Puzzle #24 — 2026-08-12
The answer was Oman. The scene was built from Ibri. Difficulty: hard.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- A flat gravel plain with a bare rock range along one horizon and nothing green outside the walls.
- Date palms grow in walled plots; the houses behind their own high plain walls are flat-roofed.
- The road is very wide and very well made for the traffic on it, and most vehicles are white four-wheel drives.
- The script is cursive and written right to left, beside Latin.
- The country occupies the south-eastern corner of its peninsula.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | date palms in walled plots, bare gravel plain between them, nothing green outside the walls |
|---|---|
| terrain | a flat gravel plain with a bare rock range standing along one horizon |
| architecture | low flat-roofed concrete houses behind high plain walls, a mosque with a short plain minaret |
| roadside | right-hand traffic, a very wide well-made road for the traffic on it, white four-wheel drives, gravel shoulders |
| signage | a cursive script written right to left, beside Latin (never rendered legibly) |
| light | harsh desert light, heat haze on the road |
Where this actually is
Ibri, Oman sits at 23.23, 56.52 — see Ibri, Oman on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was one of the roughly third pulled for a second look at image quality and difficulty. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.