A train from Dammam to Riyadh
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By Nam Sang-so
Dammam is the capital of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia located along the Arabian Gulf overlooking the island of Bahrain Kingdom. It’s a beautiful city surrounded by Arabian deserts and a dark green sea. Riyadh, garden in Arabic, is the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia situated in the center of the Arabian Peninsula.
The single rail called the Dammam-Riyadh Line connects the desert cities Dammam, Abqaiq, Hofuf and Riyadh spanning 449 km, about the same distance between Seoul and Busan. It takes four and a half hours of a comfortable ride. It’s a sandy yet picturesque route that takes passengers through the desert dunes, which is the very east-west route their ancestor caravans had hiked with camels taking several days under the scorching sun and cool night gazing up at the stars for their desert navigation. The Arabian Desert has been the home to the Bedouin, a nomadic civilization, for over 3,000 years.
The train cars are brightly decorated with Islamic touches and seats were comfortably designed and the air was cool. It had a buffet car offering a variety of Saudi food with refreshments. I’ve had three architectural design services in Dammam, Jubail and Riyadh in the peak years when Korean contractors had been busy with various construction projects.
My Saudi partner architect named Hassam was sitting next to me trying to be a tour guide in Arabic accented English. He wore the traditional white ankle length garment with a ghutrah, traditional white headdress covering his head and neck with a black round weight on it. It was a fitting dress in the arid climate to provide protection from direct sun exposure. Hassam, which meant a sword in Arabic, asked me about my religion and I said I don’t have any. “You don’t believe in god or Allah? You must be a pig,” he announced unhesitatingly. “At least you won’t eat me,” I said. “That’s true,” Hassam agreed.
The dining car had a separate zone for women and children’s sitting without partitioning wall and it was a good chance for me to steal a glance to see how in their Niqab veil fully covering their mouth and nose would eat and drink. Ladies didn’t remove their veil but opened a square opening like a small window to expose part of the face. It was that.
They were the daughters of the Bedouin and probably one of the most elegant ladies in the world and the black camouflage silk dress further impulses non-Muslim man like me into a mysterious thought about the true feminine beauty. It was far more captivating than the women wearing beach-wear-like dresses in the streets of Seoul, or kimono in Japan.
At Hofuf station in the middle of the desert the train stopped for over a half hour. The sand removing locomotive was in operation to remove the sand that covered tracks by wind. All the passengers sat quietly, showing no annoyance at all. They knew how to wait. I looked out the window on the dry sandy land far reaching to the horizon, in reminiscence of my own country scenes; the tree covered green mountains, the rivers full of clean water, the orchards, the rice fields, and the impatient brethren.
While the dry land appears inhospitable, many wildlife live off of a variety of plants which quickly absorb moisture from a once a year spring shower. The lives of desert plants and animals knew how to be patient and wait for the next rain under the scoring sand in silence, unaware of black oil flowing under them.
The writer is a retired architect whose email address is sangsonam@gmail.com.