It was a bright afternoon in 2012 when we sailed into the Musandam Peninsula — the small bit of land that juts out in the north of Oman — at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.

At the time, the name meant little to us and we did not yet know the significance it would acquire in the years ahead. What drew us instead was the landscape itself. After a day and a half of sailing past the flat desert coastline from Dubai, mountain cliffs suddenly rose straight out of the deep indigo sea.

The waters of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea seemed to meet uneasily there. The currents were restless, the shifts beneath the boat sudden and hard to anticipate. In sheltered inlets, the water turned clear green, revealing stones, coral fragments and swaying seaweed below the surface.

There was something ancient about that strait. For centuries, it has carried merchants, conquerors, fishermen, smugglers, pilgrims, fleets of empires and oil tankers through its narrow passage. Yet the mountains remained indifferent to all of them. They stood over the water with the same hard stillness with which they must once have watched Arab dhows leave on the monsoon winds for India and East Africa.

Nadeem Khalid recounts a sailing........

© Dawn (Magazines)