Failaka is a low island twenty kilometres off Kuwait City, and it carries two sets of ruins four thousand years apart. The older one is right on the southwest shore, a few steps from the water: low mudbrick and stone walls, the footprints of two Greek temples, the corner towers of a fort. This was Ikaros, the outpost Alexander's officers founded and gave a Greek name. In front of one of those temples a stele came out of the sand in 1960, and it is not a monument but an instruction. Its forty-four lines are a Seleucid officer's letter: move the temple of Artemis, give land and tax relief to settlers willing to farm it, hold games with athletic and musical contests. It was a Greek civic festival about as far from the Aegean as that world ever went. Long after the Greeks had gone, and well after Islam arrived, Christian monks were still living at the island's centre, and nobody knew until archaeologists dug there.
The other ruin is one generation old. The concrete houses of Al-Zawr stand as their owners left them in the week of the 1990 invasion: walls pitted with shrapnel, window frames blown out, a dead tree filling a doorway. Nothing has been cleared, and you can walk into them. The village faces open water, so when you stand in it the sun goes down on an unbroken horizon. Along the road a wooden fishing boat lies high and dry against a bullet-scarred wall, sand banked over its hull. The island lived off that water for centuries; when the people were taken off, the boats stayed. Camels are still kept on the open ground between the ruins and the beach, calves among them, penned on red dirt with the Gulf glinting behind the rails as you pass. And if you come in late March, the emptied village is the busiest ground on the island. Small birds crossing the Arabian desert drop exhausted into the overgrown gardens behind those houses, and for a few weeks the place nobody lives in is full of birdsong.