The Borders We Share: A New Way to Fix a Broken World
Section 6: Cities and Rocks (Posts 31–36)
Post 34: Laputa’s Towers, Dubai’s Fringe: Sandstone Stakes
Enigma of the Vertical Frontier
The desert dawn is a blade of white light, and on Tuesday, 2 December 2025, at exactly 10:15 am, it strikes two impossible silhouettes at once.
High above the clouds, Laputa turns in its slow, eternal circle. Its adamantine disc, four-and-a-half kilometres wide, glitters with fresh wounds where the levitation crystals have been torn from the underside. Below, the rockfalls that follow each extraction have already begun their long, lethal descent toward the continent of Balnibarbi, where villages wake to the sound of stone on tile roofs and the smell of crushed olive groves.
Four hundred kilometres to the south-east, the border between the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman climbs the Hajar Mountains like a pale scar. It loops through the surreal double enclave of Madha–Nahwa, slips beneath the pipelines that carry Omani water to Emirati date farms, and finally vanishes into the dunes that feed Dubai’s concrete mixers. The line on the map is quiet, almost polite. The reality is vertical: water drawn from mountain aquifers, rock quarried from Omani wadis, labour imported from half the planet, and towers that rise so high they cast shadows across three emirates at once.
I stand on the half-finished observation deck of the Jebel Jais Sky Tower, 1,680 metres above the Gulf of Oman, wind screaming through the scaffolding. With me are the companions the series has carried since Sherwood Forest: Sherlock Holmes, coat flapping like a torn flag; Dr. Watson, notebook already gritty with gypsum; King Arthur, silent, Excalibur sheathed but humming the way it does when injustice is near. And with us, the living voices of both realms.
From Laputa descend King Laputian himself, lowered for the first time in his reign on a golden cable, knees trembling under the unfamiliar weight of gravity, and Balnibarbi, barefoot philosopher who has spent a lifetime staring up at the island that eclipsed his sun. From the Emirati side strides Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, sleeves rolled, eyes fixed on a horizon that refuses to stay still. From the Omani side walks Hamed al-Ghabri, elder of a mountain village whose wells have been running dry since the date farms of Al Ain began drinking deeper. From the labour camps come Mohammed Yusuf, Pakistani steel-fixer who has not held his daughter in four years; Maria Santos, Filipino nurse who treats heat-stroke cases at noon; and Daniel Kipchoge, Kenyan security guard who salutes flags he will never call his own.
This is Post 34, the fourth stride in Section 6. We have left Jerusalem’s golden stones, Berlin’s concrete ghosts, Ruritania’s granite scars. Now the series climbs the strangest frontier of all: one that exists in the sky and one that exists in the sand, yet both governed by the same cruel arithmetic—those who live highest owe their altitude to those who are paid least and excluded most completely.
The Parallel Pathologies
Laputa is Jonathan Swift’s satire made solid. Every year the royal academy extracts 42,000 tonnes of levitation crystal. The operation is flawless in its geometry and catastrophic in its consequences. Rockfalls bury Balnibarbi villages; terraces that have fed families for centuries slide into ravines; the ground economy loses the equivalent of eight million Gulf dinars in crops, homes, and hope. The scholars record the stellar positions with exquisite precision yet remain cheerfully unaware that their island is bleeding the continent beneath them. The king has never descended. Most astronomers have never seen soil except as a smudge on the wrong end of a telescope.
The UAE–Oman border, by contrast, is one of the quietest frontiers on earth, settled by patient diplomacy between Sheikh Zayed and Sultan Qaboos, finalised in stages between 1955 and 2008. Trucks cross daily carrying crushed rock from Omani quarries to Dubai’s batching plants; water pipelines snake from Omani aquifers to Emirati farms; the border posts are little more than shaded booths and a wave. Yet the same quiet hides a vertical violence. Nine hundred thousand workers—88 % of Dubai’s population—live on wages that average AED 1,100 per month. In summer 2025, 3,812 of them were hospitalised for heat-related illness. Omani villages in the Hajar foothills have watched their groundwater levels fall 41 % since 2018. The towers rise, the island floats, and the people who make both possible remain invisible in the official photographs.
My Sovereignty Conflicts (2017) frames both disputes as classic triadic sovereignty conflicts: two privileged claimants (Laputian crown and academy; Emirati citizens) exercising control over a populated third territory (Balnibarbi; expatriate majority) whose constitutive population is treated as disposable infrastructure. The island needs the crystals to stay aloft; the city needs the water and the labour to keep growing. In both cases the third element—those who actually do the work and bear the cost—are excluded from the sovereignty they sustain.
The Evidence Gathered in Dust and Crystal
Holmes refuses to choose one realm over the other. He spends three days suspended beneath Laputa on a rope ladder, coat flapping like a broken sail, timing rockfalls and collecting crystal dust in glass vials. He spends the next three days riding aggregate trucks from Fujairah quarries to Jebel Ali and the three nights after that in a Sonapur labour camp, measuring temperatures inside metal-walled rooms at 2 a.m. When he returns, his eyes are red from wind and sun, and his verdict is a single sentence: “The higher the structure, the deeper the theft from those beneath it—whether the theft is measured in falling stones or falling water tables.”
Watson’s notebook swells to a hundred pages of parallel columns: rockfall incidents in Balnibarbi this year—3,812; heat-related hospitalisations in UAE construction camps this summer—3,812. Families displaced by Laputa’s mining—2,900; Omani villages facing critical water shortages—2,900 hectares of former farmland now too dry to plant. Scholars who have touched real soil in living memory—zero; workers who have seen their children in the last four years—statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Arthur listens without comment, then traces the UAE–Oman border on a satellite photograph with one finger and Laputa’s drifting path with the other. The two lines never touch, yet they cast the same shadow.
Two Conclaves, One Covenant
We hold the gatherings separately, because the realms are proud and the wounds are raw, but the solutions that emerge are mirror images.
First, on the lowest terrace Laputa has ever voluntarily descended to—still eight hundred metres above the earth, but lower than any king has stood in four centuries—King Laputian meets Balnibarbi and the Chief Astronomer. Arthur lays Excalibur flat on a slab of adamant. I open Chapter 6 (Sovereignty Conflicts, 2017) and read aloud the four principles of egalitarian shared sovereignty: consensus, efficiency, fair input-to-output ratio, and the equilibrium proviso that obliges the strong to raise the weak.
The king’s hand trembles when he signs the Descent Accord: crystal extraction capped at ten percent of sustainable yield; thirty percent of all future surplus dedicated to permanent descent corridors and grounded universities; a Higher Court with equal Balnibarbi representation and veto power over any project that increases shadow or rockfall risk. When Balnibarbi places his calloused palm on the document, the king flinches at the reality of another human’s weight.
The next day, on the windswept deck of the Jebel Jais Sky Tower, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid meets the Omani Minister of Water Resources, labour representatives, and camp doctors. Arthur lays Excalibur flat a second time. I read the same four principles. The Mountain-to-Horizon Accord is signed before the sun reaches its zenith: joint UAE–Oman water and aggregate commission with binding conservation caps; thirty percent of the municipal surcharge on new towers redirected into a residency pathway—ten continuous years of contribution equals permanent residency; a Higher Court seated alternately in Al Ain and Muscat with expatriate judges; every new tower over three hundred metres required to display, in six languages, the source of its water, its stone, and the names of the workers who built it.
Two documents, two realms, one covenant.
Murmurs of the Shamal
The desert wind still howls its ancient warnings. Crystals will fracture, aquifers will fall, visas will expire, people will overheat. Yet beneath the howl, new sounds have begun to travel.
In Balnibarbi, the first descent lift—built with surplus crystal revenue—touches earth for the first time in December 2025. A young astronomer steps out, removes his slippers, and presses bare feet into soil that is warm and real. In the Hajar foothills, a pipeline that once carried water only westward now branches eastward to refill village wells. In a Sonapur labour camp, a Pakistani steel-fixer receives a passport stamped “Permanent Resident – UAE” and, for the first time in four years, allows himself to cry.
Peace along these parallel frontiers is not a ceremony in marble halls. It is a crystal left in the ground so a terrace may bloom again, a pipeline that returns what it takes, a tower whose shadow irrigates instead of withers, a king who learns the weight of his own footsteps, a worker who discovers that the skyline finally has room for his name.
Why This Resonates in You
You have stood on the 124th floor and felt the building sway gently in the wind. You have driven from Dubai to Muscat on a highway so smooth you never noticed you crossed a border. You have posted a photograph of the skyline at sunset with the caption “living the dream.”
You have probably never met the man who poured the concrete at forty-nine degrees, the farmer whose well ran dry so the concrete could be mixed, the scholar who discovered that the stars are beautiful but the earth is home, or the king who learned that gravity is heavier than any crown.
The Borders We Share does not ask you to tear the towers down or to ground the island. It asks only that the next tower be built with doors wide enough, and the next descent gentle enough, that everyone who holds the sky up may one day walk beneath it as a citizen and not as a ghost.
Next Tuesday we descend again—new stones, new skies. I remain, as always, Dr. Jorge (X: @DrJorge_World) and https://drjorge.world
Trails to Wander:
• Sovereignty Conflicts (2017).
• Territorial Disputes (2020).
• Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023).
• Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025).
NOTE:
New posts every Tuesday.
PREVIOUS POSTS:
Post 33: Ruritania’s Walls, Berlin’s Ghost: Past as Present
NEXT POSTS:
Section 6: Cities and Rocks (Posts 31–36)
35, Utopia’s Gates, Hebron’s Split: Ideal Cities Clash
36, Holmes’ London, Belfast’s Line: Fog of Peace
AUTHOR’S SAMPLE PEER-REVIEWED ACADEMIC RESEARCH (FREE OPEN ACCESS):
State Sovereignty: Concept and Conceptions (OPEN ACCESS) (IJSL 2024)
AUTHOR’S PUBLISHED WORK AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE VIA:
Tuesday 25th November 2025
Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez
X (formerly, Twitter): https://x.com/DrJorge_World
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