Bahrain

THE GIANT houbara stabbed its beak at the sandy ground as though pecking, then raised its head back up and lowered it again and again. The giant zebra-striped image of the bird had been painted as a decoration on an oil pump. Actually, it was as much a piece of nostalgia as a New England weather vane. The bird itself, a wild migratory chicken that could outrun a Saluki dog on the ground, no longer existed in Arabia. It had been hunted to extinction by the Gulf Arabs. Now, Arabian falconers had to travel to Morocco and Pakistan to maintain the traditions of the hunt.

The bird was but one of a bobbing zoo of brightly painted bustards and horses and giraffes that decorated the small oil field outside Manama. Against the glowing horizon, the silhouette of the BAPCO refinery looked like the gantry of Cape Canaveral. Electric lights strung along the oil derricks twinkled like Christmas decorations in the tangerine twilight. What with all the alien shapes and the strange-colored sky, he might have been in a space port on another planet. As the taxi turned from the Muharraq Causeway into traffic-jammed Government Road, the Scorpion could see beyond the oil field to the gold and turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf, called the Arabian Gulf in this part of the world. Beyond the molten surface of the sea lay the dark shadow of the Arabian mainland.

The sheshbesh players had already settled in the green oasis of a traffic circle. Insects swirled thick as rain around the sodium arc lights, as the players banged their counters in the greenish glare, oblivious to the hurricane of evening traffic swirling around them.

The humid Gulf heat draped itself around him like a steaming wet cloak. The whiny quarter-tones of an Egyptian love song blared from the taxi’s radio, the driver’s head bobbing like an oil pump in time to the music.

The taxi itself was painted in an arabesque of colors, like a psychedelic dream gone wild, so that it was impossible to say what model it had been originally. The seats were red velvet; gold tassels hung over the windows and the flush interior resembled a fin de siècle brothel. The singer on the radio moaned that she yearned for him in the long empty nights and the Scorpion grinned. It was good to hear Arabic again. It was almost like coming home.

The driver said something, but he missed it in the blare of the radio and the cars, the drivers pounding on their horns as if it was a contest to see who could make the most noise.

“You want the fondok Gulf Hotel, asayid?” the driver repeated, turning his head and barely missing sideswiping a pink and white Cadillac aggressively driven by a young Bahraini with a peach-fuzz moustache.

“Aiwa, min fadlak,” the Scorpion said.