The Soul of
Kuwaiti Turtles

Imagine an island. An island you can only imagine.

It is round, 200m at its widest, surrounded by a coral reef, with open sea all around. It rises less than a meter above the water and, barely visible, dies down again, into the sea. It is all sand. There is not a single plant on the island, or a patch of soil, or a drop of water. It takes a human being — if there were one here — about 10 minutes to walk along its beach, around the entire island. It is more than 50ºC in the summer, and can reach 0ºC in the winter.

If you were at its center, you would look around you and see nothing but the sea, and the sky, and the sea lapping at the beach and the sea lapping at the sky. And if you were lying on its beach, with the little coral-soaked waves at your feet and you looked up at the sky and realized you were on nothing more than a few grains of sand on the sea, that a one-meter high wave swelling over the ocean — and there are bigger waves in the ocean — would wash over the island. If you imagined this on the shore, and the drop and rise of the tide, the sea lowering and swelling around you, and you just those 80cm above (this is when you realize the difference between land and sea and life and death and the monumental and the banal is measured in centimeters and millimeters). When you imagine all this, and see yourself balanced so finely between sky and sea and nothing around you, and nothing but the tide, this is when you feel the vertigo and grab at the sand and look away from the sea and sky (except there isn’t anywhere else to look).

Imagine this. Imagine this island between heaven and earth. Imagine magic. It is nowhere and yet, if you were on it, it could be a world in itself, the center of yours. It is where everything comes together.

This island is real. It is called Qaru. I am on it. I will tell you its story.

They say that in the Seventies there were so many turtles coming up for air around Qaru that the coast guard men camping on its beach couldn’t sleep at night with the sound of all that breathing. Have you ever heard a turtle breathe? It is prehistoric, ageless. It is the sound of the ocean.

Tonight, it is only me coming up for air off Qaru, with its pier pointing to Kuwait and the lights of Saudi Arabia somewhere in the distance and Iran over my shoulder. I can see it up ahead, see its coast guard station and tower and Kuwaiti flag, and see it beneath, its coral reef like a protective ring, softening the currents that come in from the north, the energy that erodes the coral and deposits it on the shallow sea bed, over the southern edge of the reef, and this mass of eroded coral, this sand, this became Qaru.

Of course this happened over thousands of years, and you may argue that I have not seen it, not seen many of the things that I will tell you in this book. But I will argue that my kind has not changed significantly in the last 100mn years. That’s one hundred million years. We have been in these waters that long. Humans in their present form have been around 80,000 years. And one thousand thousands make a million.

I am a hawksbill turtle named Dareen. I am small — so small, in fact, that the humans who tagged me on the beach of Qaru when I came there to nest thought I was a juvenile. That was in the first few hours of May 25, a long time ago, and in those four hours of work — they clipped a flipper tag on me, took a DNA sample and stuck a satellite transmitter on my shell — I bit, scratched and generally gave them hell. And all this while a sandstorm raged over the island. It was a monumental experience, and at the end they were so impressed they named me after one of their colleagues, a girl of misleadingly small dimensions. Because Dareen Almojil isn’t just a young lady — she is the driving force behind a lot of efforts to preserve the environment in Kuwait.

And like my namesake, I followed a different path. I got back in the water — this was around 4am — and swam away. And over the next five months, I swam up and down the northern coast of Saudi Arabia. While other turtles might float for days, drifting with the current, I swam with purpose, as fast as I could, which is what explains my lean dimensions. I burn calories on movement, while others get fat getting comfortable.

I was born on Qaru, born in a nest of sand dug by my mother in the dark, the eggs laid 50cm deep and then buried, and I crawled through the sand and into the motherless night and past ghost crabs and sleeping bridled terns and the odds that were stacked up against me: only one in a thousand turtle hatchlings will survive and breed. And I was the one. And I keep the promise that all turtles make, a blood oath, that we will return to the same beach we hatched from, no matter how many decades or seas we have to cross. Some things are not open to argument.

Earlier tonight I felt it, that warm feeling on my shell: around 200km north, two of the greatest rivers of the world, the Euphrates and the Tigris, or Dujlat wal Furat, were emptying themselves into the Arabian Gulf, spilling their silt and nutrients into one massive waterway, the Shatt al Arab, and then into the sea. And while humans value the Gulf for its oil, the real treasure is what the rivers bring.

Forget oil. Oil is burned, and will be forgotten. Treasure is of mud, silt, minerals, nutrients: the energy of life that hosted the civilizations of the fertile crescent, the largest date palm forest in the world, the Marsh Arabs and the marine life of the seas, all drawn deeper into the Gulf towards the mouth of the rivers. But we turtles have been here before the great civilizations. We have seen them rise and fall, watched as the price of our meat and shells and lives has gone up and dropped, as Babylon was built on the banks of the Euphrates, built and fell and was forgotten, as the Marsh Arabs, the Arab al Ahwar, were pursued by Saddam Hussein, who drained the marshes and burned their reed houses, as the oil was fought over and shipped and spilled and burned. I feel all this, and more.

We have seen it all, seen it through unflinching eyes — a turtle opens and closes its eyes, but never blinks — seen men dynamite the reef and dynamite the fish right out of the water. We have seen nets and traps and hooks, and been caught and trapped and hooked, and lived and died and swum free, and followed the reflection of the moon on the sea as we broke through our eggs. And we have cried.

We have seen oysters, and the pearl divers, and the death of the pearl industry. Kuwait made the first movie in the Gulf, and it made it on the ocean, and the relationship Kuwaitis had with it. And in 1972, TV sets across Kuwait were flickering in black and white, while Bas Ya Bahr, The Cruel Sea, premiered. It starts with a shot of the trap they call the hadra, and the ebb and flow of the tide, and the sun on the water. You can tell it is blazing hot. And the legend across the screen reads, ‘Man was not meant to be defeated unless destroyed.’

And through the flicker on the old TV, two men are mending fishing nets, and they’re black with the sun, and you can hear the sound of the waves.

“What’re you looking at?”

“You can’t see what I see.”

“I’m bored with looking.”

“I’m watching that wave. Look! It’s smiling at me. Because I know its secrets. What is behind that smile? Behind that smile lie greed, miserliness and obstinacy.”

“But the sea is generous. Entire Kuwait is dependent on the sea.”

“It’s generous to the weak and patient. You wait hours and hours. It may give you a fish or two. But to those who are like me — and who earn their living by hard work — the sea is obstinate. It fights — breaks and deprives them of everything.”

In the movie, Moussad, a poor man, is in love with Nora, a girl already promised to someone else from a rich family. Moussad begs his father, an old and broken pearl diver, to allow him to go on the boats, but his father, knowing the cruelty of the sea, is dead against it. But Moussad is going anyway. The sea can be cruel, but it also holds the promise for ordinary men to make their fortunes.

Moussad: “I love you Nora.”

Nora: “You love the sea more than me.”

Moussad: “You know of our disaster… This is the fate of all Kuwaiti people. We’ve to go to the sea. To fish pearls.”

And then, later, Moussad says: “All people are equal. A poor man can become rich.”

But while the sea can break a man and be a great leveler, men are not created equal. And there’s nothing like a little pearl diving boat off the coast of Kuwait, where the men are racked with debt and scurvy, stuck to each other and the sea, sweating and hoping for salvation, out on the water for four and a half months from June till September, nothing like this to show you the hopes and lives and fears and pain and strengths and failures of men.

And the captain of the boat was the nokhtha: from the Persian na khoda, or no God. Because, at sea, he was the god of the boat. You did as he said. The pearl divers would take a loan from the nokhtha before they started, and pay it back at the end of the season, and keep their share of the profits above this initial amount as earnings from the trip. But they started out indebted, and that’s a terrible thing to be, and if they didn’t make enough and were in debt at the end they’d do the next trip with the nokhtha. And so it went on.

We saw them dive up to 20m deep, holding their breaths for more than five minutes at a stretch. They’d go down attached to a rope, and collect oysters from the sea floor, putting them into a bag around their necks. When they were ready they’d tug at the rope and be pulled back onto the boat by the seeb, a strong man who stood on the boat, monitoring the khumbar, the rope made from the husk of the date palm.

But it was always going to end in tragedy, of course. Decades ago, Moussad’s mother had a dream. In the movie she tells her husband, when he was young and strong, “I was running towards the sea in order to see you. It was at the end of the pearl fishing season. The ships arrived — and I saw you holding a mother of pearl. I approached to take it. Then a most horrible thing interfered. And I couldn’t reach the pearl. I tried to approach you but I couldn’t. Then I saw that monster swallow the pearl. I heard you calling me. But I couldn’t see you. You said ‘Latifa I’ve brought you the pearl. Don’t let it take the pearl.’ I wanted to take the pearl from the monster that was between you and me. But it tries to swallow me.”

On land, the women were gathering and wailing for the men to come back safely, milling at the shore and looking out to sea, the cruel sea, looking for the triangular sails made from Indian Malabar cotton. And they set fire to the palm frond and threw it in the water, screaming “Burn the sea!”, to make the sea give up the men, and then they grabbed the cat by the scruff of its mangy neck and dunked it in the surf — “Drown the cat!” — and if it squealed in a particular tone they’d know the men were coming. And all the while there were the drums and the wailing and sweating and you loved the sea and hated it.

The cat lived but the pearl industry of the Gulf died when the Japanese started farming oysters, but I guess it didn’t matter any more: the Kuwaitis had oil. And yet, even though Kuwait grew rich on the world’s fifth largest oil reserves and the Kuwaitis no longer had to suffer the cruelties of the sea, or ever had to bother with being in debt to a boat captain, they still clung on to the water, as it ran through their fingers. Today, their fortunes independent of it, they’re free to put it up on a pedestal, revere the pearl diving that disappeared a half century ago and make the sea part of their national identity.

Why the sea? Because, as Ali Alhafez, a young Kuwaiti who now volunteers to save turtles says, there is nothing else. “Where will we go?” Where, indeed? Kuwait is a tiny country slapped against the sea, with its back to desert. Its hinterland is desert too: flat and dry, just open space and oilfields and highways and the ruins from the Iraqi invasion.

Ali’s family comes from the Najd, in Saudi Arabia, but its exact origins have been lost in time. A lot of people here came to this spot on the sea from the interiors of the desert, much before lines were drawn into the sand to make shapes for countries. And such people from the desert called the settlement kout, which is a word for a fortress built near the water. The plural of kout is akwat, and Kuwait owes its etymology to such words.

Ali escapes Kuwait City and heads to Oshairij, an area of shallow water, abandoned wooden boats and mud flats, and the tide is receding fast and the mudskippers are flipping over themselves and a bunch of young men are sitting on a carpet by an old souped-up Jeep Cherokee with an oud that doesn’t play. And all you can hear is the flip of mudskippers that the Persians called bushlambu, the lazy ones, because they’re so lazy they don’t follow the sea as it recedes.

But the mudskippers are really special, because they’re more than soft amphibious creatures that flap around in the goo. They’re evolution frozen in time, they’re sea creatures that began to adapt to land, and stayed there for some reason. And when humans look at mudskippers, they’re looking at themselves from a long time ago.

The bushlambu got it right, staying in the slime at the edge of water and land. To humans this is just muck but what they don’t see is that all life is born out of slime, of soft wetness. Even the human fetus. And at the water’s edge, where plants first started to colonize land millions of years ago, and shed their leaves, and died, and enriched the mud, there was this constant process of decomposition, and birth and death and rebirth, the cycle of life. So the bushlambu are living in one of the most active environments for reproduction on the earth. It’s the same with the wetlands and silt and nutrients of the Shatt al Arab, pumping their life into the Arabian Gulf, pumping blood into the veins of the great Arab al Ahwar. What would the Gulf be without this? Hot and salty.

But it is hot, hot in summer and cold in winters. Kuwait is a small country, and flat, and in the middle of everything else, and the winds blow across from all over, bringing dust, and the north Shamal wind, and thunderstorms, and the cold from Siberia. The winds and cultures of the world blow freely over Kuwait. It has the most free press of the Arabian Gulf states, the most liberated women (Lulwa al Qatami burned her abaya here in the Sixties) and, even though Dubai gets more attention these days, the best shopping.

And those summers. They burned Ali’s father, back in the days when the oil was barely flowing and there was no air-conditioning. In those days the houses were built open: you could see all over everything in old Kuwait, and they’d sleep on the roof to catch a bit of breeze and escape the heat. Abdullah Essa Alhafez was born in 1950, and was interested in the houses when he was around ten years old, and he saved everything in his mind: the wood they got from India, the teak or saaj for doors, the wood they called the ahmer and the seesam for the furniture. The walls were thick, strengthened with rocks they’d bring from the seashore. Rocks and bits of shell and coral and sand. They were always enveloped by the sea, and it filtered through their lives.

Abdullah remembered all of this, studied industrial drawing and started working in the Ahmedi neighborhood in 1976. Now, more than six decades later, he surrounds himself with models of the old houses he builds for himself in his studio, models made of wood and plaster and sand and toy men, built with the finest details only a memory could keep alive.

It is late evening when the men of the extended family park oversized SUVs outside and gather at Abdullah’s dewaniyah, a typically Kuwaiti traditional gathering of men of a family or associates, and a term that can also be used for the reception hall in which it is held. And there they sat, in crisp white dishdashas in a room of soft pink and yellow, sitting according to family hierarchy, with the model houses in the middle of the room as decoration.

There was the captain Khalid Khalifa Alrashed, Adil Khalifa Alrashed, Ahmad Essa Alhafez, Mahmoud Essa Alhafez and Ali and his father, and they talked of the old days and the pearl diving, and of the old families of Kuwait and their traditional occupations: the Hasawi from Hasa in Saudi Arabia, the Qandiri water carriers, the Hadad blacksmiths, Najjar carpenters, Qalaf boat builders, the Failakawi from Failaka island, Jazzaf fish sellers, Sayagh gold jewelers, the Safar who sold secondhand metal and scrap, Halwaji halwa makers, the Sayrafi who dealt with money, the pearl trading Tawash, Qasab butchers, Qafas cage makers and Gattan cotton traders.

And after there was dinner, and it could be anything now but traditionally there would be machboos with meat and rice, the shark or yaryoor in a stew called myadam cooked by those Kuwaitis who migrated from Persia, qabbot with brown flour and meat that they feed women who’ve just given birth, harees with meat and water and wheat stirred and ground over the fire over and over again for a couple of hours. And margook, with its flat discs of flour and black seeds drowned in a thick gravy of vegetables and sometimes meat. And gemat, white fluffy balls of flour or dough perhaps, deep fried until crusty on the outside and then soaked in syrup for dessert. And a larger version, but flatter and fluffier, called sab al gafsha, translating into ‘a drop of spoon.’

And they ate till they could eat no more, for the Bedouin, the Bedu, know the value of food, know where to find it and how to catch it and how to cook it. And how to eat it, with their right hands, pressing the rice from India against their four fingers, pressing it with their thumb and then hooking the thumb behind the compressed rice and gravy and bits of fish, and pushing it into the mouth. If you do it well it is an art.

But there was no filling one’s stomach on the pearl diving boats. A diver kept his stomach empty or he wouldn’t be able to go that deep: just a few dates, water and tea. The only meal he had was dinner: rice and dehen adani, the oil made from sheep fat, and fish if they caught any. Such a diet often led to scurvy.

But Ali is ordering a home delivery for dinner from a restaurant called Bas Ya Bahr, and everyone sits on the wall to wall carpet and eats over plates and a plastic sheet, sits under the massive HDTV in the room smelling faintly of frankincense and with a football match on, and talk of how much fun it would be if they had caught the fish themselves.

Every fisherman’s dream, says Ali, is made up of kingfish, hammour and subayti: hard to catch, expensive and tasty.

The subayti is a very, very smart fish. And the aan, which is usually found in the shallows, is very choosy about the kind of bait it likes. It sometimes likes musran, or chicken guts, but might also prefer zuri, which is the juvenile of the fish called maed. “He likes quiet places,” says Ali. “Like me.”

And the fishing. “A line 60 is perfect for the aan. A hammour, or grouper, can weigh up to 40kg, and needs a line of 150. He lives under the rocks, and if you allow him to dive with your line till there you won’t be able to get him out, so you have to reel him in as quick as possible.

“Fishing teaches you a lot. It teaches you patience. Because sometimes you get nothing. And you should always fish alone.

“I know my spots. The water, the movement, the tide. The old people always fish by themselves. But it’s not because they like being alone. It’s because everyone has his favorite spots, his secrets. They never tell anyone their secrets. The best spots are where the fish like to mate, or feed, or lay their eggs. These are the most valuable secrets.”

And then, “The old men believe that if they don’t catch anything they have to throw off their clothes and dive into the sea to wash off their bad luck.”

Every Kuwaiti has a story about the sea, even members of parliament. Khalid al Wasmi cracks open haab gara’a between his teeth, sipping at water in a glass with fake gold lining in a massive room of empty seats, and he cracked another pumpkin seed and talked of his traps, back in the days when there was no parliament, and barely any country. But there were borders before the countries, and a covered border, like a veil, was a hedar. And when you talked of where a sheikh sat you would put a hadrat before his name, the last point that could not be crossed: hadra means restriction.

And so the Awazim — the tribe that ran away from the desert and into the sea — called their traps hadras, and they transplanted them from the sand into the water, using reeds from the Ahwar, and began catching fish instead of rabbits.

And each hadra has an owner, who names it, and he names each part of his hadra, and Khalid al Wasmi named his after the people who worked for him: Suleiman, David, Suheil, Mohay and Sharfo.

And while they looked out for us on Qaru, we were crawling over the island of Umm al Maradim, the pile of rocks in Arabic, crawling over this island of tangled bushes and coast guard customs station and bridled terns that dived into you if you were a human and hunted you if you were a turtle hatchling, while you crawled out of your egg and crawled out of the sand and gasped your first gasp of muggy air and headed, half blind and all instinct toward the ocean because you knew, just as your ancestor had a hundred million years ago, that the sea was life, just as the Arab al Ahwar and the Awazim knew.

There are some truths that are half truths and they can be twisted by man, but there are others that are universal truths and they hold true whether you are a turtle or a human being. And in a place like Qaru or Maradim, where there is everything and nothing there is no place for anything but the truth.

And on Qaru, the girl I was named after was far out over the reef, suspended in crystal clear water, while the tide tugged her towards Saudi Arabia. But Dareen had soaked in the seas of Kuwait more than anyone else, soaked in it till it was in her hair and skin and in her soul, until it shone out of her through her now-permanent tan.

“I’ve always been attracted to the sea, and felt comfortable around it, with its sound, its look. And my father was always on it, and always talked of it, and he values his Boston Whaler above all else (the engine isn’t working now, and he’s heartbroken). But I was also attracted to its mystery, wondering what was under it. With the desert everything is visual: it’s beautiful but not mysterious.”

But the sea has many secrets, and one of them is a strange shadow that can turn a human heart to jelly and send Hollywood into screams of ecstasy and even a turtle would blink, if it could. That shadow is the monster of The Cruel Sea, the nightmare of Moussad’s mother Latifa, the shark in English and yaryoor in Arabic. It takes a very special person to understand a shark.

It is late at night and Dareen is sitting on the pier in Qaru, the pier that seems longer than the island, and it’s dark around but the waters beneath catch the coast guard floodlights and you can see right through to the forest of coral and there are always needle fish, but Dareen is looking for Saud the barracuda, and talking of sharks.

“I was afraid of them at first. I thought it would be the most unfair of battles to meet one underwater because I’d be totally out of my element.” But two things changed: Dareen started spending time with sharks, and the sea became her element. She began studying the population genetics of the Galapagos sharks in Australia, and will pursue her doctorate studying the evolution of sharks.

Why evolution? “Sharks have survived 400mn years with very little change. So it’s very important to understand how they’ve been so successful and this understanding is very relevant for conservation. This leads to related subjects like the general theories of evolution, natural selection, and the evolution of the immune system.

“The shark immune system is very similar to that of a human infant in that it can adapt to anything it might encounter. Humans lose this ability as they grow up. And sharks are especially immune to cancer.

“I would like to study the great hammerhead shark in Kuwait. It’s endangered and Kuwait could become a nursery for them. The great hammerhead is called bumudriga: bu from abu meaning father and mudriga meaning hammer.

“The great hammerhead is endangered because there is a booming Chinese middle class that now has the money for its fin that they consider a delicacy. It has a very long fin with lots of cartilage, which increases its value substantially.

“You find bullsharks near the delta of the Dujlat wal Furat. We call them kosa and they like freshwater, and might swim several kilometers up-river.

“But when you start killing sharks you’re messing with everything else too. Sharks control the population of other fish.”

It’s the same for everything, whether you start exterminating turtles or whales or bluefin tuna or coral: we’re all intertwined in this sea of balances and imbalances, us and all the life floating and swimming and sinking, for better or for worse. We’re all part of the same sea.

And Johne Donne, the metaphysical poet, wrote in 1624: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

But men are always looking for islands. They look for Qaru to escape, build gated communities or villas or apartments or clubs or psychological walls — these are all islands. But we’re all bits and pieces of dust and DNA and atoms and carbon and energy, and perhaps one day we’ll even find our ghostly reflections in anti-matter somewhere in this universe. And we’ve all come, even the driest of landlubbers, from the sea. Humans were once something in the sea. If you look deep enough, who knows? Maybe you’ll find a bit of turtle in them, or shark, or coral, and then they became something like a mudskipper and then something like a reptile and then one of those somethings started walking upright and growing opposable thumbs and silicon chips, and evolved so far out that when it dips its head into the water and looks into an eye of a hawksbill turtle it looks at it in wonder, or greed, or fear, or revulsion, or love, but never in recognition. So much water has flowed past us these millions of years, and so much blood has been spilt, that man doesn’t even recognize his past.

Leonardo da Vinci said, “In time and with water, everything changes.” He’d obviously never met a turtle. We have endured, and we never forget.

This is an eternal truth, which we know somewhere between egg yolk and turtle hatchling, and it is emblazoned in every molecule of our existence as we crack open our shells and wiggle through the sand and head to the ocean. It is a truth born out of millions of years, and out of loneliness and pain and desperation (character is made out of such things), for turtle hatchlings are born lonely, without their mother. Even crocodiles are tender mothers, but turtles have to be tougher.

And in that truth and tragedy and miracle of life, in those few minutes once we break through our eggs on the beach, those minutes that will determine whether we live or die, we know exactly where we are and where the moon is and where the water is and what we must do. Turtle hatchlings don’t bumble up beaches or turn their backs to the water or wander into MacDonald’s (unless the lights distract us). They head to the water, and if they survive man, man-made obstacles, birds, ghost crabs and anything else scuttling across the sand, they stay in the sea their entire lives, swimming across oceans, looking for food, sleeping, coming up for air. Indeed, they never ever set foot on dry land again, except for the pregnant females that come, briefly, to lay their eggs, back to the same beach they were born on perhaps 30 years ago. For a human this seems a miracle; for us it is just normal. We do not forget.

And under each miracle and emotion, under the soul of things, there is a reason. And I will tell you a secret of the sea which I think is so simple and logical, yet so magical and one that changes everything (Dareen knows this, because I have heard her whisper it): marine organisms have to be much more concentrated with chemical substances because anything secreted or produced underwater would get diluted.

Do you understand the significance of this? Do you see that even though the sea covers the larger percentage of the Earth’s surface, its inhabitants have to burn with a life so much stronger? And will you forgive me for insisting on the soul of the sea?

Dareen says, “This concentration is especially true for those that do not move and have alternative defense mechanisms based on chemical substances, like coral, tunicates and, especially, sponges. And it means that marine life in general is a much richer medium to study as a supply for natural remedies.”

Dareen discovered tunicates as a child, as she made her first forays into Kuwaiti waters. “They look like invertebrates but are actually vertebrates: in the larval stage they have a notocord, representing the spinal cord.” Tunicates are filter feeders and need to be attached to something, and Dareen found them stuck to the buoys moored off the beaches of Kuwait City. And that’s how her discovery of life in the seas began.

But if there were tunicates stuck to the pier of Failaka I wouldn’t know, because the waters turn brown around this island, right in the sediment-rich currents from the Dujlat wal Furat, water that marine scientists would describe as having a high turbidity. Amateurs would just call it muddy.

Failaka is not for turtles — it is for men and quad bikes and tourists and dune buggies and restaurants, speed breakers and dust and ruins. Wave after wave of ruins.

Ruins of the ancient Dilmuns, who built temples to the sun and vanished, and the ancient Greeks, who thought the island looked like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell after it melted the wax that held his feathers together (only a Greek would see an Icarus in an island), and named the island after him, and ruins of the Kuwaitis, whose villas were mortared and machine-gunned by Saddam, until the oldest continuously inhabited part of Kuwait was abandoned.

Maybe the Greeks were right. There are lessons to be learnt. If you reach too far out you fall harder. I turn away, a shudder rippling under my carapace, and turn south, towards Qaru.

But I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker. And shall I quote Eliot to you? Would you let a turtle repeat overheard lines snatched from under a faraway pier, whispered by a girl with long black hair?

‘Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’

Far away, Dareen feels it too, and shudders.

We have lived on the edge, and lived free, and after a hundred million years we have been brought to our knees (if only turtles had knees, or could blink) by a species that has over-reached itself. And yet it is man that has identified near-extinct species and flipper tags us and attaches satellite transmitters to our shells on Qaru. And in that irony lies the question of balance, development and preservation, and in that equation there lies a metaphor for the larger balances of the sea and life itself, and so it goes on and on and on, as I turn, once again, and the universe turns with me.

for the Kuwait Turtle Conservation Project

with The Scientific Center Kuwait

and the Kuwait Coast Guard

Interviews through Dareen Almojil and Ali A Alhafez

Resources by Nancy Papathanasopoulou

Kuwait, May 2011