The Road to Ubar (37 page)

2. "dashed down the mountain...," John Lloyd Stephens,
Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land,
vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), p. 12.

3. 
he was a simple "Jewish Jesuit.
" What a piece of work was Gifford Palgrave. During his years with the Jesuits, he assumed the names of Michel Sohail, Michael X. Cohen, and Seleem Abou Mahmood el Eys. In Arabia, while still insisting he was a "Jewish Jesuit," he allowed that he had been "invested for the nonce with the character and duties of an Imam, and as such conducted the customary congregational worship." (Palgrave, "The Mahometan Revival," in
Essays on Eastern Questions
[London: Macmillan, 1872], p. 126.) In his later years, he was enamored of Shintoism.

4. "Nothing but an airship can do it," David Garnett, ed.,
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 663.

5. '"Why aren't you married, O Wazir?'...," Bertram Thomas,
Alarms and Excursions in Arabia
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), p. 119.

6. 
Harry St. John Philby.
If the name Philby seems familiar, it is probably because of Harry's son, Kim, the well-known KGB mole. With a craftiness that may have run in the family, in the 1950s Kim Philby infiltrated not only Britain's Secret Intelligence Service but, as a liaison officer, the CIA.

7. "the sands of my desire," Bertram Thomas,
Arabia Felix: Across the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. 149; "the bride of my constant desire," Harry St. John Philby,
The Empty Quarter
(New York: Henry Holt, 1933), p. xxi.

8. "Tomorrow, the news of my disappearance..." This and the following quotes are from Thomas,
Arabia Felix,
pp. 1, 2, 42, 131, 136, 149.

9. 
with an accuracy that is amazing.
For decades Bertram Thomas's map would be the only reliable guide to the Dhofar region of Oman. When we began looking for Ubar from space, I superimposed portions of Thomas's map on satellite images and found that he was never more than a kilometer or two off in plotting his route.

10. "Our morning start was sluggish...," Thomas,
Arabia Felix,
pp. 160–61.

11. "'Twas I that learn'd him in the archer's art...," Zayn Bilkadi, "The Wabar Meteorite,"
Aramco World Magazine
37, no. 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1986), p. 28.

12. "the finest thing in Arabian exploration...," T. E. Lawrence, foreword to Thomas,
Arabia Felix,
pp. xix, xvii.

13. "Here then the words of 'Ad ..." This and the following quotes are from Philby,
Empty Quarter,
pp. 165–66.

14. "mantle of fraud in the east...," T. E. Lawrence,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1936), p. 503.

15. "I am convinced that the remains...," Raymond O'Shea,
The Sand Kings of Oman
(London: Methuen, 1947), pp. 180–81.

16. "A cloud gathers..." and "this cruel land can cast a spell...," Wilfred Thesiger,
Arabian Sands
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), p. xvii. Thesiger describes (p. 219) a typical Ubar discussion: "According to Sadr ... the lost city of'Ad [was] under the sands of Jaihman. Muhammad was, however, convinced that this city, one of the two mentioned in the Koran as having been destroyed by God for arrogance, was buried in the sands to the north of Habarut. He reminded me of the many clearly defined tracks which converge on these sands, and which the Rashid maintain once led to that city."

17. 
Had he sought Ubar...?
Years later, I listened as one of Thesiger's bedouin companions, Sultan Najran, relived the journey. I learned that Thesiger, indeed, had looked for—and found—the road to Ubar, but at the cost of draining his party's waterskins dry. His party was lucky to make it back alive.

18. "Qidan, the lost city...," O'Shea,
Sand Kings of Oman,
p. 1.

19. "I realized with a start...," James Morris,
Sultan in Oman
(London: Century Travellers, 1986), p. 121. Morris's book is a wry and immensely entertaining portrait of the world of Sa'id ibn Taimur, the sultan who had once retained Bertram Thomas as his wazir.

20. 
His mysterious mesa might well have been a desert outpost
... The site of "Qidan" could in reality be Muscalet, a settlement that appears on maps from the 1600s into the 1800s. Or it could indeed be ancient, the "Rhabana Regia" of Ptolemy's venerable map of Arabia. In an image taken by the high-resolution Large Format Camera aboard the space shuttle
Challenger,
O'Shea's mesa is where he said it was and has linear features that could well be man-made.

21. 
Mahram Bilqis. Mahram
in Arabic means holy platform or sanctuary, and Bilqis is a traditional proper name for the queen of Sheba. In Yemen today, if you shout "Bilqis," half the little girls within earshot come running.

22. "almost trampled over the rest of us..." This and the following three quotes are from Wendell Phillips,
Qataban and Sheba
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), pp. 225, 264, and 307.

23. "When I enquired if he knew..." This and the following quotes are from Wendell Phillips,
Unknown Oman
(London: Longman, 1966), pp. 222–23, 223–24, and 229.

24. "It was California Charlie..." Charlie McCollum, the fellow who spotted the Ubar road, was a Phillips sidekick. I managed to track him down in California; he confirmed that the road was as wide as a ten-lane freeway.

25. 
He shouted "This is Ubar!
" Phillips's bittersweet jest does not appear in his
Unknown Oman.
It was related to me by one of his guides, Muhammad ibn Tuffel.

26. 
and prospered in the oil business.
As a gesture of courtesy, the desert sheiks offered Phillips their homes, their possessions, anything he wished. He responded, no, no, they were too kind. All he asked was that they sign an option for the oil rights to their tribal lands. Brokering these options, Phillips became the world's leading private oil concessionaire—and his desert friends prospered as well.

3. Arabia Felix

1. "He is crazed with the spell...," from "Arabia," Walter de la Mare,
Collected Poems,
vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 135.

2. 
none had really done his homework.
Freya Stark, a hardy solo traveler of the 1930s, was apparently the only one to comb ancient accounts. But she never took Ubar seriously and never went looking for the city, even though her friend the sultan of Qatn "told me in the serenity of faith that everyone in Hadramaut places it between Hadramaut and Oman" (where Thomas, Thesiger, and Phillips encountered the Ubar road). Freya Stark,
The Southern Gates of Arabia
(Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1983), p. 181.

3. 
the land was uncharted.
Reliable maps of Arabia were a long time coming. As late as World War I, when the Arab revolt was brewing, British cartographers had no knowledge of the location of Medina, at the time the peninsula's largest city. And the map that Bertram Thomas drew for his book
Arabia Felix
would be the best available for close to forty years.

4. "the way they cut their hair...," Aubrey de Selincourt, trans.,
Herodotus: The Histories
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 206.

5. 
where Alexander never set foot.
Alexander the Great considered adding Arabia to his conquests, but he died in Babylon in 323
B.C.
on the eve of his planned campaign. The fact that he wanted to invade the peninsula—and even make it his royal abode—is evidence that
something
in Arabia was of great value.

6. "The inhabitants of that place said...," Albert M. Wolohojian, trans.,
The Romance of Alexander the Great by Pseudo-Callis-thenes
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 112–15.

7. "Why do you tread this earth...," Wolohojian,
Romance of Alexander the Great,
p. 116.

8. 
71° × 23° ... 73° × 16°.
Though the principle is the same, Ptolemy's latitudes and longitudes are not the same as those on modern maps, on which the 0° prime meridian passes through the British Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Ptolemy chose the Fortunate Islands in the Atlantic for his prime meridian, because they were considered the far edge of the habitable world. The scale of his system differs from ours as well.

4. The Flight of the Challenger

1. 
its inherent distortions
...In laying out his maps, Ptolemy miscalculated the circumference of the earth. To make things fit, he took to squeezing empty spaces—such as the hinterlands of Arabia.

2. "It's like rotating your house...," Elachi quoted by Ronald Blom, Oct. 1984.

3. "the loss of viewing time...,"
Time,
Oct. 22, 1984, p. 72.

4. "Have you not heard...," N. J. Dawood, trans.,
The Koran
(New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 25.

5. 
the desert of al-Ahqaf.
The Koran's passing mention of this region is a valuable geographic clue, for in post-Koranic accounts and even maps, al-Ahqaf (which has been taken to mean "wind-curved sand dunes") is located more or less where Bertram Thomas found his road to Ubar and where we hoped for success with the space shuttle's radar.

6. 
the proper names "bam" and "'Ad.
" The very earliest evidence of the city of Iram and its People of'Ad may be hidden in the word
Adramitae,
a southern Arabian tribe mentioned by Greek geographers. The name appears as well on Ptolemy's ever-helpful map of Arabia. Breaking the word apart,
Adrami-
could stand for "'Ad-i-lram"and the suffix
-tae
means "tribe." The Adramitae, then, would be the People of'Ad and Iram.

7. "Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine...," Charles ]. Lyall,
Ancient Arabian Poetry
(London: Williams & Norgate, 1930), p. 64.

8. "of ill omen...," Lyall,
Ancient Arabian Poetry,
p. 113; "She [War] brought forth Distress...," William A. Clouston, ed.,
Arabian Poetry for English Readers
(Glasgow: McLaren & Son, 1881), p. 34.

9. "Arrogant and unjust..." This and the following quotes are from Dawood,
Koran,
pp. 159–60, 129, 205.

10. "According to the tradition of the Arabs...," Johann Burckhardt,
Travels in Arabia,
vol. 2 (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972), p. 274; "the 'Adites continued to abandon themselves...," L. Du Couret,
Life in the Desert: Or, Recollections of Travel in Asia and Africa
(New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), p. 271.

11. 
where lakes once formed.
The ancient lakes of the Rub' al-Khali have been extensively studied by geologist Hal McClure. His findings are succinctly summarized in Arthur Clark, "Lakes of the Rub' al-Khali," A
ramco World
40, no. 3 (May–June 1989).

12. "Iram ... will be unearthed, by ants...," Nabih Amin Faris, trans.,
The Antiquities of South Arabia
(Princeton: University Press, 1936), p. 72. The prediction that Ubar would be unearthed by ants isn't as cryptic as it might appear. There are several classical accounts of ants bringing gold to the surface in India. Herodotus says: "There is found in this desert a kind of ant of great size, bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog ... These creatures as they burrow underground throw up the sand in heaps, just like our own ants throw up the earth, and they are very like ours in shape. The sand has a rich content of gold, and this it is that the Indians are after when they make their expeditions into the desert" (de Selincourt,
Herodotus: The Histories,
p. 246). Could this ant be a lizard or small burrowing animal?

13. "Whoever shall find and enter Ubar...," David T. Rice,
The Illustrations of the "World History" of Rashid al-Din
(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1981), p. 42.

5. The Search Continues

1. "The bedu tell of such places...," Ranulph Fiennes,
Where Soldiers Fear to Tread
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), pp. 195–96.

2. 
frankincense ... exported by sea.
From Dhofar, incense was floated in animal-skin boats down the coast to the port of Qana (west of Mukalla in today's Yemen). There it was consigned to camel caravans bound across Arabia to the great caravansary of Petra (in today's Jordan).

6. The Inscription of the
Crows

1.
converged at the well of Shisur.
Curiously, the old incense caravan route to and past Shisur is accurately marked on a map in the classic 1911 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Where this information came from is a mystery; at the time, no westerner is known to have penetrated the region.

2. "And we hunted the game...," Rev. Charles Forster,
The Historical Geography of Arabia
(London: Duncan & Malcolm, 1844), pp. 90–93.

7. The Rawi's Tale

1. 
rawis' tales of Iram/Ubar
... In the centuries after the Koran recounted the grief that befell the People of'Ad, two competing story lines evolved. On one hand there is the tale of how Ubar's mighty king had a fabulous-beyond-belief city built in his absence, only to have it destroyed by God at the moment he and his retinue came in sight of it. In an alternate version, the city has long been inhabited and is known for its idolatry and dissolution. Ubar's king is warned by the Prophet Hud that disaster is imminent unless the People of 'Ad forsake their evil ways. Hud is ignored; the city is destroyed. This is the scenario of the excerpt in the text, which is from Part 12 of
The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa'i,
translated by W. M. Thackston, )r. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), pp. 109–17.

2. "Oh my people ... worship god..." To give
Tales of the Prophets
a sense of authenticity and a dash of piety, al-Kisa'i's direct quotes from the Koran were set off with the equivalent of italics.