We packed up and set out northwest across the dunes. Our first objective was the Wadi Mitan at a point where it terminated in a distinctive dry lakebed, twenty kilometers long. With our satellite navigation inoperative, this would be a reliable waypoint.
For what lay ahead, there were two theories—two extremes—of how to handle your vehicle. The first, widely practiced by the bedouin, was a kind of Zen of dune driving. They would "read the sands," evaluating slope, texture and color to determine exactly what path to take at what speed. They would then effortlessly float out across the terrain. No sideslips, no spinning wheels. It looked so easy, so effortless. To the skilled and confident bedouin, it was.
The other way was our way. Not having the faintest idea if the sand ahead was hard packed or treacherously soft, we careened recklessly up and down, over and around the dunes, foot to the floor, driving as fast as we dared. It looked like joy riding. It was joy riding. But it was also a survival tactic. To slow down was to risk getting stuck.
With Ran at the wheel, the first of our Discoverys crested the shoulder of a dune and for a second or two flew through the air. "Whaa! Ha ha!" Ron shouted as we crunched down into the sand. Soft sand. "Uh-oh," we all reacted. The vehicle fishtailed, slowed a bit, then lurched on, and we careened up and over the next dune. And the one after that. The next was much higher, and just short of its crest we hesitated for no more than a split second, not sure of what lay beyond. With a heart-sinking whir, the Discovery's tires spun out of control.
"Whoa!" we shouted in chorus. We got out. We were dug in up to our hubcabs.
"Someone call nine one one," Ron suggested.
In what was to become an oft-repeated routine, we lowered our tire pressure to sixteen pounds per square inch. We then shoveled as much sand as possible out of the way before jacking up the rear wheels, which we then dropped back down onto aluminum sand ladders. The five-foot ladders gave us just enough of a run to send us on our way.
By radio we advised the vehicles following us when to follow our tracks and when to take a longer, easier route. We never knew quite what we were in for, especially when we crested a ridge. On the other side, we could very well slide down into a "dune pocket," a bowl of sand so steep-sided that a vehicle, even with the aid of a winch, could never climb out and would have to be abandoned.
Our route was not all up and down. On the outskirts of the Rub' al-Khali, dune fields alternate with gently undulating ramlats, or sand plains. We cruised along the southern edge of the Ramlat Mitan, and by midday we reached the dry lake once fed by the Wadi Mitan. The temperature was in the comfortable low eighties, the air still, the day clear. We scanned the way ahead with binoculars. Somewhere out on this lakebed was a stretch of the Ubar road, discovered in 1930 by Bertram Thomas but overlaid now by recent tracks. If necessary, we could return later and seek it out. But for now, our plan was to keep moving. By day's end we hoped to intercept the road where it was well defined. We were equipped to survey and follow it for two, possibly three, more days.
Our Discoverys headed out across the lakebed, aiming for a cluster of dunes identifiable on our space imagery. It was a little unclear where to go next. We picked what appeared to be a fairly obvious route west, which led us into a winding dune street a hundred or so yards wide between parallel lines of dunes. We made good time. The dunes became higher and higher—so high they could no longer be crossed. We felt increasingly uneasy as the dune street angled us more and more to the north, farther and farther away from where we wanted to go.
On we went, flanked now by walls of great red dunes more than six hundred feet high. Nearly three hours after leaving Wadi Mitan, shielding his eyes against the low but still intense sun, Ron said, "Uh-oh," followed by, "Rats!" Ahead, the way was blocked by a massive wall of sand. We had driven into a huge cul-de-sac.
And it was us, not it, that was in the wrong place. We were lost.
Distracted by the challenge (and fun) of driving the sands, we hadn't stopped to fuss with compass bearings and land navigation. We had not paid heed to the fact that in this desert, as in all deserts, everything looks alike, and there is little or nothing (such as buildings, telephone poles, trees) to lend a sense of scale. From a distance, a small dune looks just like a huge dune. And features like slopes, ridges, and gullies are replicated over and over. With your nose to a map—or a space image—you can go for miles quite certain that you are where you're not, only to realize the error of your ways when you come up against an inescapably distinctive landmark. Case in point: the wall of sand before us.
We decided to camp where we were for the night. The next day, though we could ill afford it, we might have to retrace our route back to the Wadi Mitan and try another route west. We pored over a detailed Landsat 5 / SPOT image in search of our cul-de-sac. With a yellow grease pencil we marked three possibilities. None was even close to where we wanted to be.
That evening, Ron used three Kit Kat bars to illustrate that at any given time at least one NASA navigation satellite would be overhead. "But why the silence? I just find it hard to believe the whole system is down. What of ships at sea? What of animals with transmitters around their necks?"
"And what about people lost in the desert?" Kay added.
"There has to be some emergency provision," Ron convinced himself, and reached for the receiver, to be greeted again by "NOSATS FOUND." He grumbled and punched away at the keypad. "Aha!" he finally said, for he had discovered an advisory: in our part of the world, the system would be up and running once a day, between 2 and 3:30 A.M.
"Encouraging," Ron said, "provided these dunes don't block any signals." The Rub' al-Khali's darkly encircling dunes could easily stand between us and a satellite hovering low in the sky. Setting the receiver on the roof of a Discovery, Ron programmed it to switch on at the appropriate hour and automatically record our position.
Sunday, December 15. Day 3: searching for ghostly cities of the mind. 2:15 A.M. I woke and looked over to see that Ron Blom was also awake and up on the roof of the Discovery, "just checking" on the satellite receiver, he whispered down. "It's okay. We've got a position—18 degrees 59 minutes 16 seconds north by 52 degrees 32 minutes 16 east."
"Good! And good night."
"Good night."
A few fitful dreams later, it was 5 A.M., time to get moving. Everyone was soon up, and with dawn still an hour away, Ron unrolled our Landsat 5 / SPOT image on the hood of a Discovery. By flashlight we saw that we were about as far away as we could be from intercepting the road to Ubar.
"We know we're up here, by this dune," Ron explained, "and where we want to be is all the way over here. And it's roughly thirty kilometers between the two, but we can't go straight there. We're going to have to work our way back down this dune street, then across to here, then strike out across this rather confused area aiming for here..."
With his finger he traced a route weaving through a maze of dune streets. Inevitably, though, we would have to tackle the dunes themselves. If they were anything like what was around us, they could easily be too much for us. Ran summed up our prospects: "If Ron's doing his dead reckoning navigation very carefully, shouldn't be any bother. But when you come to these two enormous lines of heavy dunes, I can't see a way through."
We began by backtracking twelve kilometers to a junction that took us into a parallel dune street. "From looking at the image, this is the only way in," Ron dryly noted. "Short of walking, that is."
We navigated very carefully now, by old-fashioned dead reckoning. Every few kilometers we would stop and set a new course. On our space image, Ron would measure where we had been and plot where we should go. I would get clear of the vehicle's magnetic field and take a compass bearing. At the wheel, Ran would hold to that bearing and track our progress in tenths of a kilometer. A single mistake and we would be lost again.
By noon, we had taken more than thirty bearings and were still apparently on course as we approached our first big line of dunes. They were wide but not high, and
we found a workable way across. We dropped into a pristine dune street, no tracks at all. We were beyond the range of wandering bedouin, drug smugglers, and military patrols.
If we could only cross the next line of dunes, we would be on the road to Ubar, close to where Bertram Thomas thought the city lay buried. At the foot of what on our space image appeared to be the most promising way across, we stopped and, with binoculars, surveyed a saddle several hundred feet above us. Mr. Gomez passed out a round of Kit Kats. We decided to give it a try with one vehicle, then have the others follow if the first made it through. Ran, Ron, and I circled to get a running start.
"Really, our only choice..." said Ron.
"So it's up and over or not at all," added Ran, as he drove straight into and up the dune. It was steep. It was soft. We slowed from fifty to forty to thirty miles an hour, then held at a little over twenty. I looked back. Our tracks were a foot deep. Juri, Kay, and Mr. Gomez waved us on. We climbed higher and yet higher. What did we think we were doing?
A verse of bedouin doggerel had one answer:
Only a fool will brave the desert sun
Searching for ghostly cities of the mind.
Allah protect us from djinns and fiends,
Spirits of evil who infest the dunes.3
"Hold on back there," Ran shouted, not quite in time to forestall my head bouncing against the roof. The way ahead now was waffled, moguled, and still steep. Ran spun the steering wheel hard one way, then the other. We slalomed onward, upward. In his shift-happy, foot-to-the-floor way, Ran drove magnificently. And we were able to radio back: "We're through! Come ahead."
It would be hard to imagine a grander or wilder or more magical desert scene than the valley, shaped like the crescent moon, that swept away below and before us. The dunes enclosing the valley were monumental, of exquisite form and color. Burnt sienna, ocher red. On its floor we spied what we thought was a fragment of the Ubar road. We should be able to see it for certain from a sand ridge across the way.
The second and third Discoverys caught up with us. How fortunate we were. Who, if anyone, had ever passed this way and gazed upon what lay before us?
With ease, we dropped down onto the valley floor. A mile farther on, juris voice came over the radio: "You know what you clowns just did?"
Ran answered, "No. We don't know what we clowns, as you call us, just did."
"You drove right through an encampment, that's what."
We stopped, and all walked back to where Juri pointed out a random assortment of rocks. "That? An encampment?" Ran asked, not at all convinced.
"Was once," Juri affirmed, as he began picking up and examining small stones. The first half dozen he threw over his shoulder, noting them to be worthless AFRs.4 But then he said, "Look here now, here you've got a potsherd, though not much of a potsherd." It was orange, badly worn. It was quite old, he thought, dating to as early as 1500 B.C.
Ran examined the shard and asked what other pottery had been found in the Rub' al-Khali. Juri hesitated, then answered, "There hasn't been any, really..."
"What?" Ran blinked. "So this is a first piece of pottery?"
Juri believed it was. Ran shook his hand, impressed that we had an archaeologist who was "not just another pretty face." Juri chuckled and pointed ahead to more rocks, laid out in a large rectangle. He walked through a gap that could have been an entrance and prowled about, looking for more pottery or other artifacts. There were none. He guessed that what he had found was the foundation of a brush corral, evidence that caravans had camped here.
We drove on to the far side of the valley, and on foot climbed the steep sand ridge we had spotted from the pass. We were rewarded with a panoramic view of the road to Ubar. The great track, as wide as a ten-lane freeway, emerged from under a line of dunes opposite us, crossed the valley, and was swallowed once again by the sands.
Long ago, before the road had been claimed by the sands, a great cloud of dust would have risen from the far horizon, sent skyward by hundreds upon hundreds of camels moving at once. Wary of marauders, outriders with long lances would have kept the animals in close ranks as they indignantly bleated and gurgled. They would have slowly approached where we stood and passed on by, bearing frankincense north to the great markets of the ancient world.
We camped by the Ubar road at the north end of the valley, at the edge of the L-shaped formation we had checked out on our reconnaissance, which had proved to be an ancient lakebed. Ron walked out across it and, with a hand auger, took a coring of sediments that could later be used to date when the lake had formed and flourished. His educated guess was that it had dried up sometime between 7000 and 8000 B.C.
Juri scanned the shores of the lakebed and wondered aloud, "If I came here to hunt and maybe fish, where would I camp?" "Higher ground," he answered himself, "where I could spot game and enemies." With that, he was off.
An hour later Juri was back, his every pocket clinking and bulging with rocks. No more than two hundred feet away, just out of our sight, he had found a large Neolithic (from 5000 B.C. on) campsite. He couldn't be sure, but it appeared to be divided by walkways. Scattered everywhere, broken and intact, were the utensils of Stone Age life, as many as ten thousand of them. Axe blades, animal skin scrapers, mauls, and arrowheads.
"But Stone Age," I wondered, "wouldn't that be..."
"Yes," he completed the sentence, "too early for what we're looking for."
As the moon rose and Mr. Gomez served us "Apricots, dried" and "Cookies, 2 choc, chip," we discussed the finds of the day and listened as archaeologist Juri and geologist Ron pieced together a rough chronology for the valley...
Perhaps seven thousand years ago, Neolithic hunter-gatherers had camped on a rise overlooking what was then a small lake. Considering the abundance of artifacts Juri had found, it had been a favored stopping place for hundreds, even thousands, of years. But when seasonal rains no longer reached this far inland, the lake dried up, and early man moved on, possibly to the south. The land, once savanna, became desert. The windblown sands of dry lakes and rivers formed dunes—small at first, then larger, ultimately enormous.
Sometime before 1500 B.C. (the approximate date of Juris orange potsherd), a more technologically advanced people—almost certainly the People of 'Ad—passed this way but didn't linger, other than to build simple shelters and corrals. The valley was a rest stop on the Incense Road.
"What about Ubar?" Kay asked.
There was a considerable pause, then Ron broke the silence. "To me, it comes down to water. No water, no city. There's certainly no water out here now, and frankly, I doubt that there was three or four thousand years ago. Considerably before that, yes. But when lakes like this dried up, that was it." Juri nodded in agreement and pointed out that if the region's lakes had been spring-fed rather than dependent on rainfall, early man would have followed the springs down, digging them out as the water table dropped. That is how springs become wells. One or two almost certainly would still be in use.
We discussed the practicality of a city out here. Uncertain, shifting sands and violent sandstorms would have been a problem. Beyond that, what would have been a city's imperative? If Ubar was a staging point for caravans and a trading city—an "Omanum Emporium"—what was it doing sixteen days by camel from the incense groves? Out here, Ubar's control of the incense trade would have been shaky at best. Judging from our space images, there already would have been at least two opportunities to bypass such a settlement and avoid the tolls and tribute that the ancient Arabians were fond of extracting.
Simply put, a city out here would have been an economic disaster.
For the last few days, our conversation had been determinedly on the light side. We now knew why. Humor had kept us from facing the fact that we might well be chasing, as the bedouin doggerel described it, "a ghostly city of the mind."
Though we were all tired, nobody turned in for a while. The valley had spoken to us and told us what we didn't want to hear. But it nevertheless had aff
irmed—with a bit of orange pottery and an impressive road—that the people we sought had passed through. How and where had they begun their journey? Answer that, and we might answer the mystery of Ubar.
The valley also showed us that the Rub' al-Khali was not, as it has often been called, nature maligna.
The Arabs once believed that the stars were the lamps of thousands of angels. They shone brightly now, as did the crescent moon. Every curve of every dune was thrown into relief, cool blue upon dark blue. In its stillness, the valley inspired not fear, or even uneasiness, but serenity.
There is a little-known alternative translation for the phrase "Rub' al-Khali." Though it has been taken to mean the Empty Quarter since at least the 1400s, it may once, far longer ago, have meant Moon Quarter. The ancient Arabians associated different territories with different gods. The Arabian sands, then, would have been the realm of the moon god, ascendant and paramount among the gods. Rising to the sigh of cool breezes, the moon spelled relief from the heat of the day and was a lamp for caravans moving by night. The moon presided over the stars, which in turn foretold the destiny of men and nations.
By the moon's waxing and waning, all time was measured. All birth, life, and death. Long ago, an invocation cited the moon as...
...a creature of night to signify the days.
May the dead rise and smell the incense.5
Monday, December 16. Day 4: the road to—or from?—Ubar. We followed the Ubar road beyond our valley and deeper into the dunes. Our Landsat 5 / SPOT composite image was very helpful; we could cruise across the sands directly to a "blowout," a place where the road lay exposed for no more than a few hundred feet. Juri suspected that if we looked long and hard enough, we would find more evidence of incense caravans and their campsites. And, judging from the lakebeds dotting our space imagery, we would find an abundance of even earlier Neolithic sites. The idea of Neolithic sites led Juri to speculate on why the bedouin believed Ubar lay hidden out here in the dunes.
The Road to Ubar Page 15