Sir Bani Yas Island is an island of 87 square kilometres in the Gulf off the Al Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, the top of a salt dome pushed up through the rock, planted with millions of trees and closed to hunters by Sheikh Zayed in the 1970s, and now grazed by one of the largest herds of Arabian oryx in the world in a wildlife park that is driven through on safari from the island's resorts. The oryx was extinct in the wild by 1972, hunted out across Arabia, and the herds bred here from a handful of animals were the source of those released back into the deserts of the mainland, so that in the heat of the day they gather under the acacia canopies, scimitar horns catching the light and white coats glaring against the gravel, with gazelles, giraffes and cheetahs brought in beside them; a crossing of the island runs through several landscapes in a few miles, open gravel plains, belts of planted forest and then the bare rocky hills of the salt dome at its centre, whose summit gives the whole island and the sea. The island is not a sandbank but a layer of ancient salt that has been slowly pushed upward, folding the rock above it into the hills.
On open ground near the coast low excavated walls trace a church, cells, a kitchen and courtyard houses, the only Christian monastery found in the Emirates, built in the seventh century and kept by monks who stayed on after Islam reached the Gulf, until the eighth century. On the sheltered side kayaks slip through narrow channels cut into the mangroves, shallow and glassy in the early morning, where greater flamingos and the waders of the Eurasian flyway winter on the salt flats from November to March, when the coast rather than the safari plain holds the show. Sir Bani Yas is an island a ruler turned into an ark, and the oryx came back from it.