell her she’s old-fashioned or just that I’m the latest fashion?

He tried to head her off.

-          Each religion is good, and each little Muslim girl worships God just as each little Christian girl worships God…

-          Then why does she go to one room to worship Him and I go to another room?

-          Because they worship him one way in the first room and another way in the other…

-          Then what’s the difference?

-          You’ll know next year or the one after that, but for now just remember that Christians worship God and Muslims worship God, too.

-          And who is God, daddy?

He stopped and thought for a while. Playing for time, he asked:

-          Well, what does your teacher say about Him in school?

-          I mean, she reads the verses and teaches us prayers, but I still don’t know much about Him. Who is He, daddy?

He thought again, then gave a mysterious smile and said:

-          He is the Creator of the whole world.

-          The whole world?

-          The whole world.

-          What does it mean to be the Creator, daddy?

-          It means that he made everything.

-          How, daddy?

-          With almighty power.

-          And where does he live?

-          In the entire world…

-          And even before the world was around?

-          Beyond…

-          In the sky?

-          Yes.

-          I want to see him.

-          You can’t.

-          Even on television?

-          Not even on television.

-          Doesn’t anybody see him?

-          Of course not.

-          Then how do we know that he’s out there?

-          That’s the way things are.

-          Who realized that he was out there?

-          The prophets.

-          The prophets?

-          Yes… like our own prophet Mohammad…

-          And how did he know, daddy?

-          With his own special abilities.

-          Were his eyes just really strong?

-          Yes.

-          Why, daddy?

-          Because God made him that way.

-          Why, daddy?

He replied, trying to hold on to his patience:

-          Because he’s free to do anything.

-          And what did he look like?

-          Very great, very powerful, able to do anything…

-          Like you, daddy?

Trying not to laugh, he said:

-          Nobody even comes close to him.

-          And why does he live out there?

-          The earth isn’t wide enough for him, though he still sees everything.

She went quiet for a little and then said:

-          But Nadia said that he lived on earth.

-          Well, if he can see everywhere it’s like he lives everywhere!

-          But she said that people killed him?!

-          He is alive and undying.

-          Nadia said they killed him…

-          No, Nadia, they thought that they killed him but he can never die.

-          And grandpa is alive too?

-          Your grandfather died.

-          Did people kill him?

-          No, he died all on his own…

-          How?

-          He got sick and then died…

-          And my sister’s going to die because she’s sick?

He noticed the mother give a start, and answered quickly, frowning:

-          No… she’ll get better, God-willing.

-          Then why did grandpa die?

-          He got sick when he was old…

-          But you’re old and you got sick, so why didn’t you die?

Her mother scolded her, and the girl moved her eyes back and forth between her parents in confusion. The father said:

-          We die if God wants us to die.

-          Why would God want us to die?

-          He’s free to do whatever he wants…

-          And death is nice?

-          Of course not, my dear…

-          Then why would God want something that wasn’t nice?

-          Whatever God wants for us is nice.

-          But you just said that death wasn’t nice!

-          I… I made a mistake, my darling…

-          Then why did mommy get mad when I said you would die?!

-          Because God didn’t me to die after all.

-          And why does he ever want it, daddy?

-          Because he brings us here in the first place and then takes us away.

-          Why, daddy?

-          So that we can do beautiful things here before we go.

-          Why don’t we stay?

-          Because the world wouldn’t be large enough for everybody if we stayed.

-          And we leave behind all the beautiful things?

-          Where we go things are even more beautiful

-          Where?

-          Beyond.

-          Where God is?

-          Yes.

-          And we’ll see him?

-          Yes.

-          And is that nice?

-          Of course.

-          So we have to go?

-          Yes, but only after we’ve done wonderful things here.

-          Like grandpa did?

-          Yes…

-          What did he do?

-          He built our house and grew the garden…

-          And my cousin Toto, what did he do?

He frowned for a moment, stealing a look at the mother as if pleading for help, then said:

-          He also built a small house before he left…

-          But our neighbor Lulu hits me and doesn’t do wonderful things.

-          He’s a naughty little boy.

-          But doesn’t that mean he won’t die?!

-          Only if God wills it…

-          Even if he hasn’t done wonderful things?

-          Everyone dies, but those who did wonderful things go to God when they die, while those who did only ugly things go to the flames…

She sighed and then fell silent, while he felt as though he had just snuffed out some spark despite all his efforts to the contrary. He didn’t know how much he had affected her, nor how badly he had messed up. The question marks swirled around the depth of his mind, only to be stopped by the little girl calling out:

-          I want to stay with Nadia forever!

He shot her a questioning look, and she replied:

-          Even in religion class!

He laughed out loud, and so did the mother. He yawned, saying:

-          I couldn’t have imagined that you’d want to discuss things at this level!

The woman said:

-          She’ll grow up one day and you’ll be able to explain what you mean!

He turned towards her sharply to try to tell if she was being serious or only joking, but he saw that she had buried herself once more in her embroidery.

When I headed out from Muscat with Vincent, another embassy employee, I assumed we were in for a fairly rough day. We were headed for the Omani oasis/valley combo known as Wadi Shab, located in the mountains to the south of the capital. While travelers’ accounts had suggested that the pools and streams of the Wadi were helpful for cooling off, I didn’t know how well they’d be able to fight the effects of the sun piercing down from overhead. As we drove out through the mountains surrounding Muscat, and along the desert of the coastline, clouds billowed overhead – dust clouds, I assumed. I didn’t think much of them as I concentrated on stranger sights, such as a group of backhoes clawing a path for themselves of the sides of nearby mountainsides. Yet when we arrived at the small, provincial town of Tiwi, we realize that we were, unbelievably, in a cloud of cool mist. This sort of thing is supposed to happen way down in Salalah, during the Khareef rains of the summer, but the Dhofar region was half a peninsula away.

We picked our way through Tiwi, around goats and villagers, asking for directions every so often. Finally, we arrived at the entrance to the Wadi – a low, greenish inlet, framed by the beam bridge veering the dual-carriageway highway overhead. Heading in, the water was low enough that we could easily see the road laid out across the basin of the inlet, only covered by a thin film of tide – just up to the knees. Then we moved further in, and started to taken in the immense greenery of the place. Don’t get me wrong, there are trees in Muscat, but even there the city felt like a sidewalk with holes cut into it to allow the occasional shrub through. Here, though, green was everywhere that water could flow or drip, all the way from slimy algae clogging the Falaj aqueducts up to the palm trees overhead. It was a great hike for Vincent and me – the fog held overhead, meaning that it was certainly warm out but nowhere near the sweltering heat of the city. I imagine this is what the Khareef would be like, if I ever get down there again.

For about 45 minutes we clambered over boulders, found and lost and found the path again, run into dead ends, treaded through water, waded through water, even swam through water (a bit tricky with the camera). Eventually we arrived at the highest pool of the Wadi, at least for the main trail, which led back into a cave hidden by fallen rocks, with an opening just big enough to paddle through, upright and sideways. Inside a waterfall pounded a pool surrounded by rocks, a number of skylights illuminating the proceedings. All very amazing – after 10 weeks of living in the desert, this oasis was a wonderful change, and a wonderful ending.

Of course, this was all a week ago, so it might be a bit much to call it the ending to my time here. Still, the week since then has passed much like the film credits after the final scene, or reading a Sherlock Holmes mystery after the criminal has been revealed (except in the case of A Scandal in Bohemia, but that’s another matter). I’ve gone to work, managed to spin not-very-much-work into an 8-hr day, returned home, waited until iftar, then gone to dinner. Admittedly, my dinner companions have been a pretty cool bunch, from friends at the embassy to the head of security to a bunch of Omani Fulbright alumni (that last one held at the Ambassador’s house). There have been a few incidents of interest, but that interest is probably solely mine. Dinner at the Ambassador’s house was a chance invitation as there were spare seats, my section organized the dinner, and it was thought to be a nice reward before I headed off from the post – of all things, the Egyptian newspaper editor next to me was a student of my Arabic teacher when Muhammad al-Sharkawi taught in Cairo.

And so here we are – the last day in Oman. I fly out of here at 11:40pm, should all go according to plan, and from there back to the United States (with a free 4-day vacation in France en route, thanks to the airlines, but that’s another story). I have really enjoyed my time here. Work at the embassy might range from interesting to frustrating to boring to exasperating to cool, but I’ve loved almost every minute of getting out and exploring Muscat, meeting people here and seeing what opportunities there are when I graduate in <1 year. More than I had thought previously, at least. I have some things to look forward to when I go back as well – I’m set to be a TA for an Arabic class at school this fall, and I might be able to pick up a job in Arabic translation as well.

In any case, I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading a bit about Oman. I’ll try to write a bit when I get back to the U.S. but no guarantees until I return to the U.S. See you around.

Oman in the Heat of Day

Nothing of any particular importance has been happening here. It being the middle of Ramadan, with the accompanying sunup-to-sundown fasting incumbent upon all Muslims, not much is happening around the city, politically/culturally/socially or /economically. As opposed to Egypt, in which the streets and alleyways of major cities become carnivals of lights and laughter, Ramadan in Muscat, Oman is a much quieter affair. Major activity involves going around to visit every last relative, alternating with visits from every last relative to your own house. Stores have much-reduced hours, and few people are out and about during the day. Needless to say, this leaves me, a non-Omani with no car, in a bit of a lurch. Not much to do, and fewer people to do it with. At this point, owning to vacation time the age gap surrounding me in the Embassy community has widened to 11-year-old kids in one direction and their 30-something parents in the other.

Medinat Qaboos, No Longer Home Sweet Home

As it worked out, though, the Embassy’s housing units got a bit muddled and I was politely asked if I knew anybody I could move in with on or before August 13^th. Luckily I did, and so I recently moved in with Isaac, a friend who works for Amideast (a U.S.-funded organization that handles education programs in the MidEast). Admittedly, a government property did open up at the last minute, but by that point I wasn’t exactly in the mood to rely on the State Dept. to manage my housing affairs. Plus, it’s been getting a bit lonely living by myself. This all explains why I was standing over a frying pan, cooking meatballs and tomatoes in the dark last night.

Khuwair - the New Home Sweet home

Well, I guess not. Let me go back a bit. I only have two weeks left in Muscat, so I suppose it’s high time I explained a bit of what exactly I dohere. As I’ve probably mentioned, I work as an intern at the U.S. Embassy, taking care of odd jobs that nobody quite has time for. I work in the Public Affairs Section, which handles education programs and media contacts – or, as I describe it to some Omanis I meet, “I have nothing to do with visas.” Working in the Embassy has taught me that no matter how much cultural outreach the Embassy does, 95% of people who come into contact with us have one interest – visas. Fair enough – it’s what we’re here for. For the most part.

The Embassy Decides Some Literature is Out of Date...

I once described what I do here as “Split between things too boring to mention and things I probably shouldn’t talk about”. To be honest, the latter makes up about 5% of what I get up to here, if that. On the flip side, I’ve worked on a bunch of projects not exactly crucial to national security – closer to routine maintenance. You’ll forgive me for not regularly updating you on my exploits here when I mention that a large amount of my work has been putting together website-update requests for the computer help desk, collecting information on other embassies’ Twitter and Facebook accounts, running our own accounts on Twitter and Facebook, reading Omani online forums.

The U.S. Embassy in Muscat

I am also two months into processing a request to purchase a new sign for the Information Resource Center. It’s slow going.

A few things have been a bit more interesting, though, such as

Section Chief and Omani Co-workers

analyzing all forms of Media in Oman and following all newspapers on a daily basis. You start picking up trendlines after a few weeks, watching Azzamanslowly push the envelope further and further in terms of press freedom, following the Ministry of Higher Education’s planned 500 scholarships to the United States, noting the mounting death toll from

Adil and I

traffic accidents along Oman’s winding desert highways and spotting visitors to the cool weather of the khareefwinds in Southern Oman. I’ve chatted with the head of Rolls-Royce dealerships in Oman at a going-away party for my immediate superior, attempted crowd control and answered questions in Arabic at a massively-overcrowded information session on the aforementioned scholarships, and talked with the Embassy’s contracted Arabic tutor about life in New York. There’ve also been innumerable random spur-of-the-moment tasks, from finding a bunch of doorstops to helping the Information Resource Director find a staple gun to put her new bulletin board together.

My Office

Life outside the embassy is pretty low-key. At a decent estimate I’d say half of my days involve going home, sleeping for a bit, going running and

Shafiq and Ali

then cooking dinner. Still, I’ve managed to meet up with a few interesting folks around town. This explains why I took the beiza bus out to Mattrah on Friday, to meet a Pakistani I’d met months ago named Muhammed Ali (no relation). Muhammad’s combined English and Arabic could fit on the back of a small business card, but he brought along his cousin, Imtiyaz, and Shafiq, an Arabic-speaking Bangladeshi. We met in front of the Marina hotel in Mattrah, where they took me to the rooftop restaurant where they work (business is slow from Ramadan). We talked about their lives as expats in Muscat, about Oman compared to Pakistan (“Nice, but just not the same”), Oman compared to Saudi Arabia (“So much better”) and how to get a U.S. visa (“Probably pretty difficult”). As the conversation rolled along in a tangled bundle of English, Arabic, Urdu and all requisite translations, we made our way through the town and back to a Pakistani restaurant by the water – huge pieces of bread and spicy hunks of chicken cooked in small metal bowls.

Late Night Driving

Going out inevitably revolves around food. The other night I went to an iftar dinner (for breaking the Ramadan fast, or close to it), with a group of Omanis who had studied in the United States. This put the group at 26 Omani 20-somethings wearing dishdashas and kumas, plus one American 20-something wearing a t-shirt and khaki pants, all in a Turkish seafood restaurant where plates of meat kebabs and grilled fish were interspersed with massive pieces of bread (spotting a trend?) and plates of hummus. In contrast, the Pizza Hut iftar dinner I went to with a bunch of US expats and their Omani/Egyptian friends was downright disappointing, at least food-wise. I figured that a Pizza Hut buffet would consist largely of, well, pizza – which doesn’t exactly explain why I paid RO3.5 to eat fish sticks, chicken lasagna, pesto bread and one thin slice of pizza seized more through chance than through anything else.

Night Lights in Mattrah

I met the US expats mostly through a couple of friends who work at Amideast, and I’ve seen at least some of them every other week or so since I’ve been here – probably more often now that I’ve moved in with Isaac. A typical evening (if there were such a thing) involves meeting up in a large, unwieldly group at a moderately-priced restaurant somewhere in the city – Darcy’s Kitchen (British/American Diner food), Beirut Restaurant (Assorted Middle Eastern),  Automatic (Lebanese), That Chinese Restaurant (name uncertain), Somebody’s House (location may vary) – followed by a session of tea/coffee accompanied by shisha (hooqah tobacco) for those that are interested. Throw ample amounts of laughter and ridiculous stories of living abroad or (for our Omani friends) dealing with expats, the occasional movie, and a rotating cast of friends of friends of friends and you more or less have the picture. Oh, and a high probability of being in a long but high-speed car ride with techno music being blasted out of every speaker as if to ward off the plague. Or something like that.

This, in a nutshell, is life here. To fully wrap things up, the one drawback of Isaac’s apartment is that the light in the kitchen does not work. Thus, while trying to cook my post-iftar meal last night at about 10pm I kept having to carry the frying pan out into the hallway to see if the meatballs were cooking through – that or use the LED flashlight on my phone to figure things out. Go figure.

[Author's Note - I am now without internet at my home apartment. On the upside, though, we foigured out that banging the kitchen fixture with a broom will flip the light on. Genius.]

On Thursday I made it back to Alexandria at long last, which was an amazing, almost surreal experience. It was a little sad in its own way – not to the point of making me regret the trip, surely, but just enough to some half-way poignant feelings of nostalgia. I’d only lived in the city for about 4 months, but going back was like visiting a relative’s house – definitely not your own, but you know where the cupboard for drinking glasses is, and so on. I could also see why every last train ticket was sold out, given that the evening air in the breeze of the ocean was wonderfully cool.

But I suppose I should begin at the beginning, no?

As usual, things began with a metro ride, this time out to the Cairo Gate bus station up in the north of Cairo, east of the Nile. This required a bit of wandering around before I actually found the place, though luckily the station, a massive concrete-and-glass land port, had more than enough tickets for the trip. I wandered through some twisting alleys after buying my tickets, picking my way past butcher’s shops, fruit juice stands and blacksmiths over fairly uneven pavement, the occasional tree improbably twisting its way up towards the sunlight. Finally I made it out towards the northern end of Zamalek, the large island district in the middle of the Nile river. I was due to meet my Arabic teacher from back at Brown for coffee, so I went to the Cairo branch of the bookstore Diwan, proceeding to pick out a large wish list of books… only to have my Arabic teacher arrive before I could buy them all. I suppose I shall return before too long.

Mohammed and I walked around Zamelek a bit before sitting down at a cafe to talk and have tea. He was reminiscing about coming to Zamalek as a child (“in Sadat’s time”) and looking for a specific cafe called Seaman’s (closed since about 2000, as it turned out). He’s glad to be back, though unfortunately hasn’t been well enough to get out and about all that much for a good while. We cycled through our usual conversation topics – what he’s doing next, what I’m doing next, the Egyptian revolution, Ahly soccer – before he had to head off to meet with his publisher. I’m glad to have finally met him in Egypt, given that I’ve only seen him in the U.S. Before. He’ll be back in the U.S. This fall, though unfortunately not at Brown – he’s heading off to Wayne State University to teach Arabic and translation. I hope I get the chance to meet him out there.

From there, I was off on another journey to the Cairo Gate bus station, though this time with a more pressing deadline. Unfortunately, the bus was late by nearly an hour, cutting into my time in Alex, and we had to stop a few times to pick up random passengers (including a few hangers-on tourism policemen) and to check tickets (at entrances to various governorates). The journey itself was fairly uneventful, aside from the mildly amusing hit Egyptian film “Black Honey” (treacle?) about an Egyptian who returns home after spending a good deal of time in America. His often-lost American passport has near-magical powers of compelling respect or cooperation from others, and much of the film revolved around cultural differences between Americans and Egyptians, though seen from the other direction. For example, the protagonist “Masry” walks around his cousin’s house without a shirt on, embarrassing his cousin and his wife, and gets in trouble with the police after taking pictures of various government buildings. Among these buildings is the at-that-point unburned headquarters for the National Democratic Party – one of several subtle reminders that the film belonged to a different era entirely. There were a few catcalls from the audience when a scene set in a police department briefly flashed a massive picture of Hosni Mubarak.

Alexandria Decked out in Patriotic Bunting

By the time I had arrived at the Mowaf al-Gadeed bus station (and made it through the crush of people to buy return a return ticket) it was already 5pm – a bit late in the day to get going, but I’ll take what I get. The months rolled back (yes, this would be much cooler if it had been years) and I was standing outside of the McDonalds near the Shotby girls dorm, which now sports a massive, faded Egyptian flag banner tossed out of one of the windows. I walked the same, longer-than-it-seems walk to the Canat Suez intersection outside the Alexandria University Campus, past the same old shops and the same cafes. Like Cairo, the major difference was in the little things – paintings and posters all over the place without being two obvious. Walls that now ran with red, black, and white stripes. Expressions of Christian-Muslim unity, and Muslim Brotherhood banners extolling the virtues of the Hijab for women. Banners mourning the loss of various martyrs of the revolution, along with posters of Gamal Abdel Nasser calling for a return to the pan-Arab nationalism that once held far greater meaning for the region.

Poster for the Muslim Brotherhood

I ran into Khaled Darwish by pure chance outside of the library of Alexandria, with a few of his friends from the Alexandria Student’s Council. We barely had time to talk, though, because he had to run. I hadn’t mentioned I was coming as I’d somehow lost his phone number. I hope I didn’t offend. In any case, after a bizarre encounter involving a high school student and a police officer I had hopped into the car with Doctor Wessam, who has mainly been focusing on his normal University work after the Middlebury program was stopped. I spotted him and traffic and headed over, and soon we were on our way to dinner, chatting about life since the revolution. He’s been doing well, though currently there’s a bit of upheaval as the previously regime-appointed and -supervised University administrations across the country are being turned out in favor of newly-held elections.

Signs of the Revolution

We went to an upscale restaurant for dinner – Tikka Grill – with another Fulbright student (also named Andrew) who’s reasearching Egyptian nationalism – good timing, no? It was a great conversation over dinner, as we didn’t bother trying to catch up on everything but just hit up the specifics – I explained what things had been like on my side of the Atlantic, while Andrew and Wessam got me up to speed on a couple of the most recent events and developments, such as the publication of the newspaper Al-Tahrir (http://www.egarida.com/), which provides fairly critical coverage of events in Egypt, compared to other news sources. I was a bit lost amidst all of the different names, but I’m starting to catch on to the political glossary of the moment – Hizb al-Nur (the fundamentalist Salafi party), Nabeel al-Araby (current Egyptian head of the Arab League), etc. Wessam al-Meligi runs pretty far to the liberal side of the Egyptian political spectrum and has been a bit frustrated by the way things are going, but like all Egyptians knows how to make a good joke out of it as well. I heard about how current Prime Minister Essam Sharif is under an incredible amount of pressure, and seems to be hospitalized every other week – can’t blame him honestly. It was a good conversation, on the whole – enough reminiscing to catch up, but mostly focused on the present and the future. The food wasn’t bad, either.

Revolutionary Graffiti

Eventually, it came time to part ways. Fulbright Andrew and I went to the bookstore Dar al-Maarifa, where I set out on expanding my burgeoning Arabic-language library – I picked up a pretty interesting day-by-day account of the Egyptian Revolution, among other things. Since Andrew had to be on his way, I just wandered around the city at length. There’s a full-scale sit-in going on in Saad Zaghloul square (named for one of the leaders of the 1919 revolution), with rallies, tents, posters and more. There were tanks outside of the court and the branch office of the ministry of justice, and further sit-in protesters outside of the Suzanne Mubarak Center for the Arts – I stopped and chatted with them for a bit, and managed to get their permission to take a few pictures. The longer I stayed in Egypt, the more careful I was about taking pictures – perhaps I’m being a bit overly cautious, but the stories of the Israeli “spy” keep coming up.

It hasn’t been that long since I left Alexandria, but it feels like forever. Like I said, sad but in a nice way. Life continues on Alex, as I watched all sorts of people people pass along on the sidewalk. A 20-something girl balanced on the back of a like-aged guy’s scooter. People hopping in and out of battered microbuses as yellow-and-black taxis wove their way in and out around the milieu of traffic. The occasional horse-drawn cart. Fully-veiled niqabis walking next to their t-shirt-and-jeans husbands, women in capri pants, laughing guys sporting all kinds of sports paraphernalia, people just heading into or just leaving the water. A nice, cool breeze coming in off the water made it quite a nice time to just sit and watch.

The City at Sunset

I had one more meeting before I headed out. Mahmoud Gebriel was free for a few hours before I headed back home, so I met him at a cafe while he took a break from studying for Med school. When the protests first broke out, he went to Cauro for a few days, but then went back to the Sinai to be with his family. As things worsened in Tahrir, and their family’s farm came under threat in the Bahira region of the Delta, he headed back with his father and other family members to hold the place down – got attacked by government thugs on the way, but made it through all the same. He made his way back to Cairo and spent the last seven days before Mubarak gave up power in Midan Tahrir, saying that each day was better than the last, with millions swamping the square. He laughed a bit when he talked about the s now – nice, to be sure, but nothing like what it was. He’s back to studying now, trying to visit Boston this winter on a scholarship program. I hope he makes it – it’ll be nice to see him on the other side of the water.

Sadly, time ran out on us there as well, and I had to head out. One slow taxi ride later, I was back in Mowaf al-Gadeed – the place still looks like a cross between a junkyard and a country fair, with vendors of everything from Chipsi bags to phone credit strewn about like so many bedouin tents, amidst ramshackle shacks selling bus tickets. I hung around until the bus finally appeared, got aboard and then fell asleep almost as soon as we got moving. Unfortunately, another Egyptian film (much harder to follow – seemed to revolve around a famous pop star trying to keep her father from knowing what she does for a living, in a crazy comedy mash-up of Goodbye, Lenin and Hannah Montana. I demurred. I was awake when we made it into the city itself, as I had to get the bus driver to stop at the side of the 26^th of July bridge, letting me walk the length of Zamelek island to get back to my friend’s apartment, walking in and amongst the late-night fisherman on the banks of the Nile, the late-night partiers coming off the riverboat dance halls on the shore of the island, and the late-night shift of military and police guards watching the Syrian Embassy. Then I went to sleep.

Late-Night Fishing

July 22-24

Not much happened on Friday, aside from some book shopping and a party thrown at my host’s residence. I hit it off with the group of Egyptians who were the first to arrive, and chatted with a wide variety of 20-somethings studying Arabic or otherwise employed in the greater Cairo area. Rarely do I find myself entirely in the company of Arabic-studying, Middle-East traveling folks, at least not since the last time I found myself in Alex, so it was a pretty cool experience – some people had even studied in Oman, while others had a wide variety of experience in the Levant, Morocco, the Gulf and of course Egypt. Again, not since the Middlebury program have I been in a room full of Westerners who could comfortably switch back and forth between Arabic and English without a problem.

Unfortunately, amidst hearing of Study Abroad nightmares and hearing of travel plans for the CASA student’s upcoming break, my phone went off with a call from Heba Abdelgelil. She had finally found enough time in between grading tests at Damanhour University to meet up with me and my friend Jason (my host) out in Alex on Saturday, but I wasn’t sure what she could be calling about now. It took me a while before I understood, my phone conversation skills still not being quite the best in Arabic, but eventually I got the message and told her I’d check back in the morning. Then, following instructions, I searched Twitter under the hashtag #Alex – immediately a host of tweets popped up, noting police firing in the air around the Sidi Gaber army encampment, rocks thrown, thugs beating protesters, photos… When I looked through the photos, I realized the intersection – I’d walked by it every Sunday on my way home from church at the Jesuit Center.

The TAFL Center, as it always was

Jason and I checked on and off through the party and into the next day. We didn’t spot anything new so we resolved to head out but simply steer clear of the whole Sidi Gaber region – easy enough, as Jason’s friends had reported nothing out of the ordinary even as close as Sporting. One 3-hour inter-connected transport sequence later, we were listening to a taxi driver complain about all the Cairenes who had descended upon the “relatively” cool climate of Alexandria in droves – every so often somebody would roll down a window and call out for directions to Montaza gardens, or San Stefano, or Miami. Eventually we got off at the Port Said/Suez Canal St. intersection, strolling down the road and into the doors of the TAFL center. The place was a bit deserted, with fairly few programs in session, but I was able to find a few familiar faces – ran into Mataaz as I headed up the stairs, and Ahmed Gamal was around, fixing some computers. I talked to Ahmed for a bit, though we didn’t get much past generalities. Ahmed didn’t say much about what he got up to during the revolution, although he is now remarkably well-versed in ways to avoid Internet censors, bury IP addresses, hijack satellite dishes into remote Internet-uplinks, and shield hotspots, if this is any indication.

Patriotic Paint Job

The Biblioteca Alexandrina was closed, with the ticket booths shuttered and a few white-uniformed policemen lounging about in plastic chairs. At first we thought there might be a relation to the previous day’s confrontation, but I had simply forgotten that it was July 23^rd– the date of the previous Egyptian Revolution, some 59 years before, a national holiday that drew much comparison to the present revolution. Jason’s friends wanted to meet for lunch further down the Corniche, so we decided to simply head out for a stroll along the water, stopping only to pick up mango-flavored ice cream. It was a beautiful day, with just enough clouds drifting across the sky to provide some occasional shade from the sun, which was strong but not overpowering. We passed the sit-in at Saad Zaghloul Square and the tanks parked next door in front of the courts and the ministry of justice, each sporting a half-bored soldier leaning on the pintle-mounted guns. By the time we got past Menshira the colorful fishing boats were beginning to collect in the water to our right, just as crowds of beachgoers mobbed the shore, accompanied by the tinny sounds of pop music being blasted over too-small speakers. A few more Egyptian flags fluttered among the boats than I recalled, and even a few Libyan opposition flags joined them. We walked on.

Tank Guarding Ministry of Justice

Lunch was a typical Alexandrian seafood affair – pick your fish, pay by the pound, choose your cooking style. We met up with a few other CASA folks on vacation and some of their Egyptian friends, and we made plans together for the rest of the day while comparing notes – a lot of us had been through the Middlebury program in Alex, with a combined experience in the city stretching back several years. Flashing forward an hour or so found us in front of Aseer Mekka, its status as juice-bar king of Sporting undiminished by the presence of a huge banner for one of the main Salafi Muslim partys, Hizb al-Nur, nearby. The tram rolled us back past artwork and posters thrown on the walls to either side, flags and slogans next to political banners and flyers.

Aseer Mecca

Selsela was much the same cafe as ever when we arrived, the fake palm trees rustling in the stiff breeze. Heba met us there, and we caught her up on the news of a few generations of Middlebury Alex alums, as she talked about what some of the Alex crowd were up to these days. The Middlebury administration/faculty in Alex are using the time off (the program is shuttered at least until the spring) to rework the program, aiming at a result Heba would only describe as “a surprise”. Conversation rolled on through cheap places to eat in Cairo and Egyptian actors blacklisted for being against the revolution. All too soon Heba had to be on her way, leaving us to enjoy the afternoon air and the beautiful view along the Corniche.

The evening wound its way to a close, slowly but surely. Other Fulbrighters, CASA students, and a few Egyptians descended on our position just down the steps of Selsela, and we sat as the sun sank into the west and the street lamps glowed against the sea spray. Conversation was entirely in Arabic, with only the occasional stubborn vocab word throw in to ease the discussion along. I broke off to grab a last few books for the collection, then came back to find that we were heading off to Halawiyat Masr, to check out if the desserts were as good as we remembered. Mahatat Raml was packed, and certainly not just with the protesters sitting and speechifying around Saad Zaghloul’s statue. It seemed like everybody from that part of Alex, and a decent number form Cairo as well, was out and about, either walking, driving, buying or selling. Struggling to remember travel times I could once pull from memory, I waited for Jason to finish his order and then suggested we might want to leave in order to beat the traffic. The taxi driver speculated darkly about what would happen if Tahrir protesters didn’t give the government a break, let things settle down. It certainly left us something to think about as we stepped away form the lonesome light-posts in Mowaf al-Gadeed to stare up at the stars.

When we returned news reports noted that 150 had been wounded in various Cairo protests during the day. By the time I woke up that number had risen to 230.

The final day ran like clockwork and passed quickly. I met Muhammad Gharib for juice (guava) not far from the Faisal Islamic Bank by the Sheraton, on the eastern bank of the Nile. One decent taxi ride later I was at the airport, waiting to board the 13:35 flight to Bahrain with a huge number of Malaysian Muslim women. By midnight I was back in Muscat, trudging my way over the freeway footbridge in order to avoid paying $30 for a taxi ride (I paid about $5).

It’s not as if I gained huge amounts of knowledge while in Egypt. I’m sure it was good Arabic practice, but I’m only slightly more literate about political events than I was when I left. The revolutionary atmosphere continues in Midan Tahrir and a few certain other areas, but most everywhere else if such events come up in conversation it is usually with a note of uncertainty, though also accompanied by laughter most of the time (this is Egypt, after all). If anything, what I took away was something a bit more basic, perhaps something too obvious to be worth mentioning. When I stepped away from the folks in Selsela back in Alexandria, I stopped by the sandwich shop past the Alexandria University campus, al-Tabawy. I was amazed – what had one been a single hole-in-the-wall restaurant now unfolds to the end of the block. Grime cinderblock had given way to shiny red siding, glass doors, gleaming chrome edging. The original sandwich shop was now adjoined with a koshery joint, an ice cream parlor, and a juice bar. It was all pretty impressive as I ordered my usual fare of one ful and one falafel sandwich. The revolution continues, the uncertainty continues, the problems and issues that plague Egypt certainly continue. Above all, though, life continues. For better or for worse.

The day started early enough, when my alarm went off at 4am. By 4:30 I had staggered down to the highway (dropping off my trash in the dumpster on the way), and after 15 minutes of frantic hand-waving managed to flag down a beiza bus that agreed to drop my off on the side of the highway near the airport, leaving me to scramble over an embankment and cut through a parking lot to get to the departure terminal. I packed light – one backpack plus a bag with a few gifts for friends.

Muscat’s airport is small but serviceable, and I managed to use the rials I saved on transport (taxi – 10 rials vs. beiza bus – 1 rial) to pick up some Omani dates for my Arabic teacher – because every Arab country has the best dates in the region, so it seems. A short flight later I was in the quiet, peaceful, gee-did-anything-happen-here? Kingdom of Bahrain. I didn’t leave the airport, so I can’t tell you much about the place, aside from the fact that the airport itself is mostly an excuse for a massive duty-free store (so much alcohol! I held off, though). Eventually, I was back in the air, this time seated next to a phlegmatic Egyptian who had been working in Qatar. Conversation was limited.

Noting the Pyramids on the Way In

As I stepped out into the bright sunlight of the Cairo tarmac (after noting the pyramids on the way in), I tried to look around for signs of change. The same black-uniformed guards stood at the edges of the airstrip, and the same visa process awaited me at immigration (glad to have kept some $ on me). I started to feel a familiar sense when various taxi drivers started to spring up around me, offering to take me into Cairo. After some negotiation (“good price, good price!”), I headed out with a pretty cool guy named Saeed, who chatted and laughed his way along as we made our way into the city. I had time to kill, so I wasn’t too concerned with getting there fast. Saeed drives for the Ministry of Water Management as his day job, so we were attacking the Cairo traffic head on.

Many of the songs on the radio touched on the revolution, but we didn’t discuss it too much. I brought it up a few times but Saeed didn’t want to dwell on it, so I saw no need to force the issue. As big an event as the revolution was, people need to get on with their lives. The more we drove, the more I saw the sheer diversity (and slight craziness) that makes Egypt radically different from what I’m experiencing now in the Gulf. All sorts of colors and clothing styles flash on either side of the street. Men push carts laden with fast food, as men on bicycles impossibly balance trays of bread on their heads. A bound ram kept poking its head out of the pickup ahead of it, shaded from the sun by two children wedged among other goods in the trunk.

January 25th

Still, the revolution was present, if not latent. Graffiti scrawled on the walls as we passed through Muslim Cairo and Khan al-Khalili recalled Jan. 25^th slogans – “For you, Egypt!”, “No sectarianism!” – while Egyptian flags (and Palestinian) were on sale to a degree I could not recall from my previous time in Cairo. When Saeed dropped me of near Midan Talaat Harb, I walked the streets that seemed not far removed from the last time I had ventured out looking for my Arabic teacher’s brother way back in December. Posters from the recent July 8^th demonstration were scattered about, along with fake license-plate stickers that spelled out January 25^th. The biggest surprise was Midan al-Tahrir, though. I had not realized that the entire traffic circle had been blocked off by protesters (apparently a somewhat recent development). Ropes and barriers closed of the street itself, while self-appointed guards checked identification and passports at the entrances. What they were looking for I’m not entirely sure, but it is probably good that my passport does not contain a stamp from the non-Arab-speaking Middle Eastern country affectionately known as “Disneyland” among expats in Egypt.

Midan Tahrir

The Midan has turned into part circus, part impromptu memorial to the martyr’s of the revolution. Egypt’s tourist industry has not skipped a beat, as Egyptian flags have replaced banana-leaf papyrus among tourist salesmen while numerous t-shirts pay homage to the events following January 25^th. Any number of banners, signs, flags and artwork are strewn about the square, slowly gravitating towards a network of tents and flagpoles at the center of the circle. I strolled about for a time, amidst numerous requests for me to buy a flag or a t-shirt, and one guy who demanded E$100 taking a picture of what he claimed to have been his artwork (I deleted the picture). I took a few pictures of Tahrir, but on the whole I tried to be a bit inconspicuous – I’m not that concerned about being in Egypt now, but I definitely don’t want to draw too much attention to myself. The police presence is practically non-existent compared to what it was – the shorta have all but disappeared from the streets, except at major intersections. As always, I picked up the occasional Egyptian trying to hustle me into his tourist trap of a shop, attention that I either ignored or had fun with, answering only in Arabic and alternately claiming to be a Lebanese-German businessman, an Egyptian-American engineer, and just a plain American who “didn’t do well at English in school”.

I’m now at a friend’s apartment in Doqqi, west of the Nile in the city itself. I had forgotten just how massive and sprawling Cairo is. Flying overhead you can see building after building after building after building of apartments, splayed out across both sides of the river. It gets to be a lot when you assume that each of those buildings has a pretty decent number of people in it. The apartment is in a pretty quiet neighborhood, off the main street by a bit. A few armored cars with accompanying guards line the streets, but nothing too noticeable.

July 20th

The next day brought a flood of memories rushing back. As much as I like living and working in Oman, the austere environment there is nothing like the swirling sounds, smells and colors of Egypt, particularly Cairo. Beauty and filth, light and shadow, pollution and greenery run together in a kaleidoscope unlike anywhere else I’ve been, keeping in mind that I’m not exactly a world traveler. Its good to be back, because stereotypes and negative aspects have a way of creeping up on you when you’re away – being back here is reminding me why I loved the place so much the first time around.

Anyway, this morning I went to Tahrir Square to visit the American University, where my hosts study with the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) program. The microbus ride wasn’t anything too new, given what I do every day in Muscat, but I was uickly reminded of how much Midan Tahrir had changed when the vehicle halted a short distance from the approach to the Midan itself – the roadblocks on every side are causing quite the traffic jamb. As noted, whatever companies were printing hundreds of pyramids & hieroglyphics t-shirts before have taken a much more patriotic tack, and Jan. 25-themed t-shirts and hats line the edges of the Square. I passed quickly with my friend from back home, but made a mental note to come back through.

After an hour or so of class time, I left AUC’s oasis of a campus and headed back through Tahrir, this time stopping to take a few more photographs. A couple of protesters invited me to come sit in their tent, which I did gladly, chatting with them in Arabic about the revolution. One had been there since shortly after the fighting on June 28^th, while another since the more recent demonstration on July 8^th. A few others joined us as well, although they were more interested in hearing about how the revolution had been viewed in America than talking about events themselves – I figured they’d been talking about that enough, so I happily obliged. They were pretty happy that I was somewhat familiar with their demands, as I conveniently translated a flyer for the website Tahrir Documents on just that subject not long ago. One of them even gave me a T-shirt, which may be one of my favorite souvenirs ever acquired.

Formerly Known as "Mubarak" train Station - Now "Martyrs'"

On a personal note, I was pleased that my next stop fulfilled a promise to myself almost a year ago, at the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art. I visited the museum last year, and I even translated a video on the subject (which I need to post on youtube), which remains one of my favorite translation projects ever. Anyways the promise was to come back and photograph a sizeable portion of the exhibits, as they’re not located on the internet at all and most of the artists are pretty much unknown outside of Egypt (and even within the country).Unfortunately this plan failed completely last time I was here when my camera died, leaing me with one ghostly image for an entire museum. Well, I made it back again, got a student entry ticket (with my Alexandria student ID, haha – it still works, and is good for getting pretty decent treatment when I enter Tahrir Square) and went to work.

I strolled back through Tahrir Square, picking up a few revolution-themed souvenirs as I went, and stopped off briefly at the University of Cairo bookstore, forgetting that just about everything available there was far too expensive to recommend itself above the Arabic-language books available elsewhere. I quickly set out for the Museum of Islamic Art, which had been closed during most of my stay in Alexandria. This required navigating a vast expanse of Cairo street life, that ostentatious, pugnacious, cramped, crowded, roar and hum of colors, cars, beeps and voices. I picked my way along the streets, noticing the occasional work of pro-revolution graffiti art or political poster as I went. As always, I found myself in peculiar districts entirely dedicated to oddly specific things. Today’s journey, by way of example, took me through the stamp district (as in ink stamps – rubber and plastic), the sofa-chair-Aoud(guitar) district, and the metal fencing district, not to mention the brief television remote district.

Along the way, a tailor almost dumped a bucket of water on me by accident, and to make up for it invited me into his shop to drink tea. Experience makes me tense up when people in the central Cairo area invite me in for tea, but these guys seemed pretty legit (and unlikely to use a tailor’s shop as an incognito tourist trap), so I sat a while. Talk touched briefly on the revolution, then got stuck in the usual rut of talking about Israel. I dusted off my usual parries and explanations on the subject, and tried to move on. You see quite a lot of Palestinian flags about the place in Egypt these days.

I finally reached the museum – no photographs allowed, unfortunately. The museum’s collection revolved around a beautiful display of Islamic-themed art, which tends to fall mostly into the areas of calligraphy, architecture, carpet making and pottery. Large glass lantern bulbs hung from the ceiling, glazed over with some of the various names of God, while brass-worked plates reflected light off thinly-traced arabesques. A fairly small museum, but well laid-out and quite worth the visit. Oddly enough, I also saw a number of citizens bullying (for lack of a better word) a white-uniformed police officer against a fence near the museum. Odd indeed. The police are still visible in certain key areas, but for the most part they have disappeared from the streets. This has evidently led to a lot of problems in the downtown area, particularly at night.

So Incredibly Lost by This Point

To get back to my story, though, my next destination was Khan al-Khalili, to pick up a few kufiyya scarves as requested by friends. Khalili is a massive tourist bazaar fused with an actual market place, though my visit would have been a bit nicer had I not managed to get myself absolutely lost in another market place, lined with all manner of dresses (one corridor of black abeya dresses almost seemed like a tunnel), t-shirts, shoes and bedding, before I realized my mistake (i.e. not finding the two main mosques, al-Azhar and al-Husayn) and headed back. I barely darted into the Khan, quickly negotiated a price on a few scarves, and got back out, as I wanted to make it back before it got too late (I had promised my hosts I’d make them dinner). The walk back was long, even though I got on a metro at some point – writing this now, after having walked even further with friends, my legs feel like they are about to come apart at the joints, with little exaggeration.

The walk back was crowded but relatively uneventful, aside from nearly getting swiped by a motorcycle. Good thing I have relatively fast reflexes, no?

Rally at Midan Tahrir

After making my newly-discovered special of pizza made from Middle-eastern pita bread, I headed back out again, this time to meet up with Muhammad Gharib, one of my friends from back in Alex. We walked over with another friend of his (who also happens to work with Tahrir documents) and walked into Midan Tahrir, where the evening’s rally was getting underway. Later that evening I saw a march near my friend’s apartment, headed towards the Midan. An offshoot, perhaps? We didn’t talk about much of importance – just walked around, met up with some other American students, and wound up at some Chinese restaurant. We spoke about the Revolution a little bit (Gharib was in his hometown in the countryside for most of it), but the major things affecting his life right now were finding a job and finding out whether or not he’ll have to push off all plans for a year or so should he be selected to enter the military – which he thinks is a near certainty given the events of the Revolution, and the need for people at the moment. The army is out and about, just not out in the open – they’re mostly guarding strategic locations in the city (my friend’s apartment, for example, has a detachment near it due to the presence of the Syrian embassy).

I’ve also been combing Muscat for bookstores, an area in which the whole country seems to be sorely lacking, English or Arabic. While there are a few stores that cater to English-speaking expats, the few Arabic bookstores are limited enough to make an airport newspaper stand look like the Strand in New York. I thought I’d found a decent location behind a Mosque in Ruwi the other day, but as it turned out the owner only stocked a collection of religious books and tapes (imagine old “Bible Stories” kid’s books, only this time about the adventures of the Prophet’s companions) and various self-help manuals (including a disturbing number of books with titles like “Be the woman God wants you to be” written by men with PhDs).

Welcome to Nizwa

The past few weeks have had their exciting moments, though. Last week I made it out to Nizwa, one of the more famous interior towns in

Mountains of the Omani Desert

Oman. The one-time capital of Oman, the city is dominated by Nizwa Fort, a large sandstone structure dominated by a central tower designed to command the plain surrounding the oasis. An extensive network of well-placed forts runs through the mountains and deserts of Oman, a hold-over form the time when Oman’s rulers faced a continual threat of invasion form Persian forces across the water, Europeans advancing across the seas, or other Arab forces further to the north.

Nizwa Fort

To start off, though, the family I was driving out with went even further past Nizwa to the Al-Houta cave complex. Nizwa as it is is somewhere a bit left of the middle of nowhere, and Al-houta is even further off the beaten path. This was, incidentally, my first experience driving in the Middle East (luckily in the country with arguably the best roads) which wasn’t too bad, once you got up to about 120 km/h and started dodging the trucks lumbering along at 80 or so. The caves run into the side of the Jebel Shams mountain chain, currently accessed through a tunnel bored into the side. The cave itself (no pictures allowed, sadly) was caused by part of the rock structure falling away due to erosion from underground streams, opening up a wide, low room in the mountain. You can trace your eye along massive rents in the ceiling where geological movements broke huge slabs of rock like a piece of bread – the edges still match up. Water trickling down through the rocks has left its mark as well, creating piles of stalactites and stalagmites shaped like anything from cones to sputtering candles to even a lion. The walkway through the caves even included an underground lake replete with blind, translucent fish.

Even more Mounatins

We ended up passing rather swiftly through Nizwa itself, as it was a pretty hot mid-day in the desert and my ride’s 4- and 6-year old daughters were getting a bit tired. Still, we toured the fort itself, an marvelous example of defensive construction. The central tower can only be accessed through a single, crooked staircase, with murder holes ready to dump heated date oil on potential invaders at ever turn. Cannons face out of the stronghold in all directions, thoroughly entrenched in thick, dense walls to guard against any attack.

The intervening week passed quickly enough. I’m slowly figuring out how to game the Embassy’s cafeteria, at least politely – keep my ears open for any mistaken order (“Well, if you’re just gonna throw that out…”) and so on. I’m certainly not starving (far from it), but always nice to get a little more for what I’m paying. I’ve picked up some books to read from the Embassy’s employees-only library. Thus far I’ve barreled through the tragic 100-odd pages of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, picked my way through the gleeful intellectualism of Naseem Taleb’s book on risk, The Black Swan, and am currently tracing the twinned stories of Guglielmo Marcnoni’s wireless and murderer Hawley Crippen in Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck. I attended a pre-departure briefing for Omani students coming to the U.S. to study, for everything from English translation to mining engineering to veterinary science (in this case the Royal Veterinarian to the Sultan’s camels).

Any military enthusiasts following along will be excited to know that I made it out to the Sultan’s Armed Forces Museum (again in Ruwi) this past Thursday, tracing the Sultanate’s military history through the old Al-Falaj fort. It was interesting enough to see some of the exhibits on early history, with weapons and armor from pre-Islamic times up until the arrival of gunpowder in the midst of the last millennium, but things really kicked into high gear with the turn of the new century. A prolonged outbreak of inter-tribal and inter-regional fighting at the close of the 19^thcentury left the country weakened and impoverished, though the nascent forces of the Sultanate were baptized in fire by repulsing an attack on Muscat in 1915. The army continued to expand through the time of WWII, but under the reign of Sultan bin Taimur more fighting started to break out with rebel groups to the south. Pictures and diagrams showed the Sultanate’s forced trying to dislodge rebel groups form mountain strongholds through concentrated artillery barrages, launching high explosives up and over the cliffs that ringed the plains of the desert.

Basically an Armory

Weapons, captured or otherwise, were on display throughout the exhibit, and it was rare for any smooth surface to lack a rifle, sidearm or rocket launcher (in some cases). The second floor takes you through the history and structure of the Armed Forces since the Renaissance (1970), with Sultan Qaboos’s seizure of power. There are a few great pictures of Sultan Qaboos out in the field, commanding the then-running Dhofar War, while other pictures charted the army’s slow progress through the rolling, grassy hills of the region. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting.

His Majesty at War

I suppose that about wraps it up for now, as I have some other things to take care of before going back to work and I should probably see about dinner. As a parting point, check out these photographs from the Armed Forces museum: the black and white image shows the area surrounding the Museum in 1970, the year His Majesty took power. The color image shows the same image in about 2000. Interesting, no?

Ruwi, c. 1970

Ruwi, c. 2000

Water was starting to pour into the trapdoor on Marco’s roof, where the copper lighting rod was feeling its way into the night air. It was caught half-way down by a cover designed to keep his set-up from short-circuiting and frying him along with it. A few more turns of the large wheel mounted on wall and his work was finished. He waited nervously for the next lightning strike as he ran through all of his calculations in his head a second time, climbing back up the spiral stairs a ways for a better view of things. The thought also occurred to him that this might put him out of the fatal blast zone if things went horribly wrong.

It had been suggested to him that he a weakness for overly-complicated experimental setup, which he readily acknowledged. Still, he preferred things this way, especially since he couldn’t count on any help beyond Mrs. Hendry running and grabbing a spare clamp while he held things in place for a moment.¹ Just set everything up, then laze around and catch up on sleep until the lightning sorted everything out. Of course, it did make things a bit stressful at the moment of truth, but it was a nice shot of adrenaline now and again. He could feel the apprehension building into anticipation. Now he just needed to pray the storm would hold out.

…

Stela, peering out through the fishbowl-lens periscope that gave her a good view of the world beyond the trees, was amazed to see another lightning rod flash from time to time in the darkness, barely visible over the crest of the hill. She knew there was only one other inventor on the ridge, though his crumbling cavern of a house faced north, towards the town.

“What is Marco up to this evening?” she wondered.

She had never quite forgiven him for beating him to the Miracle Match, as she almost had a working prototype of something very similar when word arrived that Marco was throwing a party with the proceeds of the invention. That was the first summer she lived in Landon, she recalled, and ever since then a polite rivalry had grown up between them. They each strove to outdo each other in their own way, whenever their divergent inventorial interests drew close enough to allow an actual comparison. She still drew great satisfaction from having handed over a perfect working egg-slicer while Marco’s targeted shell-dissolver was still turning eggs into so much fried protein. In short, they kept tabs on each other.

Still, her focus on Marco lasted less than an instant, as was nearly blinded by the light that flashed in the periscope and the roar of thunder overhead. She turned away, blinking, to face the swirling mass of lights and machinery that was shaking the floor beneath her. The bank of capacitors was slowly unleashing the lightning’s power into the synthesizer, as hundreds of combinations of ingredients were combined every few seconds before her eyes. Every so often, her eyes lit up as a small flash appeared deep within the heart of the beast, but each time the force of the crack made a child’s pop gun seem like a long-range artillery cannon.

…

Lightning, of course, doesn’t have very long to make decisions about where it will strike, as it hangs around for only a fraction of a second. So, when presented with two equally temping treats of beaten copper, it went with the easiest route and split the difference.

…

In kind, Marco’s thoughts of Stela were wrenched away by the sight of his laboratory apparatus bubbling and hissing into action. Mixtures flowed, gases billowed, and something resembling a primordial sludge occasionally slumped down along a corkscrew-shaped piece of glassware, dangling precariously over the whole setup. His eyes glanced over to where a tray of brass-capped vials lay waiting for the finished result. Figuring he had some time, he climbed back down the stairs and over to a small grill built into the side of the basement. He reached down, mindful of the rising hissing and screeching coming from behind him, and opened the grate. From underneath a nearby workbench, he pulled out something that resembled a roller skate after an ugly collision with a wind-up alarm clock and roll of telegraph cable. Winding up a small key on the contraption’s underbelly, he poked it into the grate and let it loose, hooking the end of the cable, which ended in a small brass earpiece, on a knob screwed into the side of the wall. The clockwork seeker continued in darkness, along the path it had traveled many times before.

The path was an old cross-ridge aqueduct from before the Intervention, long since rendered useless by centuries of blockages and developments and then forgotten until Marco had discovered it one day. He had promptly forgotten it, too, until he hit upon the idea of keeping up on the only other prominent inventor on the ridge, Stela Addison. Her bungalow might have been relatively new, but the foundations were old enough to connect to the same drain. Just a simple listening device, easy to retract, in an area she’d never think to look.

In the darkness, the probe felt the approach of its twin. It had never actually seen its double, and for all it knew they looked completely different, but in the darkness they filled the same purpose, and that was close enough. Its twin always came from the other direction, and though they didn’t meet on every journey through the darkness, they had grown used to each other in a friendly way. A casual bump of the wheels half-way along set the probe’s mainspring aflutter, as it trundled towards the point where its cable grew taught enough to pull the break on the mainspring, arresting it in place.

…

Not more than a few feet from where the probe lay in wait, Stela watched the machine hit a winning streak, the blasts building their way up from the impact of a drop of water on a still pond to a holiday firecracker. Still not enough, but getting closer, even if the occasional dud was signaled by a resounding silence. The symphony of rusty saws and cheesewire hit a deafening crescendo as the synthesizer found its pacing, the garish carousel starting to rock back and forth slowly but surely. She took a step back in precaution, trying to remind herself that she’d driven the support foundations for the machine deep underground when she’d started construction, and that little short of a massive mainline steam crawler ramming the superstructure could pry the thing loose.

The machine’s heart beat faster and faster, the explosions throwing up fumes strong enough that for Stela to throw open a window, coughing, feeling the wind-swept downpour whip her face and arms as she did so. Then, behind her, came a sound so violent that she imagined she could feel the heat of the sound waves as they pushed through the air. Then she realized the back of her coat was on fire.

…

Back in the humble shell of the once-proud home, Marco was struggling to keep everything together. One of the fractal distillation columns had blown, leaving a pool of smoking goop that was slowly eating its way through the floor, and he’d donned a heavy apron to get near enough to switch the sequence over to the backup distiller. The heat was intense. It was still mid-winter outside, even if the temperature hovered above freezing, yet despite the draftiness of the building he was sweating bullets, and heavy caliber at that. He pulled up a chair to take a break, and when he returned to watching his monster of tubes and chemicals he noticed that, ever so slowly, the condenser at the end of the process was depositing shimmering, electric green droplets into the waiting vials. His eyes grew wide in greedy excitement as the vials filled up more and more, their otherworldly glow reflected in the frames of his ironbound goggles.

And then, almost too soon, the vials were filled, the condenser’s safety valve flipped, and the beast shuddered to a halt. Satiated, it settled down and left off consuming the cornucopia of combustibles that Marco had been feeding it. Fingers scrabbling over shelves and cabinets of ill-sorted tools and equipment, Marco at last laid his hands on a pipette, which he used to siphon off the merest hint of liquid from the nearest vial. His fingers trembled as he moved up to a landing off the staircase, what would have been the ground floor of the old home. He transferred the drop to a minute tube produced from somewhere on his person, which was promptly inserted into one end of a long, rifle-like instrument that leaned against the wall. Pushing the long stick out of the window, he took one deep breath, steadied his grip, and pulled the trigger on the handle. His mind, sped up by adrenaline and anxiety, convinced itself it could see the electricity run from the wet-cell batteries at the instrument’s handle, spiraling around the barrel in a final, fatalistic waltz, right up to the point where a crucial spark provided the moment of ignition.

The explosion nearly took him off his feet, with pieces of window thudding against his jacket and slicing at his skin. His vision, consumed by the turquoise fire that had overwhelmed the protection afforded by his goggles, took a few moments to return to normal and view the gaping hole where the window had once been. He set down the shattered remnants of the igniter and steadied himself, shaking as he turned back towardss the slowly cooling hardware, the glinting vials sitting expectantly in their tray.

…

The same electric green glinted out of the glass containers in Stela’s bungalow, as she plucked one up and held it against the light. No need to test it out, as the synthesizer had done that for her.² The large machine had run through much of its stock of test materials when it had finally reached its eureka moment, meaning there was only enough left for production of a small trial run. But that would be enough, she thought, as she handled the glass tube in a gloved hand. Slotting the tube back in place with its brethren, she went to prepare for travel. This was the one major annoyance about securing a patent – all inventors were required to present the invention in person, or at least the schematics and two sworn statements if the invention was too big to fit out the door. That is, present it at the Royal Patent Office in the capital – the RPO had no branch offices. Many an inventor had hit upon a great discovery, held off a few days to make final adjustments, then arrived at the capital only to run into a grinning competitor whose freshly printed patent license rendered months or years of painstaking work essentially useless. For this reason, many inventors lived in the capital itself, but with current real estate prices it was often cheaper to charter a private steam crawler than rent a small studio apartment with a leaking roof and an uneven floor at any point within city limits.

She put her hurrying on hold for a moment, bent down by the still-opened grate, and picked up the earpiece. Nothing but static. She waited a while, and thought she picked out the slight hiss of steam, but couldn’t be certain. Nothing that would indicate a major discovery, or frantic movement around that dungeon of a lab. Satisfied, she set down the end of the wire.

A small rucksack had lain packed and ready by her bedside for days, awaiting only the insertion of the patent-winning vials in a specially concealed and protected pouch buried in the center of the thing. Throwing off the damaged coat, she slid aside a section of wall to reveal a sizeable closet, selecting a tool harness filled with all manner of wondrous gadgetry and strapping it on. Looking at the coat lying on the floor, stained and burned, she reached back into the closet and withdrew another coat, midnight blue this time. And with that, she was ready to go. She pulled down the shades over the windows, shouldered the pack with a grunt, jammed a cap on her head, and stepped out into the night air. She took care to lock the door behind her. This would, in the end, be a futile measure.

…

Stela Addison had heard nothing on her end of the wire because Marco Carver was listening to what sounded like nothing on his own end of the wire at the exact same time. Giving up on interpreting the sounds of cooling, anguished metal, he turned back to his creation. Transport would be the difficult part – he didn’t want to turn himself into a walking bomb, yet couldn’t bear the thought of carrying a bag or case just asking to be forgotten, stolen, or lost in the strange netherworld of checked baggage.

The exertion on his face as he grabbed a grey coatoff the wall seemed a bit odd, if not seemed excessive. Invented in one of his poorer years, the coat came from a time when he’d used his two weeks’ notice at the flat he’d been renting to fashion something that could safely carry a portable supply of his chemicals and tools.³ Nobody wants the crushed glass of dozens of beakers and tubes pressed against their body in the event of a fall, so he’d managed to fashion a kind of chainmail made of cotton and steel, which seized up nicely when hit with blunt force. As true defensive armor, it turned out to be useless, since anything with a hint of an edge turned the material into so many heavyweight cotton balls, but it still succeeded in keeping his lab alive and running, sequestered in myriad felt-lined pockets, despite a minor run-in with a horse-drawn carriage.⁴

Dumping out a few minor implements that he never seemed to use – why bring along a B-clamp if you already have 4 C-clamps? – he carefully inserted vial after vial into the pockets that lined the lower reaches of the coat’s interior. He reasoned that, given a slim chance of surviving an explosion, better to lose his legs than his torso. A few essentials were thrown in a traveling valise, a bandana was hastily emplaced under the goggles, and the lightning rod was swiftly retracted. He motioned to lock up as he passed the door, then remembered he’d handed off the key to Mrs. Hendry. He stepped out into the night air.

…

Flame: gushing, spreading along a small, dark tunnel, left open, sustained in its journey by a pair of copper cables, wrapped in inflammable insulation. A tongue of fire licks the air just long enough to catch hold in a new, delicious source of fuel. The explosion.

…

In the aftermath, nobody knew which explosion had occurred first. Few had been awake to witness firsthand, and those that had been awake were in no state to recollect fine details after the haze of a night’s carousing had been blasted away by a corona of turquoise fire searing its way into their retinae. The local fire department chalked it up to “inventors and their silly inventions”, and filed an insurance claim in absentia for Mr. Marconi G. Carver and Ms. Violet Stela Addison, both missing, but not presumed anything in particular. This was known to be “something inventors did”. A few witnesses did recall a shadowy figure, dressed mostly in black and eyes covered by smoked glasses, picking deftly through the rubble, but these reports were swiftly dismissed by the authorities. Nobody thought about the fact that the authorities had dismissed these reports at two separate locations across the ridge, with no proven links between the two sets of witnesses. Or if they did, they kept it to themselves.

End of Act 1

In terms of basic geography, just know that Oman is roughly divided into the north, centered around the current capital (Muscat), and the south, called the Dhofar region, centered around Oman’s second city, Salalah. The country looks a bit like a land-line telephone receiver, with one city at each end. At one point, the Omani Empire included the island of Zanzibar, way to the south, although the island eventually gained independence and was incorporated into the current state of Tanzania (whose Embassy lies behind my local grocery store). Many current Omanis are descended from Zanzibaris who emigrated to Oman, or from Omanis who married into Zanzibar’s population.

Our story begins long before Zanzibar appeared on the scene, though, as far back as 5000 B.C. When the Dhofar region was the major source for the hardened sap of the aromatic frankincense tree. For those of you familiar with Christianity, you know the gold, frankincense and myrrh presented to the infant Jesus by the three kings? This is your main source for at least two out of the three. The frankincense trade, supplemented by decent copper deposits, formed the basis of the regions wealth and reputation for quite some time, although by the first few centuries AD the area had somewhat lapsed into obscurity. In the mid-600s, though, a Muslim follower of Mohammed, ‘Amr ibn al-As, brought word of the new religion of Islam to the region, sparking wholesale conversions and a religious fervor that led even the Prophet himself to comment on the strength of the Omanis’ faith. Most Omanis follow a variant of Islam called Ibadhism, which mainly manifests itself in praying with arms at one’s side instead of held in front, a la mainstream Sunni. Still, other Sunnis and Shiite groups exist in sizeable numbers in Oman, in a harmony entirely at odds with the sectarian strife seen elsewhere. Rounding out the ethno-religious mix of true Omanis are the Baluchis, from the former Omani province of Baluchistan (in present-day Pakistan). Add to this the expat community (1/3 of the population), and you get a huge Indian influence, along with lesser amounts of Pakistanis, Filipinos, Uzbeks, Khazakhs, Thais, Sri Lankans, Tamils, Egyptians and Kasmiris.

To move along timeline-wise, though, Oman experienced relative instability through the 1500s, as internal struggles within the Bani Nabhan dynasty coupled with a growing Portuguese influence following a 1507 invasion that left Muscat and seeral surrounding regions in Portuguese hands. After 150 years of using NE Oman as a waypost for their exanding Asian trading empire, the Portuguese were forced out by the Ya’aruba dynasty, which expanded the region’s influence out across the seas, such that by the time the Said dynasty rose to power in the early 1800s Oman controlled territory in India, Pakistan, and Africa (Zanzibar). When Sultan Said bin Sultan died in 1856, though, he split the African and Arabian territories between his two sons, contributing to an economic decline further affected by British pressure to end slave and arms trading (slavery was finally outlawed in the country in 1970). Oman limped along in the first few decades of the 20^th century as a Trucial State to the British Empire, with economic concessions to Britain largely tying its hands in terms of independent economic or political policy.

In 1938, Sultan Said bin Taimur (father to the current Sultan) managed to take back control of the interior from a series of religious Imams who had arisen to power, yet in all other respects he led the country into even sharper decline. Refusing to spend government revenues or borrow money in order to contribute to economic development, bin Taimur led a country that remained a feudal backwater even as neighboring Gulf state populations surged ahead in terms of literacy, life expectancy, and overall welfare. By the late 1960s, a communist insurgency had broken out in the Dhofar region, even while the Sultan retreated into his palace in Salalah and refused to hear all but the most pressing requests of his ministers, even as he forbade them from acting without his approval. With rebellion spreading, Taimur’s son, Qaboos, stepped into the growing power vacuum with British assistance and seized control of the country in a 1970 coup. With Iranian and Egyptian help in quelling lingering dissidents, the Sultan immediately embarked on a grand scheme to modernize and develop the country, embarking on the first of many five-year plans. Starting with fledgling agencies in health care, education and infrastructure development, growing oil revenues helped to lift the country out of poverty. Sultan Qaboos re-initiated formal diplomatic relations with numerous countries, starting with the Arab nations, and received a good deal of planning and management assistance from the British, who have clearly left their mark across the Gulf (it doesn’t hurt that the Sultan was educated at the British military academy of Sandhurst).

Oil revenues helped sustain development through the early 1980s, with major infrastructure projects transforming the Dhofar region (birthplace of the Sultan’s mother) and Muscat, though a worldwide fall in oil prices brought plans for development in the coastal and interior regions to a halt. Meanwhile the Sultan and his ministers carried out a carefully-managed balancing act for their foreign policy, managing to maintain good relations with Western nations, Egypt, Iraq, the Gulf nations, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even the Soviet Union. The 90s saw accelerated industrialization, mainly in support of petroleum extraction and Liquid Natural Gas exports, even as the number of Omanis holding degrees of higher education shot up. The elected council, known as the Shura, grew out of an earlier national assembly and steadily garnered more influence in government affairs, though severely limited to commenting on social and economic policy, without legislative powers. Recent protests in regions around Sohar (near Muscat) and the Dhofar region have discussed an expanded legislative body as part of their demands, along with allegations of corruption (and gaining undue profits from the country’s expanded wealth) and calls for more job opportunities.

Still, the Sultanate enjoys a stability that made these protests, significant as they were, merely a serious development in the country rather than the full-blown crises/revolutions/uprisings/protests seen elsewhere. The vast majority of people here really do love Sultan Qaboos, and he certainly deserves the lion’s share of credit for the country’s rapid development over the past four decades. On an international level, the sultanate also fares well compared to its neighbors; though a conservative country Oman has none of the reactionary hyper-conservatism that traps Saudi Arabia in the Middle Ages, nor are its people quite as aloof as some of their Gulf neighbors (speaking generally, of course). Labor laws are more strictly enforced, with immigrant workers still subject to exploitation on occasion but more able to redress their concerns, while the country is a regional leader in pioneering new water conservation techniques, spearheading environmental causes, and confronting social ills such as drug addiction and discrimination against people with disabilities. The major lingering worry, though, is what will come next – the Sultan has no children, and though the Royal Family has its noteworthy members they largely stay out of the limelight, making it hard to tell who might appear next on the scene. The Sultan personally holds the title to a number of higher posts in government – he is the supreme ruler, the Minister of Defense, the Prime Minister, along with holding a slew of other titles. It is hard to imagine anybody coming close to what the sultan has managed to accomplish, and his loss will be felt throughout the Omani government.

Prologue

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

• Thomas Alva Edison

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

• Nikola Tesla

Prologue

There once was (and still is, to the best of my knowledge), a kingdom named Cyrcadia, though the term “kingdom” tends to conjure up a quaint little village in the mountains dominated by a picturesque Bavarian castle overloaded with crenellations and fortifications and stained glass windows and flying buttresses, or vast stretches of desert or steppe that somehow manage to conceal a series of glittering palaces and tidy settlements.¹ In this case, Cyrcadia was filed as a kingdom owing to the technicality of having a king about the place (or occasionally a queen), rather than possessing any innate royal qualities. It was a nation large enough to be worth invading but not so large that it regularly thought of invading other lands. It had its fair share of mountains, plains, and steppes, gorges, even a small desert to the south, though most of the glittering palaces had long since been converted to art museums or government offices. Cyrcadia did a bustling trade in banking, international trading, industrial technology and, in one of those strange quirks, small baked goods (just thought of a Cyrcadian glazed muffin was said to make mouths water in anticipation).

The kingdom had once been a lot closer to the hamlet-and-castle variety so favored by story books (at least in the region around Cyrcadia – the steppe-and-desert variety played a bigger part in children’s literature further south), right up to the fateful Republican Intervention of 1674. At that point, a group of the more successful merchants and traders in the area, pleased with their growing wealth and power, but wary of unimpeded monarchic power, decided to band together in attempt to get control of state policy-making – a pre-emptive measure, if you will. After all, even if you get some say in running domestic affairs, it doesn’t much help your global trading network if the king goes and sets off an International Incident over something so hard to fix a price tag to as national honor.² After conferring among themselves, a delegation quietly spoke with some senior members of the nation’s military, with much of the discussion consisting of a philosophical discourse as to whether allegiance was truly owed to the king personally or the nation as currently personified by the king, not to mention a brief presentation on the benefits of a regular salary not subject to divine decree.

Not long afterwards, representatives from each of the leading trades, along with a few quick-on-the-uptake peasants to give the whole thing a rather inclusive feel, approached the king in his drawing room³ and presented him with a near fait accompli. The king, for his part, had received a decent practical education in negotiation, and knew when to fold. An accomplished poker player, he also knew the difference between folding and leaving the game. Arguing that the symbolic importance of the monarchy provided a valuable boost for the national psyche, he managed to secure a comfortable stipend on the condition that he occupied himself with tame, symbolic activities, like making speeches, slashing through red ribbons with a ceremonial sword, or lending his physical appearance to local currency and official documentation. In addition, the king realized he should retain some stake in the developing economy, and, an avid inventor, he casually suggested that the Royal Family be granted soliciting and licensing rights for the development of new inventions within newly-constitutionalised Kingdom of Cyrcadia. Pleased at having things go over so easily, the merchants agreed.

And so, time rolled by. Trade and industry rose and fell, economic sectors expanded and contracted, the occasional border skirmish blossomed into a full trade war or wilted into a mere exchange of threatening letters. The Royal Family, more a business firm than a tradition at this point, began downsizing its royal holdings, selling off the sixth and seventh sets of dinner silver and quietly leasing some of the better-placed real estate to build up a sizeable endowment fund for the new family pastime – the Royal Patent Office. It is no exaggeration to say that the more noteworthy technological triumphs over the years began with a bright young adventurer gaining a temporary monopoly over his or her creation through a Royal Patent. The best inventions came with decent financial compensation attached, supporting noteworthy tinkers through years of productive development.

And the buildings climbed higher, and carts started to move faster and soon began to move, shakily, by themselves, and factories moved from water wheels to fiery, belching steam engines. And eventually we reach the day where our story begins…

Where Our Story Begins

Marco Carver awoke to the sound of thunder, partly out of anticipation and partly due to the hand-made amplifier which caused the sound to echo twice around the room. Still, even in the face of a raging inferno, the attraction of sleeping just a few seconds longer is fully able to hold its own; as a physical force, it lies somewhere between magnetism and the interaction of polar molecules. Then a flash of lightning, heralding more thunder, lit up the bedroom.

The title of “bedroom” was loosely applied, at best. Beyond the four corners of the bed, the place was more of a workshop, with benches nearly covered by scraps of metal and ingeniously crafted glass beakers and tubes, shelves filled with murky-colored jars of complex chemicals⁴, and a coat rack bearing all manner of heavy jackets, leather aprons, gloves augmented by steel exoskeletons and a baroque pair of iron-rimmed goggles. One wall sported a chalkboard filled with a spidery web of calculations, notes and diagrams, all linked together by some unseen filament of deep thought, and all but incomprehensible to the casual observer. Dashed lines, cramped letters and scrawled numbers shimmered against the black background with an eerie bluish-white in the lightning’s gaze.

The lightning was finally enough to rouse Marco from sleep. Hurling the covers aside, he swung his thin frame over the side of the bed, jamming his feet into a pair of boots that appeared not so much stitched together as riveted together before taking a few groggy steps forward. Behind him, deprived of his weight, the bed swung upwards, folding against the wall into a carefully-constructed niche, while in its place yet another workbench popped up. All manner of schematics were tacked out across its surface the underside of the bed, now a part of the wall. A small bell attached to a corner jingled, reminding Marco to spin on his heel and examine his plans for a moment. Time was of the essence, of course, but that didn’t preclude double checking in order to avoid wasting the opportunity, as had happened during the near-disaster back in late fall⁵. He plastered his sooty, unkempt hair into place as he flipped through the soiled and stained blueprints.

Marco was an inventor, though he hadn’t quite earned the capital letter that let the descriptor function as a true title. He was approaching his late 20s, the point when most inventors of the realm either struck it rich or gave up and went into consulting work for large engineering firms in one of the regional capitals. He wasn’t quite ready to retire yet, though he’d received a few attractive offers from a contact with an industrial chemicals plant in upper Voral. He still lived of the proceeds of a patent from a few years back, the so-called Miracle Match^tm.⁶ The idea came from attending his nephew’s birthday party, where the child’s mother had played a trick by decorating the cake with candles that re-lit themselves no matter how many times his nephew had blown them out. Later, while trying to light a cigarette at the station in a brisk wind, the idea had hit him like an express train – why not combine the candles with matches? Through a period of intense research and development, during which few members of the outside world caught even a glimpse of him, he finally overcame the obstacle of having the match re-light itself even after it had been stubbed out, after having reduced a sizeable portion of his wardrobe to a smoking pile of ash.

The matches had become an instant, if modest, success after he’d presented them at the Royal Patent Office in the capital of Cyrc.⁷ While the proceeds from the patent licensing were certainly not enough to retire on, it was enough to keep his bank acocunts healthy while he worked his way through some other, minor, niche inventions, like a cake mixer that automatically added eggs and other ingredients or gloves that gripped things like glue without actually sticking. Still, as he finished up his double-checking and threw a brown, stained coat over his workman’s clothes, he couldn’t help thinking that this would be the invention to him over the top, to let him add his name to the list of great Inventors of the kingdom, and provide him with enough of a stipend to tinker away without concern for commercial applicability.

The challenge, as had been announced at RPO information booths across the country, was to create a substance of great destructive power that could be easily, if somewhat carefully, transported. In addition to the possibility of lucrative contracts in the mining, defense, and urban demolition industries, this invention was important enough to carry with it an RPO grant, enough to comfortably support an inventor and a decent-sized staff for a good many years. Marco longed for a personal staff⁸, which was generally regarded as the feature that divided the mad scientist, hyped up on a few too many fumes, from that well-regarded Pillar of the Community, the Innovative Entrepreneur.

He moved out of the room and headed over to the spiral stairs that led down from his loft of a room into the cavern of a workshop that occupied the shell of a two-story home. A fire had burned out most of the interior years ago, but as external structure was still sound he’d purchased the property for a modest sum with the initial royalties from the Miracle Match royalty. Perched along one of the ridges that semi-circled the town of Landon, one of the more far-flung of the kingdom’s far-flung settlements, its windows occasionally showed a panorama of the village as he walked down the stairs, whenever the lightning flashed over the roofs and chimneys, cobbled streets and town squares below. The rain pounded against the roof as the frame of the old building twisted and strained in the wind, accompanied by the occasional ping of a nail working its way out and falling to the stone basement floor below.

His bedroom was built into the attic, one of the few additions he’d made since moving in, as the rest of the lab was one gaping chasm of space, and quite drafty. He was reminded of this as he pulled his coat tighter around him, reaching the bottom of the stairs and moving to begin inserting vials of chemicals into the machine. Like most inventors of his socio-economic status, Marco was able to afford electrically-powered equipment yet still found a home-sized electric dynamo beyond his reach. The array of equipment before him sprawled its complicated mass of glass containers and piping out over most of the basement floor, extended in places to the upper ceiling. It was filled with capacitors and beakers and condensers and seemingly superfluous wiring, yet the whole thing looked towards one, solitary copper cable that rose from its midst like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds. For Marco, like most inventors of his socio-economic class, powered his experiments with lightning.⁹

…

However, Marco was not the only one preparing for that dark and stormy night. Further around the same ridge, in a bungalow obscured by the trees, an exquisitely dressed young woman was carefully putting the finishing touches on a mass of motors and gears and linkages that was complex enough to give a mechanical engineer a headache. Her maroon peacoat extended down to the midst of her thighs, with stylized thread working its way around the collar of her chocolate-brown shirt, then down to the cuffs that poked out of the coat’s sleeves. Tan pants ran gracefully down her legs until they overlaid the tops of trim workboots. The name embossed on the heels was Stela Addison, and, unbeknownst to Marco, Stela was pursuing the exact same patent. She moved like a figure made of high-tension cables, all wound within a quarter-turn of their breaking point.

A graduate of the Royal Academy of Engineering, she had built up a decent supply of funds working for the Army’s engineer corps as a consultant while completing graduate studies¹⁰. Following graduation, she found her higher degree temporarily worthless in the capital due to an influx of skilled refugees from a troubled neighboring republic, and so had moved out to the relatively remote reaches of Landon to pursue work until market forces moved her potential wages back to their earlier equilibrium point.¹¹ With her income drying up due to lack of demand in the sleepy provincial town, she was convinced that the “Blast Patent”¹² would be her ticket work at any of the major engineering firms. She had embarked on the quest whole-heartedly, throwing the remains of her bank account into the project.

Unlike Marco, she had not been awoken by the thunder, although this was because she had not actually slept; when consumed by an idea, she was fueled as much by sheer excitement as by near-fatal dosages of caffeine, dispensed from the industrial-looking coffee maker in her kitchen. The kitchen itself was a complex operation of rivets and sliding levers, suggesting that everything up to and including the kitchen sink could be collapsed into a very small area if more floor space were needed. Referring to a schematic on the wall, she calibrated a few of several dozen dials on the side of the machine. The contraption resembled the twisted, child-devouring step-brother of a fairground carousel, with hundreds of small vials taking the place of the horses and idle gyroscopes taking the place of the ornate trim.

“That should do it,” she muttered to herself.

Lacking any specific training in chemistry, she had hit upon the idea of brute-forcing the problem. Her machine would combine thousands of different samples known for their explosive properties (and several hundred that weren’t) in minute quantities, varying things ever so slightly each time until a test ignition was powerful enough to flip the switch that engaged the drive chain which swapped the whole thing into production mode, bringing together the right quantities for a presentable batch. Beautiful, she thought to herself. Simple mechanics at work – easy enough to let the machine do the heavy lifting for you, in a manner of speaking.

Satisfied that all of her calculations and settings were correct, she headed over to where a sturdy metal wheel jutted out of a wall, connected to the copper spike that ran up one corner of the bungalow and up through a well-sealed hole to the roof. As she turned the wheel, the lightening rod began to extend up, telescoping as it plunged through the roof and kept on going, higher and higher into the buffeting winds above.