In early May I compiled a list of coordinates of points of interest along our road and faxed them to Ran, who in turn forwarded them to the Omani military authorities. There was a chance that we could have the use of a military aircraft for our reconnaissance. If so, we had a flight plan.
At about this time a very curious thing happened. Finding myself with an unexpected few days off, I decided to take a break not only from filmmaking but from the Ubar project. I was getting a little obsessive about it, to say the least. In our garage I dusted off my
Landsat 5 / SPOT composite image of the Ubar road
thirty-year-old Raleigh bicycle. Though a clunker by current standards, it had in recent years taken me on longer and longer solos out across the deserts of the Southwest. What could be better than a swing out across the Mojave, then through Joshua Tree National Monument, and on into my favorite desert, the Anza-Borrego? It would be good exercise. I'd enjoy clear air, sweeping scenery, and, for company, a couple of paperback mysteries. My daughter Jennifer recommended I take something by the English writer Josephine Tey. I picked The Singing Sands, which had a rod, reel, and a trout on the cover; it appeared to be a tale of fishing and felony in damp, dull-skied Scotland.
And it was ... until my Raleigh and I stopped for Gatorade and pretzels (lunch when I'm left to my own devices) in the shade of a sandstone outcropping. Inspector Hugh Grant, Tey's Scotland Yard detective, has been puzzling over a murder on the London-Aberdeen sleeper. The victim, Grant learns, had been a pilot for Orient Commercial Airlines, an outfit that ran freight to southern Arabia. Grant conjectures that somewhere in Arabia the pilot may have been driven off course by a windstorm—and from the air discovered something incredibly rare and strange, something that led to his death.
I cycled on through the heat of the afternoon and thought about The Singing Sands. What was Arabia doing in this story? What was the something the pilot saw, the something worth killing for?
I stopped again for Gatorade and a few more pages. In Scotland, Inspector Grant drops by a local library to read up on Arabia—and happens on a description of a place called Wabar: "Wabar, it seemed, was the Atlantis of Arabia. The fabled city of Ad ibn Kin'ad. Sometime in the time between legend and history it had been destroyed by fire for its sins.... And now Wabar, the fabled city, was a cluster of ruins guarded by the shifting sands, by cliffs of stone that forever changed place and form; and inhabited by a monkey race and by evil jinns."1
Ubar! I sank down by the edge of the road and read on. A character based on Harry St. John Philby or Wilfred Thesiger, it is hard to tell which, is drawn into the plot. I suspected that one of the two men had rubbed Josephine Tey very much the wrong way, for the character is querulous, effete, a creature of "pathological vanity." Had Harry or Wilfred snubbed Josephine? And now, with this mystery, was she having her revenge?
As the sun fell lower in the sky, I wondered if perhaps Ubar had already been discovered and The Singing Sands was a fictionalization of what had happened! Although the Philby-Thesiger character doesn't find Ubar, someone else does. Sitting down to his coffee and scones, Inspector Grant opens the morning edition of the London Clarion and is startled by the headline "SHANGRI-LA REALLY EXISTS. SENSATIONAL DISCOVERY. HISTORIC FIND IN ARABIA."
He turns to the Morning News, which confirms "ASTOUNDING NEWS FROM ARABIA."
It was dark now, and chilly where I had stopped. I was twenty miles from anywhere. But I read on by flashlight, grimly determined to see how The Singing Sands came out. As the moon rose and shone upon the desert, I was relieved to find that Inspector Grant cracks the case, and the Philby-Thesiger character gets his comeuppance. And it became clear that Ubar was still out there, waiting to be found. The city's discovery in the book happened only in the writer's imagination. For a long afternoon and a good part of the evening, though, she had me fooled.
I pedaled on. It was cold, cold enough, fortunately, for the rattlesnakes to stay in their burrows rather than stretch out on the blacktop for warmth. I thought over The Singing Sands. It was clever, well researched, and encouraging. Midway through the story Inspector Grant observes, "None of the writers [that he had consulted] attempted to belittle or discount the legend.... The story was universal in Arabia and constant in its form, and sentimentalist and scientist alike believed that it had its basis in fact ... but the sands and the jinns and the mirages had guarded it well."
Ahead now were the lights of the little town of Borrego Springs where Kay and our daughters were to join me.
On the weekend, we would hike the desert washes and afterward share some Cerveza Pacificas with the park rangers who patrol the Anza-Borrego region. One, naturalist Mark Jorgensen, had spent some time in Arabia. He told us, "When you get out there, be sure to drink water, water, water. More than you would in our desert. Don't ration yourself. The human body is designed to operate at temperatures of up to 130 degrees, provided it has enough water."
It would prove to be good advice.
II. Expedition
11. Reconnaissance
IN THE SULTANATE OF OMAN on an August morning in 1990, the overnight Gulf Air flight from London rolled to a stop. Aboard was our team: Kay and I, George Hedges, Ran Fiennes, Ron Blom, and Juri Zarins. As the plane's door swung open, our impression of Muscat was, quite literally, a blur. Our eyeglasses were instantaneously fogged by the 100-percent humidity and the 120-degree heat, in the shade.
When we could see again, out the window of an air-conditioned van, it was clear that in the ten years since Kay and I had been here, Muscat had boomed. Everywhere we saw new buildings, lush landscaping, and extraordinary municipal monuments. To our right, a heroic hand burst from the shrubbery and thrust an even more heroic sword a good fifty feet into the air. To the left, a herd of oversize fiberglass oryxes placidly grazed. Down the road, a giant incense burner smoked by day and blazed with lasers by night.
This splendor, we learned, was at the behest of H.M. Sultan Qaboos ibn Said, a not only benevolent but imaginative absolute ruler. He was proud of his country's heritage. Indeed, he had recently issued edicts that Omanis should wear only traditional dress and that the colors of buildings should conform with a personally selected (and quite pleasing) palette of traditional hues. But H.M., as everyone knew him, was no isolationist; he admired the heritage of the West as well as the East. He loved Bach, had a palace organist (and organ), and had decreed that before noon only classical music should be played on the radio.
Oil exploration had favored the sultan and the Omanis, and overall the proceeds appeared to have been wisely spent on first-class roads, schools, public health (you could drink the water anywhere), and hospitals. The country appeared serene, though there were hints that its current prosperity had suspended but not dissolved tribal rivalries and that old religious enmities—some having to do with Islam and the West—were not far from the surface. Early on, a deputy minister did, quite diplomatically, question whether it was proper for us, as westerners, to seek Ubar.
"There might be some people—not me, of course—who might have an objection."
"To?"
"Looking for a city that is in the Koran."
"I see ... But these people, the ones at Ubar. Doesn't the Koran say they were bad people? Like, wicked?"
I rue...
"So Ubar couldn't be a holy city. In fact, it would have been anything but a holy city. It would be..."
"Sin city!" the deputy volunteered. "Quite. Well, there you are."
We were mutually relieved, though I sensed the deputy was not altogether convinced by this line of reasoning. Always, our team decided, we should be as circumspect as possible when it came to religious matters. As a result, more than once we would find ourselves faux-piously sipping orange juice as Omani hosts knocked down gin and tonics.
Most of that week was taken up by a round of meetings in Muscat orchestrated by Malik al-Hinai, of late an officer of the sultan's Palace Guard and now with the Oman International Bank, our initial sponsor. We p
aid calls on ministries. We made appeals to potential sponsors. Silver-tongued and charming, Sir Ranulph was a master at this. He initially estimated that a proper expedition would cost $35,000, then arbitrarily upped the figure to $78,000. When no one seemed to blink, he further raised the ante. "What's he saying? Where did he get that?" George Hedges whispered when, in the midst of a presentation, Ran offhandedly remarked that $180,000 should see us through.
Though we eventually did raise a modest amount of cash, our wherewithal to look for Ubar proved to be in-kind donations by companies from a variety of countries. Gulf Air offered to fly us between England and Oman. While in Muscat we would be put up at the al-Bustan Palace Hotel. Out in the desert, "the Official Vehicle of the Ubar Expedition" would be the Land Rover Discovery. To keep in touch we would use French Racal radios, and we would log our finds on IBM computers. And we most gratefully accepted Scotland's Rowntree-Mackintosh as the expedition's exclusive chocolatier. Their Kit Kat bars became an expedition staple. At one point I had occasion to request a favor from a desert imam. Ran translated the religious leader's reply: "He says just give him Kit Kats, and it's anything we want."
By the end of the week, all was well in Muscat and we were winging south in a single-engine World War II-vintage Beaver. We were traveling in the same direction we had flown when we accompanied the oryxes to their home range, but now we continued on. For close to three hours the desert rolled beneath us, then we angled southwest toward the coastal mountains of Dhofar—and a seething mass of clouds. This is the only place in Arabia where the great Indian monsoon swirls ashore, engulfing the mountains in a drizzly gloom. The little Beaver plunged into the clouds; visibility dropped to zero. Somewhere below, unseen, the damp fog nurtured the trees that produced the finest grade of the world's finest incense: frankincense.
A half hour later, we dropped through a low ceiling and landed at the seaside town of Salalah. An hour or so after that, we were walking a beach. We would, we hoped, be walking back in time, into the land and life of an unknown people.
Our intent, on both this reconnaissance and the larger expedition we hoped would follow, was to sneak up on Ubar by first learning what we could about the frankincense trade and the People of 'Ad. Only then would we focus exclusively on the fabled lost city. There was good reason for this approach. If we didn't find Ubar, we could at least contribute something to the understanding of the region's history—and not completely disappoint our sponsors and the Omanis.
It was gloomy on the beach. In the season of the monsoon, the Arabian Sea was an expanse of dark, churning water. Palm trees shuddered and thrashed in the wind. We approached and entered the fallen gates of Sumhuram, a ruined city that had been partially excavated by Wendell Phillips's team in the early 1950s. The city was perched on a bluff overlooking a sheltered lagoon where, long ago, ships anchored to take on cargoes of frankincense. We spread out and explored Sumhuram's ramparts, dwellings, shops, storerooms, and a temple complex. We admired an elegantly chiseled inscription dating to the time of our People of'Ad.
Inscription at Sumhuram
Years ago this inscription had been studied by Father Albert Jamme and the French epigrapher Jacqueline Pirenne. What we were looking at was a plaque commemorating the founding of Sumhuram, whose name is a composite word meaning either "the plan is great" or (more to the point) "the great scheme." Its six lines stated:
'Asadum Tal'an, son of Qawmum, servant of'Il'ad Yalut, king
of Hadramaut, of the inhabitants of the town of Shabwa,
undertook according to the plan the town of
Sumhuram, its siting and the leveling of the ground and its
flow [of water] from
virgin soil to its putting in order. The creation and realization
were on the initiative
and by the order of its master 'Abyata' Salhin, son of
Damar'alay,
who is commander of the army of Hadramaut, in the country
of Sakalan.
Nearby, three one-liners of scratched graffiti said: "The one-eyed [was here]," "Aywar and Hudail are dissatisfied," and "DETESTABLE!"1 What was this about? A good guess would be that whoever hauled and chiseled the stones to build this place—namely Aywar and Hudail and a one-eyed chap—weren't all that happy to be here, which is understandable, as they were probably conscripted or even slave laborers.
Considering the formal inscription, it was evident that Sumhuram was not built by the People of'Ad, the builders of Ubar. Rather, it was a colonial outpost of the Hadramaut, a kingdom whose capital "town of Shabwa" lay some five hundred miles to the west. Since Sumhuram was built "by the order of its master 'Abyata' Salhin ... who is commander of the army of Hadramaut," its construction was likely a military operation, "a great scheme" designed to corner and control a lucrative sea trade in frankincense.
As we pondered this, the air was suddenly rent by a cry of "Kullu wahad fi haytan min shan aflan!" It was Ran Fiennes, proclaiming, in his best Arabic, "Time for a picture!" We gathered, and the camera took in a mixed, verging on motley, crew of several amateurs and a few professionals, none of whom had worked together before. And only Ran had been in this part of Arabia. Yet we had a shared enthusiasm, even as we posed for a group shot in a place whose stones said nothing of the existence of the People of 'Ad, or of their lost city of Ubar.
As the camera's self-timer buzzed, Ron Blom wondered aloud, "How, I wonder, do you say 'cheese' in Arabic?"
"Ghumda!" answered Jumma al-Mashayki, one of our Omani police escorts.
"Ghumda!" we all shouted, as the camera buzzed and blinked.
The gloom of the monsoon's overcast faded into darkness, but we lingered at Sumhuram. We were heartened to see that this had once been a splendid site, with finely finished masonry, clearly the work of an advanced civilization. We were disheartened, of course, to realize that its builders were not the People of 'Ad, but colonists from the kingdom of the Hadramaut.
By flashlight we took a last look at the inscription and its nose-thumbing graffiti. Angling the beam to cast the letters in deep relief, we picked out the name "'Il'ad Yalut, king of Hadramaut." His name dates the site's construction, for he is mentioned (as King Eleazus) in a Greek mariner's account written sometime between 40 and 70 A.D. Sumhuram, then, had to have been built no earlier than about 20 A.D.
It was then that it came home to us that we might truly be on to something. There are allusions to the frankincense trade dating back to thousands of years B.C., but Sumhuram had been built after the time of Christ. Who, then, had managed the trade, shipped the region's precious incense overall those centuries before?
Who other than our People of'Ad?
For the next few days, we surveyed the coast with an eye to finding anything that might have been built by the 'Adites. We walked a couple of sites that might have been from their era, but they could also have been built by far-ranging Portuguese seafarers as late as the 1600s. Without actually digging, Juri explained, it was hard to tell. Depending on weather conditions and building materials, a site built within the last hundred years could look thousands of years old, and a thousand-year-old site could look as if it had been abandoned yesterday.
Wrapping up our survey and heading back to Salalah, we drove into a late afternoon patch of sunshine, a break in the pervasive gloom of the monsoon. Off to the left, Juri glimpsed something.
"Wait, wait! Over there!" he exclaimed.
At the wheel, Ran muttered, "Every time you see a rock, you want to stop."
"No! No. This is important!" insisted Juri.
Juri had spied an ancient graveyard, dozens and dozens of rock-walled mounds. Ran sighed and drove over to them; everybody got out and, led by Juri, prowled from one mound to another to another.
"Don't step on that," Juri cautioned Ran. "That's something right there. See that?"
He picked up a pottery shard and explained that it could have accompanied a burial and, over the millennia, worked its way to the surface. "Burnished
ware. Look at that. See, hold it in the sun there. Kind of shines. See that? The people who made that pottery took a little stick and rubbed it real good to give it a shine. They couldn't make fancy pottery. But they tried hard. Did their best."
In a simple scrap of pottery, Juri the archaeologist had glimpsed the hand and life of an ancient potter. Moreover, the piece was unlike anything Juri had previously seen in Arabia. He logged the potsherd and hastened past the graves to the crest of a hill overlooking a marshy area called, we later learned, Khor Suli. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could discern traces of the docks of an ancient harbor. And closer to the sea we saw some structures that George Hedges dubbed "boats." They were stone enclosures, three to four meters long, shaped very much like small boats still in use on the Arabian coast. Juri wondered if cargoes of frankincense might have been sorted and weighed here before being loaded onto actual boats.
The site at Khor Suli almost certainly predated Sumhuram. Its masonry was rougher; there were no inscriptions. It had its own style of pottery, and its graves and stone "boats" were unique. This was the work not of outside colonists but of a native populace.
The People of'Ad?
The next day we were to fly a long-range desert reconnaissance. If we were lucky, we would find compelling evidence of the People of 'Ad. Of course we might find absolutely nothing, in which case the quest for Ubar would probably be over.
In an early-morning drizzle, under a leaden overcast, we clambered aboard a camouflaged Huey helicopter provided by the SOAF, the Sultanate of Oman Air Force. It was a tight squeeze: our six team members plus three National Police escorts and the pilot and copilot. And camping gear, weaponry, water, and fuel.
The Road to Ubar Page 10