The Road to Ubar

by Nicholas Clapp

  Returning to the valley floor, we shared, rather quietly, the lunch Kay had laid out on the tailgate of a Discovery. Ali Achmed ate only half of his turkey sandwich; the rest he scattered in the air.

  "Ali? Looking after the birds?"

  Cross-section of the Dhofar region of Oman

  "Feeding the djinns," he replied with a laugh that wasn't really a laugh. Even to the enlightened, djinns are not to be dismissed. They stalk the pages of the Koran, where they are considered, after man and animal, a third creation of Allah. 'Afrits, a particularly troublesome brand of djinn, dwell in graveyards. They are the spirits of wicked men turned away from Paradise, doomed to haunt their place of burial.

  "And who was wickeder than the People of 'Ad?" asked Ali Achmed, paraphrasing a verse from the Koran.

  We drove on down the Vale of Remembrance. Shading his eyes from the afternoon sun, Ali scanned the widening valley.

  "The stones," he said, "you must see the stones. They're part of this."

  He directed us to a row of stone monuments, each consisting of three unfinished slabs of stone tilted together to form a crude two- to three-foot-high pyramid, known as a trilith ("three-rocks").

  Dhofar triliths

  Line of triliths viewed from above

  Rows of triliths have been reported throughout southeastern Arabia. This site had eight pyramids in a line and, parallel to them, four fire circles. Elsewhere we found rows of as few as three and as many as twenty-five triliths.

  The triliths of the Vale of Remembrance were as old as the People of 'Ad. Ali Achmed showed us where, the year before, he had dug beneath two of them and discovered ash, and—via an English friend—sent it off for carbon dating. His ash samples dated to 60 and 110 B.C. (plus or minus approximately one hundred years).

  Ali was convinced that the triliths had once been "quadriliths," that each set of three stones once supported a capstone, which over the years could have easily tumbled off. Spotting a rock that to us looked like any other, he crouched down, dug around it, and turned it over. It was inscribed with well-preserved letters from the same alphabet used in the rock art of the mountain caves.

  His fellow Shahra, Ali Achmed told us, held that triliths were memorials to the ancient dead, a reasonable idea considering the funerary nature of this valley. 1 It has also been suggested that triliths were route markers for passing caravans or sites for the ritual crucifixion of ibexes, desert animals whose crescent horns symbolized the crescent moon, the principal deity of pre-Islamic Arabia.

  Trilith capstone

  That afternoon we visited several trilith sites and saw many others in the distance. They were generally on flat terraces above wadi drainage channels and were often silhouetted against the sky. Why were they here? What were they for?

  Sometime later I came across a tantalizing passage in Hisham ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols, a catalogue of gods of pre-Islamic Arabia compiled in the early 800s. Al-Kalbi recounts, "Whenever a traveler stopped at a place or station [in order to rest or spend the night] he would select for himself four stones, pick out the finest among them and adopt it as his god, and use the remaining three as supports for his cooking pots. On his departure he would leave them behind and would do the same on his other stops."2

  Here was a validation of Ali Achmed's opinion that these monuments had been constructed of not three but four stones. And the fourth, the missing capstone, would have served as a traveler's god, a betyl. The word expresses a concept common to both the Old Testament and the Koran. It comes from the Arabic bayt-el: the dwelling place (bayt) of God (el being the root of the word Allah). In Hebrew, bethel has the same meaning.

  A betyl was a rock where God dwelled, or at least visited. Or several rocks where several gods took up residence. In Semitic tradition it was important that the rock not be representational, that it be without countenance. Arabs and Jews alike have long abhorred the idea of graven images. Idolatry to them was a crude invention of the Mesopotamians. If God (or gods) descended from the heavens and was to be found on earth, it was as a spiritual force— Sakina in Arabic, Shekinah in Hebrew—that dwelt in a featureless rock. A betyl.

  A goodly number of the "standing stones" cited in the Old Testament were betyls. And, a legacy of ancient times, the betyl of all betyls is the Ka'aba, the windowless black basalt cube at the heart of Mecca. It is revered as the Bayt Allah (same as bet-yl): the dwelling place of God. An Islamic tradition has it that the very first Ka'aba was constructed in heaven, where it remains to this day. After his expulsion from Paradise, Adam built the first earthly Ka'aba on a spot directly beneath the heavenly one. God was pleased and appointed ten thousand angels to keep watch over the site. But these angels, despite their numbers, were remiss in their duties. Adam's Ka'aba fell into disrepair and was destroyed by the Flood. After Abraham traveled to Arabia from Syria, it fell to him to rebuild the structure with the assistance of his son Ishmael, who became the progenitor of all Arabs.

  Whatever the veracity of this primordial history of the Ka'aba, it is certain that long before the advent of Islam, pilgrims from all Arabia journeyed to Mecca. They worshipped the holy cube by circling it, by anointing it, by touching and kissing it. As the mirror of a heavenly archetype, it had an elemental appeal. According to the late Iranian philosopher Ali Shari'ati, the glory of the Ka'aba was that it was no more or less than a simple cube, representing "the secret of God in the universe: God is shapeless, colorless, without simularity. Whatever form or condition mankind selects, sees or imagines, it is not God."3 Though the pre-Islamic Arabs may have been reaching out to more gods than one, this was the essence of what drew them to Mecca—and to the veneration of betyls throughout all Arabia.

  There were once rival Ka'abas in the Arabian cities of Nejran and Sana'a, and in remoter areas stones of all sizes and shapes were worshipped. George Sale, an acerbic Arabist of the 1700s, noted that pre-Islamic Arabs "went so far as to pay divine worship to any fine stone they met with."4

  To me, the triliths of Dhofar—with their inscribed capstones—appeared a natural and logical part of all this. They were betyls, each inhabited by a god's essence. But also, on a homely level, as al-Kalbi noted in his Book of Idols, triliths supported the traveler's cooking pots—they were his stove as well as his shrine. This juxtaposition of the sacred and profane might at first seem jarring, but for a practice that has been documented at Petra, a northern terminus for Arabia's incense trade routes. Betyls large and small were everywhere at Petra, and their worship was an everyday event. After worship, groups of thirteen men would often ritually assemble inside rock-cut family tombs to dine in the presence of their departed ancestors. In their honor, the men would eat off golden plates and drink wine from a shared golden goblet.

  With clay bowls and cups instead of golden ware, similar rites could have taken place twelve hundred miles to the south, on the far side of the Dhofar Mountains. It was not hard to imagine the People of'Ad ritually circling the triliths and anointing their holy capstones with water, oil, or even blood. The capstones could then have been removed, and a ritual meal prepared in honor of the tribe's departed ancestors, who were all about, entombed in the valley walls and likely underfoot as well.

  Here the People of 'Ad would have sought the blessings of their ancestors and gods before trekking out across the vast desert to the north. On their way to their mysterious city. The city we sought: Ubar.

  14. The Empty Quarter

  JUST BEYOND THE DHOFAR MOUNTAINS lay Thumrait, an Omani airbase that would serve as our staging area in the search for Ubar. Airwork, the British company handling aircraft maintenance there, kindly offered us sleeping quarters, good food, and a place to store everything from an 8,000-gallon gasoline tanker to frozen food to boxes of dental picks (for touchy bits of excavation). At Thumrait we sorted our desert gear, two truckloads of it driven from Muscat. With the aid of Airwork volunteers, Ran set up a thirty-foot antenna for long-range communication.

  We took stock of what we had found. On
and near the coast, we had been hard put to find evidence of the People of 'Ad, but in the mountains, Ali Achmed had shown us their cave art, the work of an imaginative, literate people. And we had seen that the Shahra continued their incense-oriented way of life to this day. In both mountains and desert, we had puzzled over rows of triliths, monuments that Juris Zarins felt might mark the homeland of the People of'Ad.

  Beyond Thumrait, though, there were no more triliths. And, for all we knew, no more of the People of'Ad, except for fragments of a road, which we hoped led to Ubar.

  With no resupply possible beyond Thumrait, our plan was to strike out for the dunes to continue the search where our 1990 reconnaissance had left off. Ran and Kay worked out how much fuel, water, and food our Land Rovers would carry and estimated that we could be self-sustaining for five days. If nothing much went wrong, we could get to the border of Saudi Arabia and back. If we found anything of consequence, we would return to Thumrait, load up, and head back out.

  Friday, December 13. Day 1: to the dunes. After a tasty breakfast of pancakes and fresh fruit ("the Last Breakfast," punster Juri called it), we packed our three Discoverys. Our team was joined by desert-knowledgeable Andy Dunsire and a lean, bespectacled fellow bearing a frying pan, two pots, and a battered suitcase.

  "Mr. Gomez, our cook," said Kay, introducing him all around. "On loan from Airwork."

  "I come here as a guest worker from the country of Goa. In Goa, all cooks named Gomez," he said, or at least that's what we thought he said, for he spoke very fast, as they apparently do in Goa. ("English on speed," cameraman Kevin O'Brien called it.) When Mr. Gomez accelerated beyond a sentence or two, which he now did, apparently listing some of his favorite dishes, it was ultimately only Kay who could understand him, and she admitted to catching only every third word or so.

  As Mr. Gomez elaborated on curry in its various forms (or so we thought), someone wondered if we really needed a cook just now, but backed off when Kay asked, "You want to deal with these things?"

  "These things" were fifteen sturdy cardboard boxes of Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) left over from the Gulf War. Though they had overrun their expiration dates, we had been told their contents would last forever. "Curry sounds wonderful, but I'm afraid we'll have to make do with these for now," she explained to Mr. Gomez,' then assured him, "You'll have real food to cook later on."

  "Out in the Rub' al-Khali, will Mr. Gomez be comfortable in what he's wearing?" ventured Ran diplomatically, noting that at the moment Mr. Gomez was dressed in cook's whites and Chinese slippers.

  "Most certainly, yes, why not?" Mr. Gomez was quick to answer.

  It did seem a bit unusual taking a uniformed cook out into a place described by the normally calm Cambridge History of Islam as "the most savage part" of Arabia, "a veritable hell on earth." But in Mr. Gomez's words, "Yes, why not?"

  The MREs were lashed to the roof rack of a Discovery, joining sand ladders, sleeping bags, and fifteen jerry cans of water and fuel per vehicle. Plus clothing, blankets, camera equipment, automatic rifles, and so on. We had an alarming amount of gear.

  "It's a mystery," Kay said of our three Discoverys, shaking her head, "why they don't just sink down to China."

  "Kansas," corrected Ron Blom. "From here in Arabia, they'd sink down to Kansas."

  We shoehorned ourselves in among our gear and were on our way. Guided by Andy Dunsire, we picked up an old track that headed north across a vast, flinty, featureless plain. Our stout Discoverys, to our considerable relief, shouldered their loads well, churning on through deep ruts, then loose sand, then absolutely miserable ruts, and finally a mix of fine sand and gravel that allowed us to pick up speed and cruise at a surprisingly good clip, a steady forty miles an hour.

  The landscape changed. A dreary plain became a plain of illusions. Off to the left was a pale blue, shimmering lake. Soon there were lakes to the right and all about. The Discovery ahead of us, driven by Ran with Andy at his side, splashed into one. We followed and never got wet.

  The vehicles ahead of and behind us became rippling abstractions, mirrored upside down in water that wasn't there. We were floating out across Arabia, our destiny uncertain. It didn't at first register when Ran's vehicle fishtailed wildly and barely recovered. Andy radioed back, "Watch it! Camel wallow!"

  The wallow—a place where camels come to roll on their backs and take sand baths—was hidden by a mirage. They hadn't seen it coming. We braked and hit a twenty-foot patch of treacherously loose, deep sand, almost quicksand. How we got through it without spinning out of control or bogging down hopelessly, I'm not sure. Talking by radio with Andy, we then learned that the trick to negotiating a camel wallow is to slow down, engage the vehicle's differential lock, and don't try anything fancy with the steering wheel. By late afternoon we had white-knuckled our way through three more wallows.

  An unexpected weather front moved in, clouding the sky and dramatically dropping the temperature. The desert's phantom lakes evaporated. Toward evening we sighted on the horizon the first dunes of the Rub' al-Khali, in English the "Empty Quarter."

  The Empty Quarter derives its name from a legend that on the eve of creation God divided the world into four quarters. One was the sea, two were set aside as the settled lands, and the fourth was to be forever barren: the Empty Quarter. Sprawling across a quarter of a million square miles of the Arabian interior, it is a desert of dunes, a vast sand sea, the largest on earth. In 1885 a Colonel'S. B. Miles was one of the first westerners to gaze upon it from our direction, the south. He had this to say: "This wilderness ... stretches away to the westward for about 700 miles, forming the largest and most inhospitable expanse of sandy waste on the continent of Asia. Broadly speaking, it is devoid of rivers, trees, mountains, and human habitations, unexplored and unexplorable, foodless, waterless, roadless, and shadeless, windswept, and a land of quietude, lethargy, and monotony, perhaps unparalleled in the world."1

  Over the years, the Rub' al-Khali's reputation has gotten no better. There is something inherently terrifying about so much sand and so little life. In the 1930s, Bertram Thomas saw it as a place of romance and wonder but also as "a hungry void and an abode of death."

  Our personal reflections on the Rub' al-Khali would have to wait. As the sun edged to the horizon, we pulled up in the lee of a large dune and hastened to set up camp. Kay and Mr. Gomez sorted our rations of MREs. There were twelve assorted meals to a box, which had to be matched to the dietary requirements of our twelve-member team. Our Omani Police guards were yes on beef and no on pork. Our camera crew were vegetarian, so they got (the closest we could come) the chicken and turkey dishes. By a process of elimination, Kay and I wound up with—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—a choice of sliced ham or franks and beans (" NOT FOR PREFLIGHT USE," the label advised). The MREs weren't bad. They could be eaten cold, were better boiled, and were best fried; for added zing, their packets included tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce.

  Our sheltering dune was clearly visible on our space imagery, providing Ron with a good opportunity to verify the accuracy of our satellite navigation system. He punched out instructions on the receiver's keypad, only to have it flash "NO SATS FOUND." HOW could this be? By his calculation, even in our remote location three satellites should be overhead. Ron shut the receiver off, then tried again. And again. The device was adamant. "NO SATS FOUND."

  This was serious. Satellite navigation had proved so reliable on our reconnaissance that we had planned to find our way solely with satellite fixes plotted directly onto space images. What was wrong? Ron guessed that the satellites were up there, all right, but had been made inaccessible to civilian codes. "Could be the Gulf War has fired up again, and we want to cut off enemy access to precise navigation. Beats me."2

  On that uneasy note, as darkness overtook us, we each spread our allotted two blankets on folding aluminum camp beds. These put us a few inches above any creatures that might go slithering or skittering through the night. As we bedded down, Ran propped himself up on his
elbow and casually mentioned that we were in the domain of a solpugid commonly known as the camel spider.

  "Not asleep yet?" he queried, to be sure no one missed his tale. He then recalled that some eighteen years earlier, he and his Omani military patrol had also camped on the edge of these dunes.

  "My signaler, Ibrahim, got visited in the night. The spiders are six inches long, hairy legs and big mandibles."

  "For their size, I daresay," Andy Dunsire chimed in, "they have the strongest jaws of any creature in all the animal kingdom."

  Ran continued, "One of them couldn't get into Ibrahim's sleeping bag, so it started to eat his face! It desensitizes before it bites, so that you don't know it's biting. This fellow woke up in the morning, and half his nose and all of his cheek had gone AWOL!" Ran let this last thought hang in the desert air, then signed off with a cheery "Sleep well!"

  Saturday, December 14. Day 2: into the Rub' al-Khali. The weather front that had moved in the previous afternoon had driven the overnight temperature down to near freezing. Some of us had stoically made do with our two blankets, others had tried to sleep sitting up in the Discoverys. A rather droopy Mr. Gomez, a gray blanket draped over the shoulders of his cook's whites, brewed an inky pot of coffee and doled out a round of MREs. The combination perked us up. "MREs, we love 'em," Kay commented. "All protein and sugar. Fighting food."