In the deserts of the Al Murrah

The Jafurah is a medium-sized coastal desert. Its sands occupy more than 40,000 km2 and have a low rainfall that does not exceed 100 mm per year. At its edges there are several cities of regular size, Damman, Al Hassa, Al Jubayl, Al Hofuf, Qatif, Dhahran and several smaller towns and oases.
The Al Murrah Bedouin of Saudi Arabia travel the margins of the great deserts Jafurah and Rub'al Khali raising herds of camels and flocks of goats, and trading their by-products.
The Rub'al Khali or "The Empty Quarter" is much larger. It is one of the most extensive sandy deserts in the world (around half a million square kilometers). The rainfall is practically nil and it is totally uninhabited.
If we add to the Rub'al Khali, the dune fields of the Jafurah and other bodies of wind arenas such as the narrow Dahna and the Nordic Great Nafud, the Arab deserts exceed 750,000 km2. The Al Murrah call them simply "al-Rimal" (the sands).
These Bedouins are one of the most traditional tribes of the Arabian peninsula. They move continuously from well to well and from oasis to oasis seeking the necessary water and the best pastures for their flocks. They are famous because they can follow traces at great distances, identifying the traces of a person or animal among many hundreds. Their testimonies experts in that matter are admitted in the Islamic courts of Saudi Arabia as valid probatory elements. The members of this singular Arab lineage move normally in small groups forming camps with 3 or 4 typical black carps. The size of the groups is determined by the extent of grazing areas available. In general, the water stocks in the desert are sufficient for the population of the nomadic herders but an appropriate distribution is required so as not to deplete local forage plants. The Al Murrah were studied by the American anthropologist Donald Cole in his well-known book " The Nomads of the Nomads "(Nomads of the nomads).
I had the opportunity to share a few days with Donald Cole in a motor home that the company we worked in at that time had installed in the middle of the desert about 10 or 15 kilometers from the city of Qal'at Bishah in the valleys of the Arab Assir.
Cole, who until recently (2011) was a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt (and still teaches there), told me some of his experiences with the Al Murrah in the tours he had done with them some years before, which I found them of singular interest and they allowed me to understand this Bedouin tribe some years later. During my subsequent stay in the Eastern Province of Arabia I had several opportunities to visit or be with the Al Murrah in their extensive domains.
On one occasion, with my son Diego and some colleagues from the University of Petroleum and Minerals (today called King Fahd University) we traveled to the town of Yabrin, an oasis on the edge of the Jafurah desert with the Rub'al Khali, in full territory of the nomads. We arrived at Yabrin from Al Hofuf in two trucks after crossing about two hundred kilometers of desert with the intention of loading fuel.
Yabrin is a small town of scattered houses and orchards of date palms, which at that time housed some two or three hundred people. It served as a base for the Bedouin Al Murrah when they returned from their exits to the desert.
The gas station, located at the entrance to the town, was a box that was closed, with a gas tank that was at the top of a small rocky mound from which a hose was coming down.
We approached the town and when we saw a man walking we asked him how it was done to load gasoline.
He replied in Arabic: "We have to ask for permission from the Emir" and then he pointed to a building in the distance saying: "That is the Emir's house." When we arrived at the place we were met by a Bedouin wearing the typical tunic, a long beard and a kind of cutlass at the waist.
The man invited us to come and sit on some carpets that covered the floor of a larger construction. He then offered and served us the 'traditional qahwa96. In the same building there were other people in small groups talking, drinking 'qahwa or smoking shisha97 in the water pipes.
We waited a long time drinking the repeated wells of qahwa that man served us. After about two or three hours the emir appeared. He was a young man of no more than 25 years old, who sat down with us and asked us where we were going and warned us about the dangers of traveling in the Rub'al Khali. Finally, he authorized the loading of fuel and we were able to undertake the withdrawal.
On another occasion we went from Dhahran to the plains of Wadi Dawasir on the northern edge of Rub'al Khali where one of the main trade and grazing routes of the Al Murrah is located.
Wadi Dawasir is a gigantic ancient river that still sporadically forms with the flow of Wadis Ranyah, Tathlith and Bishah that descend from the mountains of the Hejaz and the Asir in western Arabia. These wadis flow once or twice a year and rarely reach their respective estuaries in the Wadi Dawasir. For that reason, and for all purposes, it can be said that Wadi Dawasir is a dry river. (keep going)
From "Chronicles of Human Peripecy", Danilo Antón Piriguazú Ediciones