The well where Abdallah’s father punished him becomes a metaphor for the character’s struggles to come to terms with the relationship with his father. As the only character able to provide a first-person narrative perspective, the image of the well appears time and time again in Abdallah’s thoughts. It is teased out gradually, the image appearing before the explanation. Eventually, when Abdallah gives the full story as to how he came to be dangled in the well, it has taken on an almost nightmarish quality. The image of the well itself is fraught with emotional descriptions. Whenever the well appears in Abdallah’s mind, he recalls how it affected his sensory perception of the world.

From the open, expansive desert which makes up the majority of Oman’s local ecology, Abdallah suddenly found himself trapped in a dank, dark, claustrophobic space from which there was no escape. The walls closed in on each side, the cold water caught his breath and made him fear for his life. The son of a rich merchant, Abdallah wanted for little as a child, but the harshness of his father’s punitive measures is striking, leaving such a deeply traumatic impression on the boy that he was never able to truly escape that moment.