On Muscat: Range

As I waded through the rooftop pool on the 16th floor of my hotel in Al Khuwair, I was captivated by the evening amber draping across the mountains. Forming a perimeter around Muscat, the Al Hajar Range coexists with this city of nearly two million. From up here, I could trace the concentric roads, dotted with small buildings, all a nondescript hue of beige, until my eyes met with these limestone massifs. Obscuring the horizon in a series of jagged, overlapping shadows, I imagined them as barbed wire—a natural barrier to the rugged wilderness that lay past. My gaze shifted beside me to a young kid, shouting something in Russian, to which his parents on the sundeck paused, shuffling in their bag for a towel. I turned back to the wild expanse of Arabia I had found so foreign, but the mountains had relaxed their demeanor. The sun softened their peaks now, and I realized how serene it had all been: a golden stretch of sky above, a land to be explored beyond, and me.