Canon from Nakhl Fort's upper battlements pounded attackers during a tribal conflict in 1769 that badly damaged the citadel, located some 50 miles west of Muscat. When visiting the fort in 1876, S.B. Miles, a British political agent in Muscat, wrote of being "confronted by the massive ramparts of the fortress, which...immediately began to fire a salute from a battery of 12-pounder iron guns, the sound of which reverberated sharply from the rocky walls of the glen." (Photograph by Nicolas Sapieha)