Laila al-Nudbi's eyes smile through her veil. It's a very soft sell. 'This is the best, sir. This is finest quality, sir. This will make you smell better. Life will also taste better.' The eyes laugh again, her hands holding out a small pile of semi-opaque pebbles. An incense burner and a cup of aromatic khawa smokes on the counter beside her.
Shopkeeper Nudbi's job is supplying luxury incense, perfumes and essential oils. Wearing her black abaya overdress, she works every day at Abu Mohd, in the Al-Husu market in Salalah, at the southernmost tip of the Sultanate of Oman. Like nearly everyone else in the market, Nudbi stocks oblong frankincense tears, which are precious and necessary commodities on the Arabian peninsula.
The busy market, in narrow, sandy alleys amid the town's coconut groves, is full of 'well-priced' gold and silver, turbans, kummah caps, sandals, copper coffee pots, ceremonial daggers and tailors' shops offering fittings for gentlemen's robes, women's thobes and traditional velvet dishdashas (a long, shirt-like garment). But the shops with the baskets, jars and polythene bags of frankincense tears are the most common. Frankincense is good for business. Slabs of the stuff are on everyone's shopping list, whether local or tourist.
The Dhofar region is 90 minutes by plane, or 12 hours and 1,000km by road, from Oman's capital, Muscat. Although there is also a long tradition of fishing and dhow-building here, the area has been known for centuries for its production of frankincense. The 'frankincense trail', a 30km-long, 20km-wide coastal belt plus the mountains close to the Yemeni border, receives the khareef, or monsoon, from June to September. Mist blankets the region in an impenetrable 'pea-souper' fog, creating perfect conditions for growing frankincense trees. For four months, Dhofar becomes the coldest place in the Arabic world ... and then becomes the greenest.
In the ancient frankincense valley of Wadi Dayqah, 50km from Salalah, guide Naser Sulaiman al-Mani demonstrates that he knows his stuff. 'Everyone gets a frankincense lesson when they come to Salalah,' he says. 'One tree grows to no more than five metres. Its roots grow four metres down into wadis, or water crossings,' he says. 'It takes only 14 months for a tree to become mature and a good tree can produce up to 10kg of frankincense a year for up to 30 years.'
Frankincense, or olibanum, is a gum resin obtained from certain species of Boswellia tree. The trees are found in central India and the Coromandel Coast in southeast India, as well as in Ethiopia. But the Boswellia carterii grows only in Somalia, in east Africa, around Hadramaut in Yemen and in Dhofar. It is believed to produce the best frankincense, which, despite its exotic biblical associations and starring role as one of the three original Christmas gifts, is bought to fumigate houses and clothes.