Qeshm is the largest island in the Persian Gulf, a long strip of desert off the southern coast of Iran, and the shape of it is being pushed up from underneath by salt. Buried layers of rock salt are lighter than the rock above them, so they rise slowly as domes, cracking and lifting the sandstone as they go. Everything strange on the island comes out of that. At Dareh Setaregan, the Star Valley, wind has cut the lifted sandstone into spires and flat-topped towers that deepen to rust-red in the last light. After the sun goes, wind moving through the narrow corridors makes a low moaning that islanders have long put down to spirits. West of there, Chahkooh narrows to a grooved, honey-coloured slit barely wider than your shoulders, with daylight breaking in through the cracks overhead. On its shaded floor are the wells villagers cut to catch the rain, the same rain that sawed the canyon open. On the southwest coast, water has dissolved the Namakdan cave six kilometres into the salt dome itself. You go in by headlamp over a crust that is sharp underfoot, the air faintly of brine, clear salt stalactites overhead.
The north shore is where the island softens. The Hara forest stands in open seawater, and a boat takes you through the tidal channels at first light, when the water is glassy and herons and egrets are stalking between the half-submerged roots; flamingos feed here through the winter. Off the south coast a small boat carries you out toward Hengam Island, past ochre cliffs and quiet coves, where bottlenose dolphins come in to ride the bow wave in the warm shallows. In the villages the roofs carry badgirs, wind towers that cooled the rooms below them long before electricity reached the island. And the forest is a single tree, Avicennia marina, which manages to live in seawater by pushing the salt back out through its own leaves — the same salt that made everything else here.