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By Root 238 0

saw an Omani woman wearing a tribal half-mask, dressed in a gold-trimmed caftan. With a long stick she was herding a flock of twenty or so black goats, a magnificent sight against the yellow sands. Tribal masks are optional but discouraged by the government, which is aggressively modernizing against the day, not far off, when the oil is gone. Omanis in the eighteenth century controlled the East African coast as far south as Zanzibar, where they added cloves and sugar to the island’s native pepper crop and ran a flourishing spice trade. Omanis also dominated the East African slave trade, specializing, I was told, in Ethiopian women, valued for their beauty, which may explain the Omanis’ often startling good looks. This opulent past colors Oman’s oil-rich present with soft infusions of old colors, textures, and tastes. Even today you can walk along the shore at Salalah, Oman’s southern port, which served the China trade four centuries ago, and find undisturbed shards of centuries-old Chinese blue and white porcelain strewn on the beach, or you might wait in Salalah’s modern airport beside a young Bedouin woman in a birdlike silver half-mask, the silken cuffs of an expensive blouse visible against her hennaed wrists and delicate hands resting on her smart black caftan trimmed in gold coins.

When Judy and I landed at Muscat, after an overnight flight from London, we were puzzled to find that, once we had cleared Immigration and still in our morning jet-lag fog, we were led, without explanation, by an official out to the tarmac, where Frances and a pair of helicopter pilots awaited us under a hot morning sun. As I tried to orient myself, I saw through the shimmering heat a 747 rumbling to a stop on the runway, turning 180 degrees and rumbling back the other way. Frances said, “It’s the Sultan’s. He doesn’t like to use it, but owning a 747 is obligatory for sultans. Our sultan has two of them. The pilots are taking this one out for its morning exercise.”

Still in a daze, we were now in an Omani Air Force helicopter rising into the Jebal Akhdar, the formidable Green Mountain Range that looms over Muscat. The mountains are rugged, steep, sharp-edged, inaccessible, beautiful, menacing. We came to earth on a high meadow. My ears popped as Judy, Frances, and I stepped out of the helicopter and followed the pilots toward a low-slung stone villa painted white, facing a green lawn and a screen of young fruit trees in bloom, against a Magritte-blue sky. I was told that we were at the rest house of the minister of defense in the mountain village of Saiq and were expected for lunch. The air force cook, Frances said, was formidable, envied by the other services. I was now thoroughly disoriented. What brought me around was a glorious display of local fruit—apricots, pomegranates, dates, melon, grapes—on a table under an awning on the tile patio. Lunch with the handsome air force officers was an unctuous chicken curry whose components I could only begin to parse. This was followed by a pit-roasted goat. I glimpsed our chef at the kitchen door, barely five feet in height, with the handlebar mustache of a sergeant major, a broad smile, and a white Nehru cap.

I had eaten roast goat many times in New York’s barrio and in Mexico, where villagers still wrap the quartered animal in banana leaves, tie it in a basket of palm fronds, and bury it overnight in a smoldering fire pit, so that on the following day the spiced meat falls away in caramelized shreds. Our Omani chef followed the same procedures. This fire-pit cookery was probably brought to the New World by the conquistadors, whose Spanish ancestors had themselves been conquered some nine hundred years earlier by Muslim Arabs, whose desert cuisine, along with their genes, had mingled for centuries with those of the Spanish. It is this desert cookery, introduced to the New World by the gold-crazed Spanish as they stumbled toward what is now Kansas, that probably became the ancestor of today’s slow-cooked, spicy barbecue, the brash New World descendant of our Omani chef’s fugue of melted dates,