The Road to Ubar

by Nicholas Clapp

  Pilot Nick Clark, an Englishman on contract to the SOAF, flipped a sequence of switches. "Ignition," he announced. The Huey's main rotor turned, lazily at first. "Well, then, two minutes to liftoff." The Huey's rotors spun and whined, faster and faster. The big helicopter rocked and shuddered. And then, hardly realizing it, we were airborne, angling up into a thousand feet of dense monsoon. As we banked and turned north, there was a misty glimpse of the ground crew, waving and wishing us well.

  A half hour later, we broke free of the coastal monsoon and saw before us the desert: blindingly bright, parched, pristine. Not a settlement, not a road to be seen. Nick the pilot swung an opaque combat visor down over his eyes. His voice crackled over the intercom: "Holding at 2,000 feet. On a direct bearing to your coordinates 18 degrees 32 minutes by 52 degrees 36 minutes. Should be there in a little over an hour." The coordinates were for the spot where Bertram Thomas, sixty years earlier, had crossed "the road to Ubar." Because we were heavily loaded and would be burning fuel at a rapid rate, we had elected to head directly to our most promising sites.

  Nick: "Off to the left, that's the Wadi Ghadun." This great serpentine dry streambed heads north and into the sands of the Rub' al-Khali. What a trade route this could have been. I imagined caravans bearing frankincense off to the horizon, perhaps to Ubar. But imagining was one thing, and finding hard evidence was another. We could easily go down in the annals of Ubar exploration as hapless dreamers—"misguided at best."

  I had read about cold sweats and seen a few in the movies. They hit Humphrey Bogart when he had his back to the wall and realized his automatic was in his other jacket. Wedged into the Huey, I remembered, or thought I remembered, a big close-up of John Garfield, as on a wing and a prayer he coaxed his battered B-24 back to Britain. I knew how he felt. This day would have to lead us somewhere, to something. I looked around. Was anybody else not feeling so good about this outing? Ran and George were lost in thought (conversation was impossible); framed by the barrels of a pair of automatic rifles, Kay smiled over at me, immensely enjoying her first helicopter ride. An old hand at flying desert terrain, Ron Blom shifted his gaze back and forth from the window to the Landsat 5 space image spread across his knees.

  Nick the pilot, Ron, and I were linked by headsets. "Ron? Anything?" I asked him. "See anything?"

  "Nothing as yet. Some great geology, of course. And up ahead it looks like we're in for a sandstorm."

  "Afraid so," Nick confirmed.

  I thought out loud, "It's hard imagining anyone actually living out here, isn't it? Now or then." Hoping that they would disagree.

  "Yes, it is," said Ron.

  "I'd say so," confirmed Nick, then added, "Coming up on target."

  Discernible ahead was the ancient dry lakebed that had caught our attention on our very first radar space image. As we dropped down onto it, a cloud of swirling red sand, kicked up by our rotors, engulfed us. "Not to worry," Nick assured us, landing blind and hitting the desert floor. As the cloud of sand drifted clear of the idling helicopter, he warned, "Watch the rotors. Stay where you can see me. Nobody get behind me."

  According to our calculations, we were more or less where Thomas had reported the hundred-yard-wide road to Ubar. But now we found the lakebed crisscrossed and churned up by modern vehicle tracks too narrow to show up on our space imaging. They would make it difficult to find and follow Thomas's road. How they got here was answered as three vehicles materialized on the horizon and sped our way.

  An Omani military border patrol. Or, as we were to call them, the Phantoms of the Desert. They drove stripped-down, sand-swamped Land Rovers. No doors or windshields, but a few key accessories: racks for extra fuel and water, passenger-side .45-caliber machine guns, and, most critical of all, three extra batteries battened between the front seats. This wasn't the place for a balky starting motor. If you had to get out and walk, you might as well lie down and die.

  We never saw the Phantoms' faces, hidden behind dark Afrika Korps-style goggles and woolen Omani head cloths called shamags. What they were patrolling for was a mystery to us, though we later heard they were engaged in a shoot-on-sight war with smugglers, who followed the route of the Ubar road as they ran drugs from the Arabian seacoast north across Oman and into Saudi Arabia. On their return, if they hadn't been gunned down, they would smuggle back gray-market color television sets.

  The Phantoms of the Desert were quite willing to help us look for the road to Ubar. We thanked them for their offer, but considering the overlay of modern tracks, we felt we would be better off seeking our road farther on, in less trammeled reaches of the Rub' al-Khali.

  Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the Land Rovers raced off across the desert to destinations and destiny unknown. And we were again airborne. Ahead now were the red dunes of the Rub' al-Khali. They did not yet form a solid mass of sand. Rather, they stretched in long rows, with intermittent gravel plains—known as "dune streets"—between them. At first these intervals were scored by modern tracks, but as we flew on—and the dunes rose to heights of two, three, four hundred feet—the tracks thinned out.

  "Ten kilometers to target," Nick announced.

  "Ron," I asked, "just to the north? You see what I see?"

  "Could be our road. It's hard to tell with the blowing sand and all. But it's wider, more diffuse than the vehicle tracks we've seen."

  "Older then?"

  "Can't say." He squinted. "Can't see. Lost it."

  The blowing sand blotted our vision, then cleared. And below us now there were no tracks at all. This, though, was as it should have been; below us, according to our best Landsat/SPOT image, a flash flood had wiped away our road.

  Nick punctuated our thoughts: "Five kilometers to target." What we were heading for was the most dramatic appearance of the road to Ubar on our space imaging. It was also where, on his detailed map of Arabia, Bertram Thomas had spotted the "Probable Location of the Ancient City of Ubar."

  "Four kilometers." Ahead now was a massive red dune more than six hundred feet high.

  "Three kilometers." Nick guided the Huey over the shoulder of the dune and into a valley beyond.

  "Two kilometers to target."

  And there it was, unmarred by recent tracks: our road to Ubar. It came out from under the dune below us, continued for a good kilometer across an intervening plain, then disappeared under another dune. The track had to be very old, for it clearly had been laid down before the immense dunes that had buried it were formed. The road had been there for thousands of years.

  "One kilometer..."

  "Our road ... Can you land right beside it?"

  "Going in..."

  We tumbled out of the helicopter and, as fast as we dared walk in the 115-degree heat, hastened across the plain. But the road wasn't there.

  "You just walked right over it," Nick shouted (and no doubt chuckled to himself).

  So we had. We marveled: the road to Ubar was clearly visible from 520 miles out in space, yet was barely discernible on the ground. What our space imaging had measured was not the earth's color or contrast, but its compression from the passage of untold caravans. With Nick's correction, we saw it: the road was composed of rows and rows of faint but unmistakable tracks heading northwest.

  Quickly, we were airborne again for a short hop to the "L" site, which was the leading candidate for lost Ubar. Our expectations rose—and, even before we landed, fell. What might have been a walled settlement was nothing more than an unusual L-shaped alkali dry lake. It's been said that nature avoids right angles. Not here. The L formation had six of them, all beautifully shaped and geometrical, all formed by nature, not man.

  As we lifted off, I thought again of the phrase "misguided at best."

  Yet we saw that the Ubar road was still down there, and we were able to follow it onward, the sole track through this desert wilderness. Time and again, the ancient route would disappear into the sands, then, a kilometer or so later, reappear on an interval of gravel plain. Where it was buri
ed, could Ubar also be buried? From the air, there was no way to tell. But on the ground, there would likely be telltale clues as the road neared the city: a concentration of potsherds, graffiti left on small rocks by camel drivers, perhaps even fragments of structures.

  "I hate to say it, but if it's all the same to you, we should be turning back," said Nick. "It's hot. We're heavy. And we're not doing all that well on fuel."

  Up ahead we could make out where the dunes became a solid mass, swallowing up the caravan tracks we'd followed. If Ubar was buried farther on, it would be impossible to find it. The helicopter banked, turned, and headed back along the road. We scanned it again, now looking for additional features that had caught our attention on our space images.

  We passed back over the "L" site. A bust. Next we looked for what might have been a lost oasis where our space imagery showed a patch of infrared radiation. But whatever created it must have been transient—we saw nothing. (When the Landsat 5 satellite passed over, seasonal vegetation may have sprouted from a rain-dampened hollow in the dunes.) It was then that Nick announced, "We're not going to make it. We're burning fuel like mad." He hesitated, then suggested a plan. "Best bet is I drop everyone off, lighten up. Should be able to make it to an emergency fuel dump, then back. Okay?"

  "Okay. But could you at least drop us off at the next waypoint, the one at 18 degrees 32 minutes by 52 degrees 31 minutes?"

  "Will do."

  This was a hot spot that had seemed promising on our SIR-B radar scan. But as we dropped down to it, we could see that it was yet another natural (though unusual) formation, a small limestone hill rising from the surrounding dunescape.

  Nick offloaded us at the base of the hill. "Got to keep moving, so no shutting down. Watch yourselves. Should be back in an hour if all goes well..." In less than two minutes, he was on his way. His Huey became a speck on the horizon, then vanished.

  We trudged to the top of the hill and found there a single, solemn bedouin grave. We checked the temperature. Shaded, at eye level, it was 120 degrees. The ground temperature, then, would be well over 160. We checked our supplies. Kay had some sandwiches. But most of our water, we realized, was still in the helicopter. We had only a few quarts in backpacks. Normally this would have been plenty, except that out here you were thirsty five minutes after your last drink.

  Kay opened the umbrella she had brought along. Earlier on we had kidded her about it. Now, one by one, we took turns strolling over to Kay to double-check the time and gaze out across the desert, burning with a heat so intense it felt as if the oxygen were being drawn from the air. "Heat suffocation" sounded like an appropriate medical term—was there such a thing?

  An hour went by. Everyone now just happened to be facing east-southeast, where Nick's helicopter had disappeared across the dunes. Our unspoken thoughts, I'm sure, were similar: what if Nick didn't quite make it back to the fuel dump? What if he ran out of gas or threw a rod or lost a bearing?

  Two hours since Nick left. We said nothing, just listened. In the desert stillness, the tiniest of sounds was exaggerated. The crunch of a foot was thunderous, a whisper a shout. Then, two hours and twenty minutes after the helicopter had winged away, we heard a distant thumpety-thump, then spied far off a gnatlike, angellike speck skittering over the dunes.

  Once we were aboard, Nick explained that the fuel dump had been marauded, either by drug runners or local bedouin. Out in the desert, fifty-five-gallon drums all but beg you to fill up. Luckily, he had managed to scrounge a few gallons and make it on to an SOAF outpost.

  "Sorry about that, mates. It will be on to Shisur, then?"

  "If it's okay by you..."

  Prior to the drilling of recent bore holes, the well at Shisur had provided the only reliable fresh water in this quadrant of the Rub' al-Khali. As indicated on our space imaging, the Ubar caravan route made a considerable swing to pass by Shisur. Our theory was that the well had been a way station, a rest stop on the road to Ubar. It might be a good place to find traces of the People of 'Ad.

  A patch of green—a tiny oasis—marked Shisur. We circled once and landed by a cluster of one- and two-room cinder-block buildings, a seasonal settlement of the Bayt Musan, a band of the Rashidi bedouin. They greeted us warmly, if a little warily, and offered us the abiding hospitality of the desert. Little boys ran from house to house, rounding up sufficient cups and glassware. Cardamom-flavored coffee was brewed and ceremoniously poured. Sitting in a circle on the floor of Shisur's one-room schoolhouse, we inquired as to one another's well-being. It was a formal, almost courtly gathering. I sat on my left hand to ensure that it wouldn't unwittingly reach for a handful of dates, a breach of bedouin manners.

  The Rashidi were pleased we knew of their history. They listened with interest to our idea and hopes of finding Ubar. Yes, they were well aware of the lost city and believed it could lie as close as half a day's drive away. Some day, Allah willing, a desert wind would bare its walls. And did we know that there were ruins here at Shisur? Yes, we had read of the fort here. It had been described by both Bertram Thomas and Wilfred Thesiger. Thesiger noted that it had been built by Badr ibn Tuwariq, a famed sheik of the early 1500s.

  The Rashidi walked us over to Shisur's ruined fort. A lot of work had gone into it, considering its location so far out in the desert. Too bad that it dated back only five centuries.

  "All right! Yes!" Juri had found a potsherd, burnished in much the same way as the scrap he had found at Khor Suli on the coast.

  "Unfamiliar," Juri mused. "Weird stuff."

  "How old?"

  "Could be the People of 'Ad. It's unique, could have been made very early on, a couple of thousand years ago. But it's also a little bit sloppy, see here? This rim. They didn't finish it as well as they could have. Maybe things weren't going so well, maybe they didn't care anymore. Could be late."

  "Late ... What do you mean by late?"

  "Medieval, I suppose, or maybe even after that, at about the time Sheik What's-his-name built his fort here." The promise of the Shisur shard faded.

  It had been a long day and was still a very hot one. As we returned to the helicopter, everyone dragged a bit, except pilot Nick, whose step was now remarkably sprightly. He said something about a need to conserve fuel, or maybe a need to avoid turbulence. The upshot was that the last leg of the flight was to be fast and low.

  A half hour beyond Shisur, we banked and dropped down into the Wadi Andhur, a dry watercourse that originated in the incense groves of the Dhofar Mountains, off to the south. The wadi was once a major caravan route, a branch of the Ubar road.

  As we followed the wadi south, I checked my watch: it was a little after seven P.M. The desert was no longer relentlessly bright and shadowless. The dry watercourse was cast in deep relief; boulders and patches of scrub brush were caught in the low sun's golden crosslight. They whipped by, no more than twenty or thirty feet below us. The wadi narrowed. We careened hard to the left, then to the right, then back again, following its twists and turns. Out the side window all was sky. A second later and the view was of the wadi floor, as the helicopter's rotors flattened vegetation and kicked up swirls of sand.

  We hurtled on. Kay, by a window, was really enjoying the ride, untroubled by thoughts of imminent physical danger, such as catching a rotor and crashing.

  Quite unexpectedly, the wadi widened. Ahead, in its center, rose twin mesas crowned with impressive ruins. We had come to the walled fortress of Andhur, reported by Bertram Thomas in 1930 and yet to be excavated or studied.

  Reconnaissance into the Dhofar interior

  In an aerobatic climax to the day, Nick spiraled into a deft landing within the walls of Andhur's south mesa. We offloaded our camping gear (and, this time, water). We improvised a plan: Nick would leave us to explore the site, then return, refueled, the next morning to pick us up.

  We waved the helicopter on its way, then paused a minute to catch our breath and take in Andhur's splendid setting. It was quiet now, not the deathly silence of
the open desert, but a stillness touched by a murmur of breeze, the chirps of a few hardy birds, and the bleating of goats.

  A shout, in Arabic, came up from the base of our mesa. We looked over the edge to see a raggedy flock and a fierce Jebali (mountain man) herdsman. He was quite agitated. Ran listened.

  "I can't quite make it all out, but he claims that our helicopter frightened five of his goats to death ... Oh, and there's more. It seems another dozen goats, at least, have run away. Dear me, tsk, tsk." (When the occasion warranted, Ran did an excellent "tsk, tsk," at once skeptical and sympathetic.)

  Ran offered to make amends. "Just bring us the frightened-to-death goats," he shouted down, "and we'll discuss a price."

  The Jebali cursed (no translation needed), whacked his (surviving) goats with his staff, and stalked off.

  "Nice try. Tsk, tsk," Ran commented. "You have to hand it to him for that."

  In the last light of day, we prowled Andhur. The walled south mesa, where we had landed, had probably been used to sort, store, and guard frankincense harvests. The walls of the north mesa enclosed a curious half-buried double-walled structure that had likely been a temple.

  Architecturally, the site was reminiscent of the port of Sumhuram on the coast. Its masonry was identical. It stood to reason that, like Sumhuram, Andhur was a colonial outpost of the kingdom of the Hadramaut. The site dated to perhaps 60 A.D., the work of wary outsiders (we thought) penetrating the land of our People of'Ad.

  We pitched camp and reflected on the long day's adventures. Though we had found and followed the Ubar road, we had made no startling discoveries. Three sites that could have been Ubar weren't. All told, we were pretty disappointed. Juri was intrigued by his pottery find, but, as Ran noted, you don't sell an expedition on a shard.

  But we were not about to mope. The temperature had fallen, a full Arabian moon had risen, and ex-rocker George had brought his guitar. He now played for an audience of four adventurers, three Omani policemen and, possibly within earshot, a scattering of lost and traumatized Jebali goats. The ancient ruins of Andhur echoed with big-city blues and tales of Texas heartache, which somehow triggered a lively discussion of Junkyard Dog. Inexplicably, the American wrestler had become an Omani folk hero. Was it possible, our police escorts wondered, that the great Dog might someday come to Arabia?