The Road to Ubar
Page 1
The Road To Ubar
Finding the Atlantis of the Sands
Nicholas Clapp
* * *
A MARINER BOOK
Houghton Mifflin Company
Boston New York
* * *
FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Nicholas Clapp
Illustrations copyright © 1998 by Kristen Mellon
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Clapp, Nicholas.
The road to Ubar: finding the Atlantis of the sands / Nicholas Clapp.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-395-87596-x
ISBN 0-395-95786-9 (pbk)
1. Ubar (Extinct city). 2. Excavations (Archaeology) —
Oman—Ubar (Extinct city). 1. Title.
DS247.063C55 1998
939'.49—DC21 97-36640 CIP
Book design and dune drawings by Anne Chalmers
Type is Electra by Linotype-Hell
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
* * *
For Kay, Cristina, Jenny, and Wil
* * *
Contents
Prologue [>]
PART I: MYTH
1 Unicorns [>]
2 The Sands of Their Desire [>]
3 Arabia Felix [>]
4 The Flight of the Challenger [>]
5 The Search Continues [>]
6 The Inscription of the Crows [>]
7 The Rawi's Tale [>]
8 Should You Eat Something That Talks to You? [>]
9 The City of Brass [>]
10 The Singing Sands [>]
PART II: EXPEDITION
11 Reconnaissance [>]
12 The Edge of the Known World [>]
13 The Vale of Remembrance [>]
14 The Empty Quarter [>]
15 What the Radar Revealed [>]
16 City of Towers [>]
17 Red Springs [>]
18 Seasons in the Land of Frankincense [>]
PART III: THE RISE AND FALL OF UBAR
19 Older Than 'Ad [>]
20 The Incense Trade [>]
21 Khuljan's City [>]
22 City of Good and Evil [>]
23 Sons and Thrones Are Destroyed [>]
Epilogue: Hud's Tomb [>]
Appendix 1: Key Dates in the History of Ubar [>]
Appendix 2: A Glossary of People and Places [>]
Appendix 3: Further Reflections on al-Kisai's "The Prophet Hud" [>]
Notes [>]
Bibliography [>]
Acknowledgments [>]
Index [>]
* * *
Prologue
Boston, Massachusetts, February 1797... IT WAS SNOWING and well after dark when the wagon finally pulled up outside the bookshop on the corner of Proctor's Lane. Wil, the young proprietor, would have been waiting anxiously, stamping his feet to keep warm and every few minutes wiping the snowflakes from his spectacles. He helped unload the shipment of the books he'd had printed in New Hampshire and, back inside, hastened to inspect a copy. The sturdy little volume began with his friend Cooper's account of his trip to the continent and his discovery in a country inn of a French edition of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Cooper wrote, "When I had finished reading the book, it struck my imagination, that those tales might be compared to a once rich and luxuriant garden, neglected and run to waste, where scarce any thing strikes the common observer but the weeds and briars, whilst the more penetrating eye of the experienced gardener discovers still remaining some of the most fragrant and delightful flowers."1
Wil paced back and forth in his tiny shop, leafing through the translation—the first in America—of the tales. It was a daring, even reckless thing that he had chosen to do. It was not so long ago that the Reverend Jonathan Edwards had deemed that the only fit reading was the Bible or commentaries on it. Works of the imagination were the work of sinners, to be punished by an angry God. "That God holds you over the pit of hell," Edwards fulminated, "much as one holds a spider, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked."2
Wil, though, thought he had sensed a recent change in public sentiment. People were tired of the dark cloud of Puritanism. The time was ripe, he thought, for the "most fragrant and delightful flowers" of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, which he had slyly retitled The Oriental Moralist, hoping that nobody would notice the rather striking absence of morality in these tales of evil magicians, flying horses, secret lovers, and haunted, lost cities.
Wil's Oriental Moralist included "The Petrified City," a tale told by Zobeide, an enterprising woman of Baghdad. Accompanied by two tiresome sisters, she sets out on a journey:
We set sail with a fair wind, and soon got through the Persian gulph, and saw land on the twentieth day. It was a very high mountain, at the bottom of which we saw a great town....
I had not the patience to stay till my sisters were dressed to go along with me, but went ashore in the boat by myself, and made directly to the gate of the town. I saw there a great number of men upon guard, some sitting and others standing with sticks in their hands; and they had all such dreadful countenances that they frightened me; but perceiving they had not motion, nay not so much as with their eyes, I took courage and went nearer, and then found they were all turned into stones, all petrified.3
Zobeide, though frightened, is determined to find out what happened. Exploring the town's fantastical palace, she discovers it full of "infinite riches, diamonds as big as ostrich eggs." And she discovers a sole survivor, a man chanting the Koran, who relates: "It was about three years ago, that a thundering voice was suddenly and so distinctively heard throughout the whole city, that nobody could avoid hearing it. The words were these: 'Inhabitants, abandon your idolatry, and worship the only God that shews mercy.'"
It seems that the message was repeated for three years, until the "only God that shews mercy" apparently ran short of it, and at four o'clock in the morning petrified the entire population, with the exception of the fellow chanting the Koran, who joins Zobeide and her sisters as they leave the city. The tale now takes some curious turns. At sea, Zobeide's envious sisters push her and her new friend overboard. He drowns, she survives. For their treachery, the two sisters are turned into black dogs by a passing dragon. Back in Baghdad, Zobeide divides her time between enjoying her great riches (for she had gathered up a few souvenirs) and disciplining her two new black dogs. She allows that "since that time I have whipped them every night, though with regret."
The world of "The Petrified City" was a world unknown to puritanical and bleak New England. Prior to Wil's publication of The Oriental Moralist, American school geographies had had little to say of Arabia, other than that "the Arabs are an ignorant, savage and barbarous people. Those on the coast are pirates; those in the interior are robbers."4 Yet in "The Petrified City," Zobeide is portrayed as smart, sensual, brave, and remarkably independent. And through her eyes we enter a world of exotic sights and sounds, of Oriental wisdom, of strange and mysterious happenings.
Zobeide's tale also happens to be the very first account printed in America of a city that time and again magically appears and disappears in the course of the thousand and one nights of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. The city is usually located in Arabia. Sometimes it is at the edge of the sea, but more often the traveler has to cross a forbidding mountain range and venture into a vast, sun-scorched land. Som
etimes the city has no name, but often it is called Iram. And, as we shall see, Iram is one and the same as a fabled land and city known as Ubar.
Ubar, rich beyond all measure. Ubar, for its sins, suddenly and dramatically destroyed by Allah.
Back in the winter of 1797, aspiring publisher Wil Clap could take pride in "The Petrified City" as one of the "most fragrant and delightful flowers" offered to his fellow New Englanders. Sadly, his offering was unrequited: The Oriental Moralist had only a single small printing. Though Wil survived by printing tracts and memoirs penned by his Puritan ancestors, he was eventually forced to close up shop and head west, then south, in search of business. On his way to New Orleans he died in his forty-eighth year, of unrecorded cause.
Wil meant well, and he made a remarkable unsung contribution. So it is fitting that this book is dedicated to a forefather I never knew: William T. Clap. His Oriental Moralist opened a door on a wondrous world. Nearly two hundred years later, my wife, Kay, and I and a hardy band of adventurers would have the good fortune, like Zobeide, to journey to a far land of the Arabian Nights Entertainments in search of its petrified city, in search of Ubar.
March 1997
NOTE: In this journey to unfamiliar places populated by unfamiliar people, both of the past and of the present, the reader may wish to consult Key Dates in the History of Ubar, [>], and the Glossary of People and Places, [>].
I. Myth
1. Unicorns
Over Iran, December 1980 ... The small cargo plane flew on into a starry but moonless night.
"You cannot be up there," the voice crackled over the radio. "We are having a war here. You are not understanding? Yes?"
While the pilot worked the radio, the copilot tried to make some sense of the scattered lights below. Were they in southern Jordan or perhaps Saudi Arabia? No. It appeared that the aircraft had somehow strayed into Iran, which at the time was engaged in a heated war with Iraq.
"Okay, okay, okay. Got it," the pilot radioed back. With a sigh, he turned to the copilot. "We'll head west then? And sort things out." He paused. "Hopefully."
As the cargo plane banked, the flight engineer, wedged behind the copilot, checked his instruments—those that didn't have "INOP" stickers stuck to their faceplates. The oil leak seemed okay now, and the port engine wasn't overheating as long as they took it easy and held back on the throttle.
The journey had begun two days earlier in a winter storm that turned the San Diego Wild Animal Park into a sea of mud. In a driving rain, three of the zoo's rare Arabian oryxes—magnificent black and white animals with long, tapered horns—were patiently coaxed into a chute and loaded into large wooden crates. They were going home.
Once, great herds of oryxes had freely roamed Arabia. But in the early part of this century, the peninsula's bedouin began replacing their old flintlocks with accurate and deadly Martini-Henrys. A large oryx could feed a family for a month, and the hunt was exciting, a test of riding and marksmanship. Later, oil-rich princes joined the hunt, not on fiery Arab steeds but on military half-tracks fitted with heavy-caliber machine guns. For sport, not food, they would slaughter sixty or more animals in an afternoon. Until there were no more. By the early 1970s, the Arabian oryx was extinct in the wild.
Fortunately, a number of conservation groups had faced the reality that the animal was being wiped out in its native habitat and had initiated an innovative breeding program. Arabian oryxes in zoos were swapped back and forth so that a genetically sound "world herd" could be created. By 1980 there were enough animals in captivity that a few at a time could be returned to the wild.
On their journey home, San Diego's oryxes would have company: Dave Malone, a young zookeeper, and a documentary film crew, consisting of myself and my wife, Kay, cameraman Bert Van Munster, and soundman George Goen. As soon as the oryxes were secured in their crates, the clock began ticking, for it would be unwise to risk opening the crates to give the sharp-horned animals food or water. It was essential to get them to Arabia as quickly as possible.
The freeway north to Los Angeles was partially flooded and choked with traffic. The Wild Animal Park truck made it to Air France Cargo with not a moment to spare, and we and the oryxes were on our way to Paris. There we transferred to another cargo plane, flown by a pickup crew that normally worked for British Midlands. After nightfall they veered off course somewhere over eastern Turkey. The error was understandable. Of the crew, only the pilot had made the run before—once, ten years ago.
Now I was in a jump seat behind the pilot, except the pilot wasn't there. He was all but on hands and knees, puzzling with the rest of the crew over navigational charts spread out on the cockpit floor. Gazing into the night, I thought I saw something. A glint in the moonlight.
"By any chance could we have company up here, coming our way?"
"Doubt it. Not at this altitude."
"You're sure?"
"Actually, no."
The pilot swung up, peered ahead, didn't see anything. But his eyes weren't accustomed to the dark. He flipped on the plane's landing lights. And in response, coming at us, another set of landing lights lit up the sky, the beams diffused by the petro-haze that hovers miles high over Arabia. The two planes streaked past each other. Dave, who'd been back in the cargo hold checking on the oryxes, poked his head through the cockpit doorway.
"You guys okay?"
"Just fine," the pilot said.
And we were. A few minutes later the copilot spotted the burning flares marking Saudi Arabia's major north-south pipeline. "Flying the pipeline" took us to within an hour of our destination: Muscat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman, where His Majesty Sultan Qaboos ibn Said had become intrigued by the plight of the oryx and had established a program to reintroduce the species into the wild.
At three A.M. we banked to the right just short of the silvery Arabian Sea and were on final approach to what the pilot was pretty sure was Muscat's Seeb Airport. We landed and barely had time for a catnap before three winged boxes emerged from a hangar and whirred toward us. They were Skyvans, small Irish-made military planes that could carry a small vehicle—or a crated oryx—and land it almost anywhere. The pilot in charge, Muldoon, Irish like his plane, supervised the loading with inordinate cheerfulness, considering the hour. Muldoon was a mercenary for Oman's fledgling air force. He was a good mercenary, he took pains to explain, busy with worthy missions (food drops, medical flights, and so on) in a time of peace.
We boarded Muldoon's plane. He flashed a thumbs-up and hit the throttle. Despite being loaded down with oryxes and fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel for the return flight, our three planes were quickly airborne. We circled over the sea to gain altitude and greeted the dawn as we headed toward the Jebel Akdar, the rugged "Green Mountains" that rise abruptly from Oman's coast. The greenery at first was limited to tiny terraced cornfields and vineyards. But then we flew into a long, winding valley and over grove after grove of palm trees.
Beside me, Kay had her face pressed to the window, taking all this in. Neither of us had ever been east of Europe, much less flown a barely charted desert in a tiny, mercenary-piloted plane. This didn't faze Kay a bit; she loved it. In everyday life, though, some things did faze her. Raised in the South, she could become distraught upon discovering that her navy shoes didn't match her new navy skirt or, worse yet, that her hair had become "a mop, with simply nothing to be done about it." Big things, like a crazed teenager trying to knife her or an international dope dealer threatening to have her "disappeared," didn't bother her at all. Our documentary filmmaking jaunts were breaks from her job as an in-the-trenches federal probation and parole officer. I remember her coming home one day all black and blue.
"Mom, what happened to you?" inquired first-born daughter Cristina.
"More aikido training with the FBI," she said nonchalantly. "This morning it was how to slow bad people down by, um, doing things to their kneecaps."
Always chipper, immensely capable, Kay is a good partner in strange places. We
unbuckled our seat belts and squeezed by a crated oryx for a view from the cockpit. "The way to the interior," Muldoon the (beneficent) mercenary gestured, as our three Skyvans buzzed a crumbling old watchtower and cleared a narrow pass.
Ahead now was a vast, rocky plain dotted with mud-brick villages. But soon the villages were behind us, all but one, set in a lonely cluster of palms. "Adam, the oasis of Adam," Muldoon said, then mused, "Suppose that's where he and the missus got the gate?"
The oasis was a last landmark. Oman's interior, desolate and featureless, rolled off to the horizon. We droned on for an hour. The Skyvan couldn't go very fast and, with no pressurization, had to stay under 5,000 feet.
Ahead, fingers of red sand reached out for us. "The Rub' al-Khali?" I ventured, surely mispronouncing the Arabic for the Empty Quarter.
"If you want it to be," Muldoon replied. "Who knows where it begins?"
Land of the oryx
The Empty Quarter is the great sand sea of Arabia, the largest sand mass on earth. Following the fingers of sand to the horizon, Kay and I could see—or thought we could—distant dunes, dancing through the heat waves. And then the fingers of sand were gone, left behind. Muldoon squinted ahead and began his descent to Camp Yalooni. Beyond the reach of roads, with scant vegetation and no water (the nearest well was eighty miles away), it was the ideal place to release our oryxes, as far as possible from harm's way. A scattering of specks became a cluster of small prefab buildings and a water truck. No airstrip. Muldoon circled once, slowed till the plane's stall alarm went off, and hit the rocky terrain with a bump and a crunch.
By now the oryxes had been in their crates for just over sixty hours.
Clambering out of the Skyvans, we were greeted by Mark and Susan Stanley-Price, the personable wildlife biologists in charge of Camp Yalooni. Behind them, running across the desert, came a band of bedouin, shouting and waving rifles. Members of the Harasis tribe, they were garbed in turbans and long robes. Wickedly curved daggers were tucked into their belts, and state-of-the-art Motorola walkie-talkies hung from their shoulders. They were to be the oryxes' gamekeepers.