Snow Storm in the Desert

We flew into malignant magnificence.

But what do I know? In the vast airport, a flu-masked child is briskly herded by a man in white robes. They coast the new Terminal Three like star troop hovercraft above the marble floors.

“We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men.
Leaning together. Headpiece filled with straw.”

To this visitor, this terminal addition to Dubai airport seems a voluminous Vegas temple to the temporal. Squinting at the eye-stabbing glint from a zillion mirrors that bedeck monstrous rows of 100 foot Grecian columns, a thought leaks from my head wound into the refrigerated air. Here lies schizophrenia spawned when Sharia sheikhs met mountains of shekels in the red dragon’s lair. Deep in that phosphorescent pit, whispers wafted above the blackened, oily floor. What contract was signed? The tender for whose soul was secured? But I am culturally inept. Curious. Stupid. I know nothing.

“Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men The stuffed men.”

Lit by a silvery sheen - garish bright like a hot metal disease - I walk through the valley of the shadow of wealth. In this scary city of austerity, we all walk on a desert in a hearse with no name. I am sorry, I know only western clichés. Word play mask my infantile infidel mind. Sheikhs in dish dasha robes wander the echoey halls. Following, floating at head height, come metonymic hints of women. A procession of eyes, pairs of eyes: immutable eyes, framed robed eyes, almond pharaoh eyes, mascara lined eyes. Less is more. Is it? I know nothing.

“Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom”

Cruising the travelator we glide past black-robes and … and … who are these brown, sandblasted faces obscured by leather nose pieces  burnished with gold from Bedouin ritual deep in the desert? Am I lost in a figment of Frank Herbert's mind, on Arrakis in the book Dune, milling with strange creatures whose robes conceal mutant matrix cables intravenously plugged into the spice melange of immortal dreams? Forgive me for my foreign thuggery. I am culturally inept.

“Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises”

We walk through markets – to the gold souk – lots of filthy lucre souk seething with the sweet-talking talents of sweaty merchants gnarled by trade over a thousand years: dark swarthy men from Iraq and Oman and Egypt and Iran who smile black gapped golden grins and nod but the bargain eluded you like grains of sand in the desert wind.

And back home all along the watchtower in the comfort of the all-whirring aircon, the expats live in compounds – some say villas – in a house or a duplex or smallish apartment that costs 132,000 dirham a year.

So divide 300,000 rand by 12 months to see the fiscal paycheck pop of the international fantasy bubble after we were all seduced to the other side by the amicable amir. But was he just another greasy shyster who hunched a humpbacked flourish then grandly swept his jewelled hand backwards to reveal your promised riches? Next we slaved for a pittance on the slopes of the pyramids.

The grass 'seemed' greener, but not this washed out grey like Isis lost hope and burnt it with a paint stripping gun. Here massive desalination plants wolf up trillions of litres of sea water to engulf the gulf courses and lawns and opulent desert gardens in this suckling pig oasis of decadence without the comforting taint of debauchery. But I don't know Sharia Law. I am ignorant. I only have my senses.

“This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand.
Under the twinkle of a fading star.”

The ice of Ski Dubai lies in crystal shards to trip you as you hurtle down a 400 metre slope trying to side-wind brake your breakneck snowboard speed – ay this ain’t powder but as artificial snow goes it ain't half bad.

Like hitting your head against a sauna wall, the twisted oxymoron of "Ski Dubai" is a sucker punch to senses incessantly assailed by alternating extremes, smacked and whacked and teased and tugged by conflict and confusion in this opulent furnace; this blinking oven-baked mirage that veils the true shape but not the piercing sandstorm eyes of the ancient psychotic – a schizoid effigy of brassy greed.  Sorry my master, I know nothing.

I kneel before you, supplicant.
“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms”

'Who turned the heater too high,' mumbles the jetlagged son stumbling through the sweating treacle outside the airport, the 38 degree heat cool for the dawn.

'Who conceived this idiocy,' mumbles the hypocrite father later flying through the freezing air of the ski run, oscillating between adrenaline highs and horror at this mad monument to moronic hubris.

Remove oxy and moron remains, onion layers peeled back to the core truth.

The cuckoo drools and coos and rocks gently in the snowy corner of a bright room. Did you pay 1 billion rand to build this loss-making white elephant in the searing sand? Do you pump the bilge money 24/7 that evaporates in the furnace desert to fuel the energy of gargantuan turbines that suck 50 degree air and convert it into minus five degrees in your huge pleasure dome? What crazy electric ladyland must feed the chattering maw that is this huge terrain of five rugby fields and three ski slopes, a luge run, a four-seat ski lift, a whatnot lift, and a restaurant halfway up that sells Americano coffee for R45 nursed with cold hands on the chilly balcony in your ski suit watching people fall on their arse sixty feet below?

Below the snow you find pipes frozen at many degrees below zero while above, along the walls beneath glittering runway lights, pumps blast 30 tons of artificial blizzard snow into the eerie night air, the only sound their whining whir. Every night, tubed white silence floats earthward in this vast curved dome while outside on the perimeter we is sanded to an immaculate sheen working like Pharaoh’s slaves for a hook-nosed dream and it ain’t fairytales about pretty robes, sumptuous tents and a romantic sailor man named Sinbad.

“Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow”

The thought cracks as I slam across a chunk of ice, dissolving into a sensory wakeup call as the board slips sideways without traction, bounces off the rim and flips as the buckle hooks a piece of orange boundary mesh.

Wham! Eina.

“Ha ha ha ha,” mime muffled smiles stuck like animated stickers on blurred heads that loom behind the double glazed windows of a restaurant overlooking this.

This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.