It’s a rocky fretwork, an outlandish calligraphy. There is no level ground. In the folds of its cursive script pale green squares stand for gardens, their soil gathered laboriously from miles around and contained by dry-stone walls. Alfalfa one year. The next year, nothing. Musandam is the homeland of the Shihuh, the ichthyophagoi of Ptolemy, who speak Kumzari, a language all their own, and spring from some nameless corner of Central Asia; who are said to bark like dogs after a meal and who, having nowhere else to put them, once buried their dead under their floorboards. Musandam’s coastline is so scooped, so ragged, only a thread of broken rocks attaches the place to the mainland. West of this thread is a deep scoop of all-but-landlocked water called Elphinstone Inlet. In the middle of the inlet, Telegraph Island, so called because from 1864 to 1869 it was the terminus for the Persian Gulf telegraph cable. Signals were received here from Europe and retransmitted along another cable under the Arabian Sea and beyond, across the Indian Ocean, all the way to Calcutta.
