The Road to Ubar (8 page)

This identification had a bonus: far more was written about Iram than about Ubar. An early faint remembrance of a place and its people may be embedded in the meaning of the proper names "Iram" and "'Ad."
⁶
At its Semitic root, "Iram" means a pile of stones erected as a way marker, and "'Ad" is most likely the same as "Gad," the god of fortune once revered throughout the Semitic world. Thus we might conjure up an image of a city that was a landmark in an unknown land, and an image of a people pursuing fortune, a people enamored of wealth and its trappings.

This, of course, was a major conjectural leap, yet when Iram and 'Ad appear in surviving pre-Islamic poetry—a mirror of life in ancient Arabia—there is more than a hint that these people were living a worldly life and having a good time of it. One poet pondered what it would have been like "had I been a man of the race of'Ad and of Iram":

Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine,
to speed on camel fleet and sure...
White women statue-like that trail
rich robes of price with golden hem,
Wealth, easy lot, not dread of ill...
⁷

Fragments of other poems imply that the People of 'Ad—and even their camels—were a wicked lot. Seeking a superlative for nastiness, one poet comes up with: "of ill omen, eviler than Ahmar of 'Ad." Describing the aftermath of warfare, another intones: "She [War] brought forth Distress and Ruin, monsters full-grown, each of them as deformed as the dun camel of 'Ad."
⁸

It is interesting that in pre-Islamic poetry, which dates back to 500
A.D.,
perhaps earlier, the 'Ad appear as a past-tense people, gone from Arabia and even from the face of the earth. What became of them? And of their city? The prophet Muhammad knew. Preaching in Mecca around 640–650, he declaimed: "Arrogant and unjust were the men of 'Ad. 'Who is mightier than we?' they used to say. Could they not see that Allah, who had created them, was mightier than they? Yet they denied our revelations. So over a few ill-omened days, We let loose on them a howling gale, that they might taste a dire punishment in this life; but more terrible will be the punishment of the life to come."
⁹

Muhammad's preachings, gathered into the Koran, make much of Iram's destruction by a "hurricane bringing a woeful scourge," a sudden and dramatic end for the People of 'Ad: "When morning came there was nothing to be seen besides their ruined dwellings. Thus We reward the wrongdoers."

In the Koran's account of Iram's violent demise, two major figures appear: the worldly King Shaddad and the prophet Hud, who warns the 'Ad that their wicked ways will bring them to a bad end. Regrettably, little more is said of either character or of the full story of Iram. In the Koran, tales are never told from beginning to end as historical accounts; rather they are repeatedly—and fragmentarily—cited to drive home a moral point. For the 'Ad, the moral point is a thunderous warning: "You squandered away your precious gifts in your earthly life and took your fill of pleasure. An ignominious punishment shall be yours this day, because you behaved with pride and injustice of the earth and committed evil ... Serve none but Allah. Beware of the torment of a fateful day."

In the Koran, Muhammad gave the People of 'Ad a resounding stamp of disapproval—and thereupon licensed a host of Islamic historians, geographers, travelers, and storytellers to decry the city and people of Iram. What better theme than comeuppance for the wicked? By medieval times, the tale of the city's rise and fall had been told and retold dozens of times and had been seized upon and woven into the fabric of the
Arabian Nights.
Along the way there was considerable embroidery. Incidents, details, and characters were added, some imaginary to be sure, but some—maybe—harking back to forgotten documents or preserved oral traditions.

As a late-night project, I compiled a cast of characters and genealogy for Ubar. Whereas the Koran mentioned only King Shaddad and the prophet Hud, my tale came to have more than thirty interrelated players. There were forebears of King Shaddad dating back to Noah. There was the sage Luqman ibn 'Ad, a pair of dancing girls known as "the Two Locusts," and the woman Mahdad, the first victim of the havoc of the city's final days. My genealogy even had a column for "nisnases," weird, monkeylike creatures said to have taken over and haunted the ruins of Iram/Ubar after the place was divinely demolished. They dated back to a common ancestor, one al-Nisnas ibn (son of) Omain ibn Aalik ibn Yelmah ibn Lawez ibn Sam.

With no other way to seek Ubar, here I was plotting a family tree of creatures described as having one eye, one arm, and one leg!

Myth's path, I knew, was uncertain and abounding in slippery slopes. But give the myth of Iram/Ubar credit for staying power. Though the tale achieved its peak of popularity in the 1100s and 1200s
A.D.,
it was still very much a part of Arabian culture when outsiders penetrated the peninsula. In the early 1800s Johann Burckhardt wrote of the region of al-Ahqaf: "According to the tradition of the Arabs, this desolate region was once a terrestrial paradise, where dwelt a race of giants, who, for their impiety, were swallowed up by a deluge of sand." In 1860 Colonel L. Du Couret, a wanderer through Arabia, recorded the venerable story of how, deaf to the prophet Hud's message, "the 'Adites continued to abandon themselves to the practice of an idolatry the most besotted."
¹⁰

Could a story so long-lived, so rich and complex, be based on nothing? Yes, it could, given its cheerful embrace of nisnases and the like. But, myth, it's widely believed, nearly always springs from something—a place, a person, an event—that once was as real as a hometown, an ancient king or prophet, or a wrenching disaster.

In the late spring of 1985, I called Ron Blom at JPL. Even though the search from space was on indefinite hold, I felt he would be interested in the Ubar-Iram link. It had produced new clues: evidence of the city's existence dating to the dawn of Arabic literature, a location in the al-Ahqaf region, and the possibility that the city had come to a violent end between the time of Ptolemy's map and its mention in pre-Islamic poetry, between 150 and 350
A.D.

"Funny you should call," Ron said, "because I've got something for you. You might want to stop by."

Later that week I did. The "
DARE TO BE STUPI'D!
" Post-It still stood watch over his computer. Certainly done that, I thought, as I showed Ron my schematic, rather outlandish Ubar genealogy. In exchange, he picked up a manila envelope. "Down the hall," he said, gesturing, and led the way to a dark, windowless room. He switched on a large light box, then from the envelope matter-of-factly produced a black-and-white transparency.

"Can't see much on this one. Transmission efficiency was way down, only about two percent. This line over here looks to be a pipeline..."

He placed a second transparency on the light box, just below the first. "Better resolution on this one. See the dunes here?"

I also saw that the transparency had a printed notation: "
JPL DATA TAKE
96.1." We were looking at the results of the space shuttle
Challenger
's flight over Arabia! Ron smiled and explained that really these weren't supposed to exist. But somehow, in the chaos of the ill-starred radar mission, they had been downloaded to the TDRS satellite, from there to Maryland's Goddard Space Center, and finally to JPL.

"How about this? The radar's behaving now."

The image was of the edge of the Rub' al-Khali, where its sea of dunes gave way to gravel plain. It clearly mapped the heart of our Ubar search area. Further, the radar had seen through superficial drifting sand, even small dunes, and revealed a landscape thousands of years old. It was a landscape where rivers once flowed, where lakes once formed.
¹¹
A landscape of Arabia as a vast savanna, an Eden even. Certainly not a desert. Ron pointed out a particularly large lakebed, over twenty kilometers long, the size of California's Salton Sea. On its shores early man could have camped, hunted, even fished. Here civilization could have gotten a toehold and held on, even as the surrounding terrain became desert and the lake vanished.

We calculated the point where Bertram Thomas had crossed and regretfully left behind the road to Ubar. It was in the middle of Ron's long lake. With a magnifying glass we searched for the road, but found no trace of it. As in the line from
Winnie the Pooh,
"The more they looked, the more it wasn't there."

"Right..." Ron said with a sigh. "To be expected, I guess. With space imaging, it's rare you find what you're actually looking for." He added, "But then you come upon something else that may—or may not—be helpful."

As he looked at the shuttle's transparencies this way and that, Ron spoke of what might be described as the Zen of Space Imaging. You

Radar image of area of the Ubar road

clear your mind of preconceptions. You look for an anomaly, something out of place. If you're interested in the presence of man, you look for geometric features. Straight lines, right angles, and the like. But beware: nature can concoct shapes that you could swear were roads, walls, or canals. Above all, you keep an open mind.

Ron pointed out a few "hot spots," white patches where the radar may have recorded "disturbed earth." Such disturbances, he explained, were often caused by man and his endeavors. "These are places worth looking at. If we ever could." He singled out a particularly striking hot spot. "Like here. It's a hill. But why so bright?"

He gathered up the images and handed them to me. "Have a look. See what you can find."

At home I spent hours poring over the images, millimeter by millimeter, until at last, south of the large lakebed, I saw the outline of ... a city? With a macro lens I photographed this suspicious feature and blew it up so that I could examine its every dot of grain (its every digital pixel). Sure enough, I saw a distinct continuous line—a wall?—enclosing a mile-square area.

Hopes up, I returned to JPL, only to have Ron say, "Artifact." Radar imagery, he explained, has the perverse ability to produce random geometric features—called artifacts—that have nothing to do with what is really there. But I shouldn't feel bad; artifacts had led more than one serious scientist down the garden path.

In archaeology, artifacts are keys to the past. In space imagery, they're meaningless doodles.

We met with Charles Elachi and reviewed the SIR-B images. There was no sign of the road to Ubar. Yet we had a good overview of the area and at least one particularly promising hot spot. We had found just enough to want to find more. Ron suggested that we follow up on the SIR-B sweep of Arabia by obtaining satellite coverage. It would be in color and could be processed to bring out features not visible on the SIR-B radar images. Charles agreed. But this would take time, he cautioned. JPL was swamped with NASA priority projects.

As the meeting broke up, I told Ron and Charles of Abu Muhammad al-Hamdani, a southern Arabian scholar who had spent a lifetime (893–945) gathering reports of past civilizations. In his
Eighth Book of al-lklil,
he lists "Iram, the city of Shaddad ibn 'Ad" as first among the lost treasuries of Arabia; he predicts that someday "it will be unearthed by ants.... This will take place when despots are gone and the tyrannous pharaohs are no more."
¹²

"Well, there are no more pharaohs," Charles reflected. "But despots? In that part of the world it could be a while."

I decided not to tell Charles and Ron of an additional Ubar item, a curse recorded in
The World History of Rashid al-Din
(1290): "Whoever shall find and enter Ubar will be driven mad with fear."
¹³

I
N THE EARLY MORNING
of January 28, 1986, seventy-three seconds after launch, the space shuttle
Challenger
came to a sudden and fiery end, killing six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from New Hampshire who was to give school lessons from space. After a period of shock, disbelief, and sadness, Kay and I and our
J
PL friends rarely discussed the accident, yet we tacitly agreed that we owed the ship and its crew our best effort in the search for Ubar. One way or another, we would travel to Oman and walk the desert mapped by the
Challenger's
1984 radar images.

Kay and I agreed that the time had come to see what could be done to organize a ground expedition. It was also time to get some sound advice from professional archaeologists. And so, a month after the
Challenger
went down, I flew to Montreal for a rendezvous with Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Ran for short. He was en route to the high Arctic for another installment of his polar adventures.

Though a hereditary baronet, Ran Fiennes's life had been anything but tea and crumpets. In the military he had shown promise as an officer in the Special Air Service—until the night when he and his mates got themselves up in greasepaint and camouflage and dynamited the principal set of the movie
Dr. Dolittle.
It wasn't right, he felt, for the film's producers to push around the people of Castle Combe, a picturesque village near his SAS barracks.