The Tree of Life is one tree standing by itself in bare desert in southern Bahrain, and it has been there for about four hundred years. There is no other tree in any direction, no surface water, and no shade but its own. The usual explanation is a taproot driven some fifty metres down to groundwater. Nobody can even agree what it is: guides call it a ghaf, the native Arabian tree. The visitor centre and most experts call it a mesquite, which is American and reached the Gulf only in modern times, awkward for a tree said to have started growing in the 1580s. The argument has never been settled.
The name is a story rather than botany: Bahrain was Dilmun, which Sumerian poems describe as a pure land watered by sweet springs, and people have put the Garden of Eden here. Archaeology supports Dilmun and the sweet water; it has never supported Eden. What it did turn up is more interesting: digging beside the trunk in 2010 brought up 500-year-old pottery and the traces of a small settlement. People lived on this mound, and almost certainly for the same reason the tree does: water within reach under the sand. A low wall now keeps visitors off the trunk, close enough for you to read the damage — names gouged into the bark, holes worn at the base, limbs cracked and sagging — with the oil field on the horizon behind it. From a few hundred metres off you see the whole situation: one green mark on an empty pan, the people at its foot reduced to dots. In summer the pan passes forty degrees and the visitor centre is the only shade you can get to. The buses come in the afternoon and go before dark. After they leave, lamps buried in the sand come on around the trunk and you have it to yourself: one tree on a mound, still drinking whatever the village drank.