I woke to the roar of total silence.
Issa, an Omani bedouin of the Al-Maashani tribe, made tea as the orange-lit theatrics of sunrise began behind us. It was just him, me and the soundless dunes of the Empty Quarter.
Dinner had been Issa's too - chopped camel meat fried in camel fat, chewy and delicious, washed down with ginger tea.
Afterwards, we had chit-chatted companionably in the dark, staring upwards as the Milky Way slid across a pinprick sky, like the arch above Wembley Stadium.
We were camped in what the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes had called "a place of wind and spiders". In his day it was known as Fasad, or "decay".
The spot had since been euphemistically renamed Al-Hashman, meaning wholesome - but with its broken walls and foully undrinkable spring water, that struck me as an oddly mirthless piece of spin.
There is a lot of that in Oman these days, as the country paddles ever harder to maintain its trademark swan-like serenity.
The Arab Spring has come knocking. Last month a local journalist was jailed, accused of slander - the most high-profile of, so far, 42 court cases related to issues of public protest. » | Matthew Teller, BBC News, Oman | Thursday, November 08, 2012
