Regretfully we had turned back, heading east just south of the great dunes, when suddenly Charlie exclaimed, "There are the tracks!" It was California Charlie, not my desert-bred guide, who located these rows of parallel tracks incised deep in the hard surface and covered with glazed pebbles.24 I counted eighty-four tracks running side by side. They had every appearance of being very old and must have represented a time when there were countless camel caravans in transit through this uninhabited region of today.
Exploring the ancient caravan route would have to wait for two and a half years. In 1955, Phillips returned with an armada of Dodge Power Wagons and followed the road a good twenty miles. He lost it in the sands that had drifted over it, then found it again. The Power Wagons bogged down. The caravan route led away into a no man's land of impassable dunes, six hundred feet high. With a melodramatic flourish, Phillips recounted: "From here on I knew we were through, for there is no barrier so great as billowing immeasurable sands stretching like a vast ocean as far as the eye could see in cruel and sublime grandeur."
But Phillips wasn't quite through, at least according to one of his bedouin guides. He apparently fixed on a particular red dune and proclaimed (for no apparent reason) that Ubar was under it. He shouted, "This is Ubar!" and, quick-drawing his pearl-handled revolver, emptied it in the air.25
When he returned to America, Phillips published his findings and prospered in the oil business.26 But, though outwardly brash and cocksure, he had long been in frail health. He passed away at the untimely age of forty-two.
What a saga! The quest for Ubar had an Arabian Nights flair to it, a tumble of interwoven tales penned by scholars and scoundrels. And Ubar—if it existed at all—was still out there, undiscovered, a phantom city approached by a road that vanished in the dunes.
It was a city of dreams, or at least daydreams. Driving around Los Angeles, I would occasionally realize, with a start, that I no longer knew where I was; my mind, with increasing frequency, was lost in the sands. I would find myself puzzling over how to traverse the dunes. Maybe camels were the best after all. Or maybe specially designed vehicles. I ordered a catalogue from Johnnie's Speed and Chrome, an outfit that produced customized "sandrail" buggies that on a 45-degree slip face of dune could come to a full stop, then restart and climb on. The secret was the tires: huge, inflated with a minimum of air. They could run over you without leaving even a bruise. But then, I realized, these balloon tires would be quickly shredded by the Rub' al-Khali's intermittent flinty plains. And fine red sand would quickly clog the sandrail's exposed carburetors. Nevertheless...
We had decided to use the sandrails after all. And so far, so good. We had changed tires—from hard to soft, then back again—more than a dozen times, and now we were beyond where Wendell Phillips had given up and turned back. The dunes were enormous, but we raced up and over them with surprising ease. Then the wind picked up. We were in for a major sandstorm...
Where was I? Somewhere in Los Angeles, of course, but where? It was only when I looked in my rear-view mirror that I spied, two blocks back, the Denny's where I should have turned right.
Ubar ... The sandstorm had passed, and we weren't at all sure where we were. We had strayed from the tracks of the Ubar road. Hoping to pick them up, we headed north and slightly west. We passed a small round boulder that seemed out of place in the dunes. We shifted into reverse and backed up. Turning the rock over, we found it scratched with ancient graffiti. Similar stones lay ahead, as did a great red dune. We scanned it with our binoculars and spied a fragment of masonry breaking free of its sands. Racing ahead, we discovered it to be part of a buried structure of finely cut stone. Carefully we removed a few blocks and entered a long, dark passage. It was clogged with sand, yet we could follow it deep into the dune. Our flashlights played across inscriptions. With A Dictionary of Old South Arabic (purchased at Hyman and Sons), we began to make sense of the elegant chiseled lettering...
No harm in dreaming.
3. Arabia Felix
He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
they have stolen his wits away.
The words of a poem by Walter de la Mare buzzed through my mind.1 And it occurred to me: daydreaming of far Arabia aside, there was something very real I, as an amateur, could do to further the search for Ubar. Though prior seekers could not be faulted for their daring, it appeared that none had really done his homework. No one had taken the time—or perhaps had the opportunity—to see what, if anything, lay behind the campfire stories of the Rub' al-Khali bedouin.2
Given Kay's and my situation at the time (no contacts, modest means), this was about the only thing I could really contribute to the search for the lost city. The resources were certainly at hand: the nearby UCLA University Research Library alone had 60,000 volumes on the beliefs and lands of Islam. I could seek Ubar, not in the sands of far-off Arabia but in new and old accounts and documents. Was Ubar a real place? Or was it a mirage, a city that never was, a place that existed only in the realm of myth?
To begin with, was Ubar on any maps? For as long as I can remember, I've loved maps. As a kid, in my imagination I journeyed across them to distant isles and buried treasure. Now, presumably a grown-up, I planned to scour recent maps, then work my way back to the wonderful old ones that featured the woodcut legend "Arabia Felix."
To better understand the expeditions of the 1930s to the 1950s, I had already purchased a series of English operational navigation charts, the best available in the early 1980s. Designed for use by aircraft, they indicated prominent ruins with three little dots. I thought there was a remote chance that Ubar had been sighted and noted without anyone realizing what it was. But this was not the case. Though the rest of Oman was dotted with ruins (medieval or later), there was nothing whatever in the vicinity of Bertram Thomas's coordinates for the road to Ubar. The area was, in fact, blank. No contour lines, no shading. A legend said only "MAXIMUM ELEVATIONS BELIEVED NOT TO EXCEED 1800 FEET." Even in the early 1980s, the land was uncharted.3
That the landscape of the area had long been a blank was clear on maps going back as far as the 1500s. Huge swatches of desert were written off as "great Sandy Space" and "deserts très arides." The maps did note a number of old towns, survivors from antiquity, but not Ubar. An exception was the Reverend William Smith's 1872 Atlas of Ancient Geography, in which "Wabar" appeared in the middle of a surprisingly detailed map of Arabia. This was heartening, for it meant fabled Ubar was more than a recent bedouin invention.
Reaching further back, into medieval times, I couldn't believe my luck in finding a map that was all I could ask for. I first saw it as a reproduction, then obtained detailed slides of it from the British Library, where it resides. On the Psalter Map, a mappa mundi compiled circa 1225 and less than four inches across, tiny triangles marked the location of eighty-four of the world's major cities—among them, it would appear, Ubar! And what a city it must have been. Though it didn't appear on the Psalter Map by name, the area where the road to Ubar had been found in southern Arabia was marked:
This says are liberi n colime er culis, Latin (not-very-good Latin, I was told) for "the altar of Liber and the Pillars of Hercules." In classical mythology, the Pillars of Hercules marked the edge of the known world, and "Liber" (often "Father Liber") was another name for Dionysus, god of the vine and wine, patron of revelry and ecstatic carrying-on.
But what were these two monuments, altar and pillars, doing in Arabia, let alone at Ubar? Dionysus was a Greek god, as was Hercules. And the Pillars of Hercules, I recalled, were said to have marked the Strait of Gibraltar. Delving into classical accounts, I pieced together what I thought was a plausible explanation.
First, consider Dionysus. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus, the god was born at Nysa, a "happy mountain" in Arabia Felix. It was only natural, then, that the Arabians should venerate Dionysus as one of their own, especially at a city known for its wanton ways. I found ancient Arabia's fascination with Dionysus confirmed by the Greek hi
storian Herodotus: "The way they cut their hair—all round in a circle, with the temples shaved—is, they say, in imitation of Dionysus."4
Concerning the Pillars of Hercules, it seems that in the lore of the ancient world there were more than one pair. In particular, a chronicle of the conquests of Alexander the Great relates that Alexander found "Gates of Hercules" ninety-five days' march along the Babylon road, about what it would take a traveler to reach the Arabian Pillars of Hercules recorded on the Psalter Map. (Ever on the alert for spoils, Alexander ordered the pillars pierced to see if they were hollow or solid gold.)
It was late on a work night when I read this. Just for a moment or so, I closed my eyes.
Digging the great red dune was easier than we thought. Slowly but surely, we uncovered many buildings. Most had fallen to ruin, yet one was remarkably preserved. It was a temple. Two grand free-stand ing pillars dedicated to the god Hercules flanked its entrance. As described in an account of Alexander the Great's adventures, they were the equivalent of twelve cubits high.
Our hopes high, we passed between the pillars and entered the temple. It took several minutes for our eyes to adjust to the gloom inside. Quietly, hardly exchanging a word, we picked our way forward and were startled by the sight of a procession of drunken revelers reeling along behind the god Dionysus. They were figures on a frieze decorating a stone altar, figures frozen in time. We were awestruck. This had to be the very spot where, 2,300 years ago, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king and conqueror, had come upon monuments to Hercules and Dionysus...
But alas, just when Alexander the Great became part of my theory concerning the Psalter Map, my theory fell apart. I discovered that though the Macedonian hero's conquests had been very real, they had given rise to some of the most outlandish fantasies of all time: the "Alexander books." Allegedly dating to an account written by one of his generals, these tales were popular well into medieval times. There were Armenian and Ethiopian Alexander books, an Indonesian version and an Icelandic one. They were forerunners of Gulliver's Travels and superhero comic books. In their pages Alexander encounters amazons, mermaids, and men who live on the smell of spices. He marvels at fleas the size of tortoises and lobsters as big as ships. He soars through the air in a griffin-powered flying machine and dives to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in a goatskin submarine.
It was likely, then, that whoever created the Psalter Map, probably a monk long on imagination (and short on spelling), had an Alexander book tucked under his straw pillow. And it turns out that the map's are liberi n colime er culis were not only fragments of spurious iconography, but they were inked in the wrong place. As the Alexander books have it, they should be in India; instead, they were set down in Arabia. There's a reason for this. In the Psalter Map, India is bisected by a wall built by Alexander to keep the rapacious hordes of the giants Gog and Magog from overrunning the world. The iconography of this takes up so much space that depictions of other Alexandrian events, like his pillar and altar encounter, had to be expeditiously shifted to the neighboring emptiness of Arabia, where Alexander never set foot. In either reality or legend. 5
The realization that the are liberi n colime er culis had nothing to do with Ubar was naturally disappointing. It had taken several weeks of spare time to decode the Psalter Map's promising inscription, find it worthless, and then figure out why. I must admit, though, I enjoyed the diversion. The Alexander books were surprisingly well plotted, and wildly entertaining. For instance, in an Armenian version written in the first person, Alexander, guided by the stars, crosses a desert that is anything but deserted:
The inhabitants of that place said that there are wild men and evil beasts there ... There were men each twenty-four cubits tall; and they had long necks, and their hands and fingers were like saws...
Moving on we came to a place where there were headless men. They had no heads at all, but had their eyes and their mouths on their chests, and they talked with their tongues like men ... Then there appeared to us, about nine or ten o'clock, a man as hairy as a goat. I thought of capturing the man for he was ferociously and brazenly barking at us. And I ordered a woman to undress and go to him on the chance that he might be vanquished by lust. But he took the woman and went far away where, in fact, he ate her.6
In their bizarre way, the Alexander books were instructive, for here was a good take on how myth worked. In the past I had read of myth as "hieratic" or "teleodidactic," cryptic cultural constructs that I could never quite grasp. Here myth was anything but arcane; it was a lively, mischievous animal with scissor hands, barking at us, that delighted in pouncing on the truth and making a merry hash of it. Yet shards of truth survive. There was an Alexander, and he did have great adventures. The Alexander books were reasonably accurate in their depiction of some peoples, places, and events.
I understood, too, why myths persist across the centuries. They offer entertainment. They have an action-adventure quotient, they have an aura of wonder and mystery—and, best yet, they offer insights into the glories and fallibilities of the human heart, and how and why we live and die. As the conquest-obsessed, immortality-seeking Macedonian Alexander reaches the far side of his desert, two birds with human faces fly overhead and, in Greek, ask, "Why do you tread this earth looking for the home of the gods? For you are not able to set foot in the Blessed Island of the skies. Why do you struggle to rise to heaven, which is not within your power?"7 These were sensible birds, not about to buy into Alexander's proclamation in 329 B.C. that he was a god. For all his might, chirped the duo, the Macedonian could not transcend his mortality.
Following the mythical footsteps of Alexander led me from the University Research Library to the gates of the Huntington Library in San Marino, near Pasadena, where I was kindly (and capriciously?) accepted as a "Reader," a researcher with formal privileges.
Set in magnificent grounds, the Huntington is a great marble building guarded by solemn Greek gods and housing a major research library of some 2 million books and 6 million manuscripts. Though famed for its holdings on British history and literature, the Huntington proved to have a surprising amount of material on Arabia: rare and wonderful editions of The Arabian Nights, the entire personal library of the great explorer-linguist-historian Sir Richard Burton, and, of special interest, a collection of original editions and manuscripts of the maps of Claudius Ptolemy.
In the late 1400s European printing houses sought to outdo each other bringing out woodcut editions of Ptolemy's atlas of the known world. Bologna, 1477 ... Rome, 1478 ... Ulm, 1482 ... These Cosmographias, as they were called, were impressive. The editions at the Huntington were leather-bound and hand-colored, often in gold. Each turn of their vellum pages gave a whiff of the past, musty and mysterious. Locating "Tabla Sexta Asiae"—Ptolemy's map of Arabia—I saw that hundreds of sites and geographic features were accurately identified.
Yet understanding Ptolemy's Cosmographias was not a simple matter. It took me a while to grasp when and how they were compiled and what exactly they portrayed. To begin with, the Cosmographias were not at all what they first seemed. Though compiled in the 1400s, they were not the product of the Renaissance quest for knowledge and new horizons. Ptolemy was born in Greece and lived in Egypt circa 110–170 A.D. The Renaissance editions were, in substance, reissues of maps produced some thirteen hundred years earlier at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Great Library of Alexandria.
Sometime around 150 A.D., as overseer of the Great Library, Claudius Ptolemy set out to map the known world. For information, he drew on his library's estimated 750,000 manuscripts, among them a number of "Peripluses" (literally, "round trips"), records of coastlines compiled by seafaring Greek traders. In the case of Arabia, these traders also brought back accounts of inland sites gathered, not firsthand but from local tribesmen. These informants measured camel journeys from place to place in "stages," each equaling a day's ride. Calculating that a stage averaged thirty to thirty-five miles, Ptolemy did his best to estimate the whereabouts of inland
cities and towns.
To plot this and his other accumulated data, Ptolemy not only envisioned the world as round, but invented and set upon it lines of longitude and latitude. Every site was then given identifying coordinates. In Arabia, for instance, Medina (then called Yathrib, or Lathrippa) was at 71° × 23°, and Saba Regio, the royal city of Sheba, was at 73° × 16°.8 In its original form, Ptolemy's atlas—including his map of Arabia—was a wonder of the world. Nothing so complete, so detailed, so accurate, had been done before. And therefore it was a very sad day when, in 391 A.D., at the order of the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a religious mob trashed and torched Alexandria's library—and Ptolemy's atlas went up in smoke.
Nonetheless, fragments of Ptolemy's work survived. At least one copy of his table of coordinates—his listings of landmarks and sites—was saved and passed down through the centuries, until in the late 1400s European mapmakers laid out longitude and latitude grids and plotted afresh Ptolemy's coordinates of coastlines, mountains, rivers, and tribal fiefdoms. They marked his cities and towns with quaint castles or little dots, often in gold. They reconstructed, quite successfully, the world as Ptolemy knew it, as it was not long after the time of Christ.
On Ptolemy's map of Arabia—if anywhere—I should find Ubar. And sure enough, on most editions, the tribal name "Iobaritae"—Latin for "Ubarites"—appears more or less where Bertram Thomas encountered his road to Ubar. But there was no identifiable settlement, only evidence that an Ubarite tribe once may have wandered the region's sandy wastes. No castle or golden dot on Ptolemy's map, no city. And it wasn't as if I could look further into the past. Before Ptolemy, the only maps were very crude and usually local.
For several weeks there seemed no way to get beyond this impasse. Then, to better understand how Ptolemaic maps were constructed— and to attempt to conjure something out of nothing—I decided to make one of my own, step by step. Working from a table of coordinates printed in Ulm, Germany, in 1482, I plotted nearly four hundred landmarks and towns, just as Renaissance mapmakers had done. The project, which took several evenings, was intriguing, much like working a jigsaw puzzle. But there were no surprises. Except ... a day or two after I'd finished, one of the places I'd plotted popped up in my mind and bothered me. Omanum Emporium, "the marketplace of Oman," appeared in western Arabia at 77° × 19°. As far as I knew, the ancient land of Oman was in eastern Arabia (as today's Sultanate of Oman is).
The Road to Ubar Page 4