The Road to Ubar (7 page)

I looked back at the Huntington and realized why scholars, for one very good reason, had never taken Ubar seriously: the city wasn't on Ptolemy's map. Yet—under another name and in the wrong place—it had been there all along.

F
OR THE TIME BEING,
at least, Ubar's place and purpose made sense. In a far corner of ancient Arabia, incense was harvested, then taken via a time-worn road to the fabled caravansary of Ubar, known to Claudius Ptolemy as the marketplace of Oman. The incense would then have been loaded on camels for a daring journey across the Rub' al-Khali to the great markets of Petra, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Rome.

But now, could the search for Ubar be defined, narrowed? Ptolemy's map of Arabia was fine for determining the lay of the land, yet its inherent distortions made it impossible to zero in on a site with any degree of accuracy.
¹
The best that could be said for Ubar was that it was somewhere in a 100-by-300-mile sandbox, somewhere in 30,000 square miles of gravel plains and dunes.

A while back, the Los
Angeles Times
had had an article about an airborne radar system that had successfully located Mayan ruins hidden beneath a dense jungle canopy. The article said that a similar radar system, in the near future, was to fly aboard the space shuttle.

It was an improbable idea, but maybe the shuttle could look for Ubar. It couldn't hurt to ask. On a Thursday in 1983 I took a deep breath, called Pasadena information, then dialed the main number for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"Good morning. JPL-NASA. May I help you?"

"I'd ... I'd like to talk to someone about using the space shuttle to look for a lost city," I asked in an unconvincing this-is-just-a-routine-inquiry tone of voice.

"Oh ..."

A pause ensued. "A lost city in Arabia," I blurted, as if this validated my question.

"I'll connect you with Dr. Blom," the operator said in a rush, and was off the line.

An extension rang. Who was this Dr. Blom? The duty officer for fielding dreamers of Atlantis, hollow-earthers, the flying-saucer crowd?

"Ron Blom," said an affable voice.

Introducing myself to Dr. Blom, I managed to slip in that I had worked for the National Geographic Society and Walt Disney, hoping this would give me some shred of credibility. I think I scored a point or two as I (correctly!) alluded to the orbital parameters of the shuttle's flight path. "Could we talk further?"

"I don't see why not," replied Dr. Blom. In fact he was free for lunch that very day, provided I made it to JPL by 11:30. Scientists like to eat early.

Not far from the Huntington Library, the Jet Propulsion Lab also has serene, grassy grounds and a population of serious researchers, at the time more than ten thousand people working on NASA projects. As scholars at the Huntington probed secrets of the past, JPLers looked to the future, to revelations brought by the manned and unmanned exploration of space.

Ron Blom was clearly a serious scientist. A Caltech-trained geologist, he had a beard and favored plaid shirts and sleeveless sweaters. Yet there was an air of bemusement about him. At the JPL cafeteria, he thought I might enjoy watching rocket scientists work the salad bar. For $2.25 they could help themselves to whatever would fit in a little styrofoam bowl. They began by laying solid foundations of garbanzo beans, baby tomatoes, beets, and the like. Upon this they built edifices of romaine and spinach. Buttressed by celery and carrot sticks, their leafy constructs soared higher and yet higher, triumphs of structural engineering. As I headed off to the checkout counter, two scientists were debating the viscosity and slip-face factors of green goddess versus California ranch dressings.

"On me, Dr. Blom," I offered. This was a nice gesture, I thought. And it would have been, had not my wallet been empty. In my haste to get to JPL, I had forgotten to stop at a money machine. Not only was I going to take up Dr. Blom's time with a harebrained idea, but he would have to pick up the tab. I tried to make the best of it.

"Thanks, really. Dumb of me ... But how about this: the day we land in Oman to look for Ubar, I'll return the favor. I'll buy you lunch."

I was able to make good on this—seven years later. In the meantime, Ron was to prove a stalwart of what became an Ubar team. We spent a good part of that first afternoon chatting in his office, where I was put at ease by the message on a Post-It stuck above his computer terminal: "
DARE TO BE STUPID!
"

We started with my Operational Navigational Chart J-7, on which I had marked what Bertram Thomas and Claudius Ptolemy had noted about the possible location of Ubar. Ron was amazed that in our day and age this area was still left white, unexplored and uncharted. He filled me in on the system that could remedy the situation and perhaps even find Ubar.

Scheduled to fly on a shuttle mission eighteen months thence, SIR-B—Shuttle Imaging Radar B—would map selected areas of the world by beaming down a powerful microwave and then digitally recording its bounced-back return signal. The radar had a unique ability to see through cloud cover and dense vegetation. It could even penetrate dry sand and reveal buried features, both natural and man-made. It could create images of sights unseen, of times past.

An earlier version of this radar, SIR-A, had been borne aloft on a 1981 mission of the shuttle
Columbia.
Ron had been a principal scientist on the project and savored relating the story of some of the first images to be analyzed. Taken over Africa, they were of northern Sudan's pancake-flat Selima sand sheet.

"The immediate thought was that somebody had grabbed the wrong roll, that this was really someplace else," Ron recalled. "The radar images didn't look anything like what we understood to be the Selima's bland surface."

It was the right roll. What those images recorded was not the veneer of the windblown sand sheet but a denser surface buried beneath it. The radar saw right through the sand as if it weren't there, revealing a hidden landscape of streams and rivers, now dry and buried but once filled with the torrential runoff of monsoon rains. The radar had reached back hundreds of thousands of years and taken a snapshot of a vanished land.

Ron's team traveled to Egypt and Sudan to "ground-truth" the Selima images. In a totally featureless landscape, they plotted where on their radar image two buried rivers converged—a good place for a campsite. They dug down through the sand and, sure enough, found riverbank contours and Stone Age artifacts.

"With Ubar, say it was buried. We could pick up what?"

"A lot, as long as it was reasonably near the surface."

"Meaning?"

"Six feet down, no problem. Theoretically, the radar can penetrate up to five meters—eighteen feet, that is—of very dry sand."

"And what would we see? Walls? Buildings?"

"It would have to be something pretty sizable. But sure, structures should show up, as long as they were on the order of thirty meters across. That's the limit of SIR-B's resolution ... the size of a pixel."

I nodded, not entirely sure what a pixel was.

Walking me back to the lab's main gate, Ron promised to arrange a meeting with Charles Elachi, who not only headed up JPL's Radar Imaging Geology Group, but was director of the entire ambitious NASA SIR-B shuttle project.

A week later we were in Charles's office. And if there was an occasion for intimidation, this was it. Here was a scientist's scientist, at thirty-six a holder of Ph.D.s in planetary geology, electrical engineering, and quantum physics. He had also grown up in Lebanon and was well aware that in the Middle East fact and fancy often became hopelessly intertwined. I admitted this to be the case with Ubar, but said I felt that, as sources, Bertram Thomas and Claudius Ptolemy could be trusted.

"Okay, how about you?" Charles said to me. "You think this place Ubar really exists?"

I had to be honest. "Frankly? I don't know."

"That's a perfectly good answer," Charles replied, without a hint of hesitation. "What's science for, if not to find out what exists or doesn't. Right, Ron?" Ron nodded, and Charles continued, "But say we did this, we went looking for Ubar with our spaceship, it would have to be unofficial, you understand. With you, we're not exactly dealing with ..."

I could complete the sentence: "...an academic institution."

"No offense, you understand, It's just..." Ron interjected.

"Oh, my, no offense at all," I assured them. "Listen, I'm amazed you're even considering this."

"What if," Ron suggested to Charles, "we made Ubar a target of opportunity? If we're not in trouble on anything else, that is."

"We could. Yes, we could certainly do that," Charles agreed, and the meeting was over.

As Ron and I walked away down one of JPL's endless corridors, I wasn't quite sure what the upshot of the meeting was, but I suspected that the space shuttle's trajectory might just happen to intersect with the road to Ubar.

"Was what happened in there what I think happened?" I asked.

Ron smiled. "Uh-huh."

A few weeks later, a manila envelope arrived in the mail from JPL. In it was a computer-generated map of Arabia. Two parallel lines, fifty kilometers apart, angled across the peninsula ... the paths of two scheduled space shuttle passes over the Ubar area. A Post-It from Ron said simply, "I think you might find this of interest."

Several months later, I intently followed the
Challenger
's radar mission.

Friday, October
5, 1984 ... At 7:03
A.M.,
a blaze of light pierces the dark Florida sky. A huge cloud of smoke billows out across Cape Kennedy's swampland. In a rare night launch, the space shuttle
Challenger
thunders skyward, punches a hole in a cloud, and accelerates into orbit. It is a perfect launch, the sixth for the
Challenger.
A commentator notes that it is "now a fully mature spaceplane."

Saturday...
The shuttle mission isn't going so well. One problem is an out-of-control, wildly swinging KU-band antenna, designed to relay data from the SIR-B radar to a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS), which is supposed to beam the information back to earth. In Houston the press is told that SIR-B may be able to cover only 20 percent of its targets. There would have to be drastic prioritizations. Goodbye, Ubar. The flight director, John Cox, says that "Murphy has a way of getting to you," Murphy, of course, being the author of the law "Whatever can go wrong, will."

Sunday
... Hopes rise when Mission Specialist Kathryn Sullivan becomes the first American woman to walk in space. Working with Specialist David Leetsma, she stops the KU antenna from reeling about like a drunk at a party. They lock it in a fixed position. Priority SIR-B data can now be downloaded by using maneuvering jets to point the
Challenger
at the TDRS satellite, a space-age version of the tail wagging the dog. As Charles Elachi explains, "It's like rotating your house to re-aim the TV antenna and get better reception."
²

Though a controller announces, "We're back in business," the SIR-B array malfunctions again. As part of "the revolt of the antennas," the radar's main thirty-five-foot antenna won't budge from the cargo bay. Finding this unacceptable, Sally Ride pokes it with a mechanical arm, and it springs to life. Next a short circuit plagues and intermittently degrades SIR-B's images. There's no way to fix it.

Tuesday...
It is touch and go with the SIR-B array.

Wednesday...
Still touch and go.

Thursday...
On its 96th orbit, the
Challenger
streaks over the Ubar search area, presumably without acquiring any data.

Friday...
The spacecraft's 112th orbit again takes it over our search area, on a path fifty kilometers west of the pass the day before. Six hours later, dodging Hurricane Josephine, Captain Robert Crippen safely guides the
Challenger
back to earth.

In a NASA news conference, it is estimated that the SIR-B radar achieved only 40 percent of its goals. Charles Elachi allows he is "a little bit disheartened," but is confident SIR will fly again another day. The next week's issue
of Time
reports: "The loss of viewing time, coupled with the antenna problems, meant that a few scientific projects had to be sacrificed, among them a hoped-for image of the Arabian Peninsula near Oman, thought to be the site of an ancient lost city. Shrugged Charles Elachi, 'The lost city will have to be lost for another year or so.'"
³

Ron Blom, Kay, and I were as disappointed as Charles was. About the best we could hope for, he said, was a radar reflight in three or four years' time (actually, it would be a full ten years before SIR-C went aloft).

Ron went on with his work interpreting the geology of America's western deserts from space, Kay continued to combat crime as a federal probation officer, and I made documentaries for television. Still, whenever I could spare a few hours, I wistfully returned to either UCLA's University Research Library or the Huntington. I pursued the possibility that the city was a link in Arabia's incense trade, perhaps even its point of origin. But I had relatively little idea who might have lived there or what had become of them.

Now I had a new lead. As I chased after Ubar, I had frequently bumped into references to another lost city in Arabia, spelled either "Irem" or "Iram." The Koran asks, "Have you not heard how Allah dealt with 'Ad? The people of the many-columned city of Iram, whose like has not been built in the whole land?"
⁴

The legends of Ubar and Iram, I learned, had much in common. In fact, they had too much in common. Both were allegedly feckless cities destroyed by an angry Allah. They flourished and fell at the same time. Moreover, they were in the same area, a region of the Rub' al-Khali known as the desert of al-Ahqaf.
⁵
Most telling,
they were both built by the same tribe, the shadowy "People of'Ad.
" Was Iram another name for Ubar? Yes, I thought.