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Bahrain: Beneath the Tree of Life
| Article
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10115 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
4,123 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bangs
Richard Bangs is the author of Island Gods, Whitewater
Adventure, and Riding the Dragon's Back, which won the
Lowell Thomas Award for the best travel book of 1989. He
is the founder of SOBEK Expeditions, an international
travel-adventure company, which has become part of Mt.
Travel-SOBEK. |
"The croak of the raven is not heard,
the lion does not devour, the wolf does not rend the lamb,
the dove does not mourn, there is no window, no sickness,
no old age, no lamentation."
--Anonymous description of Bahrain, third millennium, B.C.
It was a legendary place called Dilmun. The Sumerains, who hailed from what is today southern Iraq, described the island of Dilmun as a Garden of Eden. On this spot in 1932, a steel bit pierced a LAYER OF RENT ERUPTED. The first oil had been discovered in the Middle East and an age had begun.
It was 10:00 at night. I had accepted an invitation to visit Bahrain to explore its tourism potential. I was standing in the immigration hall at the International Airport after twenty hours of flying and the official had just told me there was no visa waiting and no one to meet me.
Great. I was "hidden like a fish in the sea, "as the Sumerians described what is now Bahrain in 2500B.C.I had no names, no phone numbers, just stateside assurances that everything was arranged and I would be a guest of the royal family. After an hour of wandering about asking policemen, passersby, the cleaning staff if they had any advice to no avail, I was idly wondering if this might turn into 1,001 Arabian nightmares.
I decided to call Mohammed Hakki, Anwar Sadat's former press secretary, who had set up the visit. I got through to Washington, D.C., in a snap, and the connection was so clear I thought he was in the next room. He gave me the name of the prime minister's press secretary, Al Sayed, and told me to call him at home. Things were fine, not to worry, he assured me.
Bahrain, about one-sixth the size of Yosemite National Park, is actually an archipelago in the lower end of the Persian, I mean, the Arabian Gulf.(Sunni-ruled Bahrain, because of theological and political differences with Shiite Iran, insists on calling the surrounding waters the Arabian Gulf. Iraq, for the same reasons, does as well.) The archipelago has an inexact number of islands; the count is every changing. By dredging the shallow sea bed, new islands can be created as is seen fit.
Bahrain was a port of call between Mesopotamia and India for thousands of years. Held under
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