Ian Skeet on Muscat & Oman: The End of an Era

Muscat exhales history. You can sense it in the heavy hot air of summer and the light bright winter mornings, in the dusty alleys and the large crumbling square houses and it’s stored up, it must be, in some concentrated distillation in the forts of Merani and Jalali. A whiff is mixed with the breeze daily, but, like the widow’s cruse, it will not run out, not at least until the forts, and the houses, and the walls and the towers are torn down to make way for blocks of flats and offices and off-street parking.

The forts are most people’s first, and usually most lasting, image of Muscat, an image that is almost tactile, so solid are they. Coming by road up and over the last pass from Muttrah they are angled and merged almost into one, heavy and grey over the faded blue and dirty white wash of the huddled houses. From the sea they stand square in front of you, like two enormous bastions built for a suspension bridge across the harbour; but in place of the bridge there is the front line of the town, dominated by the Sultan’s palace and the British Consulate General, both gazing straight out to sea. Very proper too, for much of the history stored up in those forts and pervading the town came in ships from that same postcard blue sea, glittering peacefully in the sunshine of 1967.