DESTRUCTION Iram/Ubar was suddenly destroyed by a great cataclysm. But what actually happened? The storyteller appears unsure of his apocalyptic imagery. Early on, a mysterious voice promises destruction by an "icy gale, turbulent with dust" (line 108). A few sentences later another voice exclaims, "May they [the 'Adites] quench their thirst with hot water" (line 115). Next we are given the imagery of the three volcanic clouds. The Barren Wind that is ultimately unleashed is supremely violent but not terribly convincing. It has the characteristics of a tornado, an all-but-unknown phenomenon in southern Arabia.
Other versions of the tale downplay the wind, having Iram/Ubar destroyed by a mighty but still baffling "Divine Shout." In one account the end comes as "suddenly the earth opened around it and Iram, bathed in a strange twilight, began to sink slowly down until the whole city was completely swallowed up. All that remained was an endless wilderness of empty, shifting sands across which the winds moaned and howled."3
If we ever did find Iram/Ubar, it certainly would be interesting to investigate how (or even if) the settlement was destroyed.
LOCATION The casual mention of the "Wadi al-Mughith" (line 147) was to provide a valuable clue to Ubar's location. At first the name didn't make any sense; it's not to be found on any map, old or new. But then, by chance, I found it cited in an account by the 800s A.D. geographer Ibn Sa'd, except that he expands the name to the "Wadi al-Mughith in Sihr." This rang a bell from my earlier Ubar research. The word "Sihr" appears on something called "The Gardens of Humanity and the Amusement of the Soul," a map compiled by Muhammad al-Idrisi, an Arab cartographer living in Sicily in the 1100s A.D. Though fanciful in title, the map is an outstanding example of the Arab scholarship that through the Dark Ages kept a flickering flame of learning alive. Based on earlier records and the accounts of mariners and merchants, it depicts Arabia in detail. The Ubar region bears the legend "the region of 'Ad and the place of Sihr."
Here, then, was an intriguing two-step connection: our rawi's tale placed Ubar near the Wadi al-Mughith, which another writer called the Wadi al-Mughith in Sihr. His addition of the word "Sihr" leads us to a locale on a respected early map of Arabia, a detail of which is shown here. The shaded box approximates what we had tentatively settled on as our Ubar search area. We were, it appeared, in the right neighborhood!
Detail of al-Idrisi's map of Arabia
Several worthies of storyteller al-Kisai's time locate Iram/Ubar and the People of 'Ad in the same patch of Arabia. The historian Nashwan ibn Sa'id al-Himyari (died 1117) sums up: "Ubar is ... the name of the land which belonged to 'Ad in the eastern part of Yemen; today it is an untrodden desert owing to the drying up of its water. There are to be found in it great buildings which the wind has smothered in sand." (At the time, eastern Yemen included part of what today is Oman.)4
This Nashwan al-Himyari was also a poet, who dwelt on the theme of vainglory come to grief. His verses are an epitaph for Iram/Ubar and the People of'Ad:
They turned to dust and are trampled under foot,
as they once did with others ...
They rest in the earth now,
when once they dwelt in palaces
and enjoyed food, drink, and beautiful women.
Time mingles good with bad fortune,
Time's children are made to taste grief amidst joy.5
8. Should You Eat Something That Talks to You?
THE APPROACH I HAD TAKEN with al-Kisai's tale "The Prophet Hud" was to look closely at the story, identify the elements added on over the years, and throw them out, hoping that maybe—always maybe—something would be left of a real time and place. This approach also worked well with the story of the geographer Yaqut ibn 'Abdallah (died 1229). "Yaqut" was a slave's name meaning "Ruby." In the medieval Arab world, it was common to give slaves names of gems and flowers and virtues, allowing their master to say, "Bring me dates, Pleasure. Tell me a story, Ruby."
As a trusted slave, Yaqut traveled the Persian Gulf on behalf of his master, a Baghdad merchant. He increased his master's prosperity, traveled farther, and eventually was given leave to compile his Mu- jam al-Buldam, or "Dictionary of Lands." It includes a substantial section on the "City of Wabar," or Ubar. Featuring lore Yaqut gathered while trading in Oman, most of his description is fanciful. Yaqut was particularly taken by the notion of nisnases. He wrote, "The Lord destroyed everything there [in Ubar] and converted the human beings to nisnas—a monkey-like creature with a human-being look. The men and women appeared ridiculous, each had half a head and half a face with only one eye and one arm and one leg ... They used to jump high and rapidly on that one leg. God made them chew up the grass like cows and buffalos." 1
Yaqut gives us anecdotal accounts of bedouin run-ins with "devil man" nisnases—and he is disquieted by the fact that nisnases speak Arabic. This, he reports, troubled the bedouin as well, who felt it was okay to hunt down and spear a nisnas (just as they would slay any other creature), but, they asked, should you eat something that talked to you?
Because of his preoccupation with nisnases, both Arabic and Western scholars have ridiculed and discounted Yaqut's account of Ubar. But subtract all the nisnas lore, and what's left is an intriguing geographical description: "Wabar is a vast piece of land, about 300 fer-sakh [37½ miles] wide....The land of Wabar was very much fertile and very rich with water. It was full of trees and fruits. The very fast growing population there could multiply their wealth and could live in excessive luxury.... [There is] a big well called the Well of Wabar."2
Here we have a thumbnail sketch of Ubar as it really might have been: a sizable oasis watered by a great well, and the home of a rapidly expanding, prosperous population that became a little too full of themselves.
9. The City of Brass
AS THE TALE OF UBAR was told and retold throughout medieval times, any clues to its underlying reality became more and more submerged in fantasy. This is evident in the variations of the legend that appear in Alf Laylah wah Layla, the Arabian Nights.
The Arabian Nights tales have long been considered the product of overheated imagination. When they were popularized in English at the turn of our century, essayist Thomas Carlyle considered them "unwholesome literature" and forbade their presence in his house. "Downright lies," he sniffed. "No sober stone is permitted to kill even the wildest fantasies." Even back in the 900s, historian Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Mas'udi termed the tales "vulgar, insipid"; nevertheless, he wrote of their origin: "The first who composed tales and made books of them were the Persians. The Arabs translated them and the learned took them and embellished them and composed others like them."1
Still relatively unexplored is a possible pre-Persian origin of the tales. Ethnologist Leo Frobenius and mythologist Joseph Campbell both suspected that a number of the tales were in their earliest forms genuinely Arabian—and had their genesis in the valley of the Hadramaut, not far west of our search area.2 (It was in this valley that Ubar's Prophet Hud was traditionally said to lie buried.) Given this proximity—and given that Iram/Ubar's People of'Ad wander in and out of many of the tales in the Arabian Nights —I thought they might conceal a wealth of useful information.
A succinct, relatively restrained tale is "The Story of Many Columned Irani and Abdallah Son of Abi Kilabah." As for clues to Ubar, there is an interesting description of the city's locale as "an uninhabited spot, a vast and fair open plain clear of sand-hills and mountains, with founts flushing..." And, following Ubar's divine demolition, there is the line "Moreover, Allah blotted out the road which led to the city"—a reference, it would appear, to the very road we were seeking.3
In other Arabian Nights tales, the myth of Ubar gathers momentum—and fancy—as it careens from story to story. In "The Eldest Lady's Tale" a medieval traveler enters a version of Ubar and finds it quite intact. It has not been destroyed; rather, its inhabitants "had been translated by the anger of Allah and had become stones ... all were into black stones enstoned: not an inhabited house appeared to the espier, nor a blower of
fire. We were awe struck at the sight ... and said 'Doubtless there is some mystery in all this.'"4
In this version the Iram/Ubar myth has been populated by maskoot, an Arabic term for human beings petrified by the wrath of God. It has been suggested that the idea of maskoot came from the discovery by superstitious bedouin of shattered statuary in the deserts of Upper Egypt.
More maskoot are found in the tale "The City of Brass," by all odds the most bizarre rendition of the Ubar myth. It is phantasmagoric, funereal. It recounts the adventures of Emir Musa and his companions as they set out from the sea in search of a mysterious lost city. They are directed across a great desert by a brass horseman, then by a djinn (or genie) mired up to his armpits in a furnace. The way "is full of dozens of frights, full of wonders and strange things." Emir Musa's little group finally climbs a hill, and...
When they reached the top, they beheld beneath them a city, never saw eyes a greater or goodlier, with dwelling-places and mansions of towering height, and palaces and pavilions and domes gleaming gloriously bright ... and its streams were a-flowing and flowers a-blowing and fruits a-glowing. It was a city with gates impregnable; but void and still, without a voice or a cheering inhabitant. The owl hooted in its quarters; the bird skimmed circling over its squares and the raven croaked in its great thoroughfares weeping and bewailing the dwellers who erst made it their dwelling. 5
Within its walls, the city is a showcase of death, at once splendid and the stuff of nightmares. Its streets and palaces are filled with ghastly long-dead maskoot. The queen of Sheba even makes a cameo appearance. Reclining on a bejeweled couch, she appears as "the lucedent sun, eyes never saw a fairer." But..."she is a corpse embalmed with exceeding art; her eyes were taken out after her death and quicksilver set under them, after which they were restored to their sockets. Wherefore they glisten and when the air moveth the lashes, she seemed to wink and it appeareth to the beholder as though she looked at him."
Everywhere in this city of the petrified are graven inscriptions that drive home the moral message: the pleasures of immense riches—here everywhere in evidence—are for naught, for life is brief and death almighty. This powerful idea is central to medieval Islam. As a legend over the tomb of the son of King Shaddad ibn 'Ad tells us: "Be warned by my example. I amassed treasures beyond the competence of all the kings of the earth, deeming that delight would still endure to me. But there fell on me unawares the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies, the Desolator of domiciles and the Spoiler of inhabited spots." The angel of Death.
Though its message and central story line are relatively simple, "The City of Brass" in its entirety is a dense, complex tale, a concatenation of imagery and characters from diverse times and places. Emir Musa appears to be an incarnation of the Old Testament's Elijah. And what are not only the queen of Sheba but Solomon and Alexander the Great doing here? The tale, packed with hundreds of allusions, is based on at least eight major sources. Indeed, the brass city itself appears to be inspired not only by Ubar but by rumors of a town of copper and brass located either in North Africa or in Spain. To accommodate these rumors, whoever wrote the tale whisked Ubar and its People of 'Ad from Arabia and plunked them down in Andalusia!
"The City of Brass" is ultimately surreal, beckoning us ever onward into a sun-drenched yet sinister landscape that "is like unto the dreams of the dreamer and the sleep-visions of the sleeper or as the mirage of the desert, which the thirsty take for water; and Satan maketh it fair for men even unto death."
The tale draws to a close with hardly a glimmer of Ubar as a real place. If mythmaking can be likened to a mirage—hiding yet reflecting a distant reality—that mirage has finally become all but impenetrable. Emir Musa and his companions take leave of the sepulchral brass city they have discovered and retrace their steps across the desert to the sea. But then, in the span of a single sentence, the mirage fleetingly dissolves. We are told that the emir's party "came in sight of a high mountain overlooking the sea and full of caves, wherein dwelt a tribe of blacks, clad in hides, with burnooses also of hide and speaking an unknown tongue."
Here, quite unexpectedly, is a sudden cluster of clues.
1. "a high mountain overlooking the sea and full of caves ..." In all of Arabia, the only seaside peaks known for their caves are the Dhofar Mountains in southern Oman.
2. "caves, wherein dwelt a tribe..." The peninsula's only cave dwellers—past or present—are tribes of the Dhofar Mountains.
3. "a tribe of blacks..." The people of the Dhofar Mountains are distinctly dark-skinned.
4. "clad in hides, with burnooses also of hide..." Hides come from cattle, and there is only one area of Arabia where within the past 4,000 years cattle have been a mainstay of a tribe's livelihood: the Dhofar Mountains.
5. "and speaking an unknown tongue." The Dhofar Mountains are the only area where a language other than Arabic is spoken—an ancient language, only recently studied.6
Were these legitimate clues? Or was this a cluster of incredible coincidences? In any case, if we ever found the wherewithal to search for Ubar, we would begin our journey at the foot of the Dhofar Mountains. We would cross these mountains, where to this day dark-skinned people raise cattle and speak a strange language. Until recently, they dwelt in caves.
This was the logical route to our search area in the desert beyond. In following it, we would be setting out in the footsteps of Bertram Thomas, Wendell Phillips—and now, apparently, Emir Musa of the Arabian Nights.
10. The Singing Sands
AT THE TURN OF 1990 I was at work, alone, sorting out paperwork for a documentary film for Occidental Petroleum. I gazed out the window of my office at the company's Los Angeles headquarters, and instead of steel and glass towers saw the sands of Arabia. Was Ubar really out there? Or was it only a city of the imagination—as real as brass horsemen, djinns in furnaces, and queens with quicksilver eyes.
The phone rang. It was George Hedges. "We got a letter from Yahya," he said. His voice was curiously flat, as if he was feigning nonchalance.
Yahya. Another mystic? Like the Count, like Jorsh?
"Yahya..." George repeated. "According to his letterhead, he's with the Oman International Bank. They want to sponsor us."
George explained that Barry Zorthian, the ex-CIA operative we had met in Washington, had brought our project to the attention of Dr. Omar Zawawi, chairman of the Oman International Bank. A physician and philanthropist as well as entrepreneur, Dr. Zawawi liked the idea of looking for Ubar and asked his associate Yahya Abdullah to contact us. If we could make a brief preliminary trip to Oman, Dr. Zawawi's bank would not only pay our way but help us enlist additional sponsors, who would either help underwrite the expedition or donate services and equipment. At the same time we could get a feel for the problems we would face and perhaps even fit in a quick reconnaissance of our search area.
"How about that?" said George with a deep and heartfelt sigh. "At last!"
We called Juri Zarins. He was delighted with the news. At the time he was researching the demand for incense in the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia, a need that may have been met by shipments from Ubar.
We called Ran Fiennes. With the influential Dr. Zawawi behind us, Ran felt that permission would be granted for at least an Ubar reconnaissance. There was a hitch, though. Ran was about to set out on another Arctic adventure—a walk, unassisted by machine or dog, to the North Pole. The earliest he could fit in the Ubar reconnaissance was the following summer. We settled on the last two weeks in July. Considering that nearly ten years had gone by, what was another few months? The delay, in fact, would give us time to analyze some space imaging that was due in, in fact overdue, from the French SPOT satellite.
At the Jet Propulsion Lab, Ron Blom and Charles Elachi were delighted that an expedition was now possible. "But," Ron grumbled, "I don't get it."
"Get what?" I asked.
"What's wrong with the French?" What Ron had in mind was their inexplicable delay in forwardin
g computer tapes of the SPOT satellite's pass over our search area. It was not as if JPL/NASA had written a bad check.
Ron called the SPOT people and got the verbal equivalent of an exasperated shrug. The reason for the delay, they explained, was that the satellite had twice overflown our search area, and twice sent back unusable images. Too many clouds.
Clouds in the Rub' al-Khali? Unlikely, Ron thought. And then he recalled that the French routinely spot-checked incoming images with low-resolution, low-quality scans. "Perhaps you're not seeing clouds at all," he suggested. "Perhaps those clouds are dunes."
They were. And a month later we had images that were worth the wait. In black-and-white rather than color, they had triple the resolution of our previous Landsat 5 shots. The road to Ubar was razor sharp and clearly visible as it ran far out into the dunes of the Rub' al-Khali.
As I studied the image, absorbed in what might lie along the Ubar road, Ron and Bob Crippen whispered back and forth; I caught phrases like "computer waypoints" and "pixel registration."
"We can do better," they announced.
What they had in mind was a computer-generated merge of data from our Landsat 5 and SPOT images. The result would be a single image that had the sharpness of the black-and-white SPOT data and the rich color of the Landsat 5 imagery. It was a technologically daunting idea. Two disparate pictures, taken years apart from different altitudes and angles, with different lenses, would have to be precisely overlaid: 36,000,000 pixels of SPOT information superimposed on 16,262,000 pixels of Landsat 5 information.
It worked, and the merged image was detailed and dazzling. If the expedition did go forward, we had plenty of candidates for Ubar to check out. The most promising was one we named the "L" site. Our "road to Ubar" led to a sharply defined L (400 by 400 meters) that appeared to be man-made. It could be an agricultural area—or even a walled, ruined city. There was nothing remotely like it anywhere else on our images.
The Road to Ubar Page 9