Frankincense is for remembrance

So, this is my 'Oman binge' part of the week /month. The 'Oman binge' is that part of the week/month when I cannot stop thinking about the place and very much resembles those moments of brilliantly unadulterated longing that strikes when thoughts of a beloved paramour come unbidden. And of late, the one thing that absolutely satisfies the craving short of actually packing my bags and hopping on a plane is the prose of Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
My greatest regret when it comes to this man is that I have been introduced so late to his work. It is my belief that he is the only person ( man or woman) who has captured the magic of the country. I absolutely adore this man. There, I said it.Take a look at this article that appeared in the Saudi Aramco World journal . Sample these lines :

Source: here

The diesel-engined Asad al-Bahr (Lion of the Sea), bound for Hasik with a cargo of rice, sugar, cooking oil and hay, did not inspire such daydreams. But the monsters of old were still at large: A few meters to starboard, an enormous tail appeared and began slowly thrashing the waves. Both whale and Lion of the Sea, though, were dwarfed by the cliffs of Jabal Samhan, beneath which we were passing. Forming a sheer wall, they trailed clouds like the scarves of an exotic dancer. I recalled a Greek description of the Frankincense Land, "mountainous and forbidding, wrapped in thick clouds," and I remembered those other monsters of old, first reported by Herodotus in the fifth century bc: vicious flying snakes that guarded the frankincense groves. Herodotus is often criticized for an over-fertile imagination, but the Dhofari scholar Sa'id al-Ma'shani has noted the existence of a rock drawing from the region which shows a man's leg and a snake. Possibly, he suggests, this is an ancient "No Trespassing" sign. 


Or these :


Back home, I lit some Hasiki frankincense, a going-away present from Shaykh Musallam. Whatever the substance of their other claims, the old pharmacists were right on one point: Frankincense stimulates the memory. For, as the smoke is released, so too is a stream of recollections: early-morning frankincense meeting the iodine tang of low tide, rustlings in the reedbeds of Wadi Hadbaram, a cow-byre at twilight; and older recollections, of censers in childhood churches and, finally of course, the Salalah suq, where Radiyyah sits among her stock, a benign commingler of smells.

From here