The Road to Ubar

by Nicholas Clapp

  "Say you're a bedouin of the last century or so, and you find a Neolithic artifact, like a big grinding stone, which can be pretty impressive. Aha, you think, you're on the outskirts of Ubar! And your imagination gets all fired up thinking of the treasure that must be hidden under the next dune, or the next one after that. And so not only the bedouin but explorers like Bertram Thomas and Wendell Phillips get to thinking this is where to find Ubar."

  Late in the morning of that fourth day in the dunes, we reached a point of no return. Getting lost two days ago had cost us considerable fuel, and now we had just enough to make it back to the beginning of the Rub' al-Khali, where we had dropped off a reserve 55-gallon drum of gas.

  Reluctantly, we turned back on our tracks and, without incident, crossed the dunes that guarded our lost valley. We were then able to find a more direct route back to the Wadi Mitan. As we drove, we talked back and forth by radio. What next? Our best (and about only) hope was that we had found the Ubar road, but that it was not the road to the city, but from it. Ubar might lie in the direction we were now heading, in open desert closer to the incense groves. This was logical, but it was also unlikely, for there was hardly an inch of the open desert that hadn't been crisscrossed by sharp-eyed bedouin who, we had found, were perfectly willing to share the secrets of their land.

  After the Wadi Mitan we knew we were more or less following the Ubar road, but our earlier reconnaissance had told us that we would have a hard time making it out. According to our space images, sometimes we were right on it, sometimes a few kilometers to the north or south. We considered how and where we might look for Ubar. A good start would be to explore where the road crossed wadis that once might have provided a water supply. We could also, centimeter by centimeter, again go over our space images. Had we overlooked any promising anomalies? At this point we doubted it.

  It was after dark when we made it back to our first Rub' al-Khali campsite. Our fuel drum was exactly where we had left it, but empty—a blessing, we guessed, upon a passing bedouin's pickup. No matter, we had enough gas to make it on to the little oasis at Shisur, and maybe even back to the airbase at Thumrait.

  Tuesday, December 17. Day 5: to Shisur. Desert winds can drive you to distraction. Or you may pray for them. The next day was hot and deathly still. The Discoverys kicked up huge clouds of sand that just hung there. Only the first vehicle had a view of where we were going; the others followed blindly. An hour or so out, we stopped to regroup. The cloud that had enveloped us cleared. Across the sandy plain, not all that far away, shining white buildings and towers floated in a mirage.

  "Must be Ubar," Kay remarked, not very seriously. "How could we have missed it?"

  Ran steadied his binoculars. "It's a housing development, would you believe," he said. "Tsk, tsk." Actually, it was the settlement of Shisur, site of the ruined fort we had seen on our reconnaissance and a dozen brand-new houses and a mosque that the government had recently completed for the principal sheiks and families of the local Rashidi. As we drove on, the mirage melted, and we could make out little kids darting between houses and alerting everyone to our arrival.

  Through the desert telegraph, Shisur had heard we might be coming, and its thirty-six souls, from wide-eyed infants to white-bearded elders, all dressed in traditional Omani robes, turned out to greet us. They offered warm salaam aliechems; for whatever peculiar reason the strangers had come here, peace be upon them. Baheet ("Luck") ibn Abdullah ibn Salim was the imam, the religious leader of Shisur. He and his friend Mabrook ("Congratulations") proudly toured us through the newly built settlement and accompanied us as we took another look at the site's ruined fort. They confirmed that it had been built in the early 1500s by one Badr ibn Tuwariq.

  The dominating feature of the ruined fort was a tower, and with more time to examine it, Juri was struck by a curious feature. Near its top, the quality of the masonry became slapdash. And the shape of the tower changed from square to round.

  "You know, it could just be that this Sheik Tuwariq didn't build the fort, but rebuilt it," Juri remarked. "The original structure could be medieval, even earlier."

  The fort was perched on the edge of the distinctive steep-walled sinkhole that gave Shisur its name. In Arabic, we were told, shisur meant "the cleft." Geologist Ron and archaeologist Juri led the way as we walked down a sloping rubble ridge to the sinkhole's sandy floor. After some discussion, they determined that we were in what had once been an underground cavern. More than likely it had been filled with water. But at some point in the past, either through natural causes or human use or both, the water table had dropped. Emptied of water, the cavern became geologically unstable—and collapsed. Moreover, it had collapsed after the fort had been built. Looking up, you could see where a wall connected to the fort had sheared off, tumbled into the sinkhole, and lay buried in the sand beneath our feet.

  The ruin at Shisur

  In myth, Ubar had been destroyed in a great cataclysm whose exact nature was unclear. Different tales had spoken of a great wind, a "divine shout," or the city sinking into the sands. The Shahra tribesmen back in the mountains had told us that Ubar came to an end when "the city turned over." Could what happened at Shisur also have happened at Ubar? Might Shisur be Ubar? For that to be possible, the ruins here would have to be more than five hundred years old. Our hopes rose when Baheet and Mabrook led us to petroglyphs etched on the far wall of the sinkhole. They appeared old, but as Juri pointed out, they might date back only a hundred years or so. Out here, until very recently, time had stood still.

  Shisur's sinkhole

  Returning to our Discoverys, we finished off the last of our MREs and carefully checked a space image of the Shisur area. The new houses and mosque didn't show up, of course, as they had been built after the image was made. The sinkhole, though, was clearly visible as a dark crescent. And at least six old caravan tracks came up from the incense groves and converged on the site. None bypassed Shisur; with its reliable water source, it was a necessary stop for any and all caravans passing through. Whoever controlled Shisur—and its water—could control the incense trade as the caravans headed out across the Rub' al-Khali.

  Detail of Landsat 5 image

  There were, of course, arguments why Shisur couldn't possibly be Ubar. So far as we knew, the fort was not old enough by a good two thousand years. And the site was hardly a candidate for the city described in the Koran, a city "whose like has never been built in the whole land."

  "It wouldn't take all that much, would it?" Kay asked.

  "Much what?" I asked.

  She explained, "Much to be the greatest city in all this land."

  "Perhaps not," mused Juri.

  We cracked open a box of Kit Kat bars and shared them with Imam Baheet, Mabrook, and a cluster of Shisur kids. And we agreed to a plan. For a month we would make Shisur our headquarters. We would dig two or more test squares and try to date the site's rise and fall. At the same time we would range out along the incense road, looking for traces of Ubar.

  A couple of Kit Kats later, Baheet agreed to a price for a month's rental of three of Shisur's not-quite-finished houses. We left for the airbase at Thumrait, looking forward to real beds and real food—and, after five days in the sands, showers.

  15. What the Radar Revealed

  WE SOON RETURNED TO SHISUR. We had reinforcements. Joining us now were JPL's Charles Elachi and Kris Blom, Ron's wife, also a JPL scientist. First on our agenda was to probe the sands that had drifted into the site's yawning sinkhole over the centuries. We would do this with a mini version of the radar that, seven years before, had scanned this desert from the space shuttle Challenger. Our three JPL scientists unpacked five crates containing the components of a Geosystems SIR ground-penetrating radar rig. With stakes and string, Juri, Kay, and I laid out a grid on the floor of the sinkhole. Ron assembled the radar's sender-receiver—a red sled resembling an oversize carpet sweeper—and connected it by cable to a stationary signal processor and recorder. Kris switched it o
n. Graph paper rolled; ink flowed. Charles set the unit to record what lay under our feet to a depth of fifty feet.

  We were all set to go when, without warning, the whole array went dead. Charles checked the power supply; Kris leafed through the manual; Ron thought the recording unit might be overheated. The three scientists moved it into the shade and waited for it to cool off. Still it wouldn't run. They tried everything. "Myself," Ron muttered with mock disenchantment, "I still think the best way to find buried objects is to dig them up."

  Everyone was about at wits' end when Ran Fiennes ambled over and politely asked, "You mind if I try something?"

  Shisur's sinkhole as radar mapped

  "Not at all," Ron said.

  Ran bent over and lifted the recording unit a foot in the air. And dropped it. Sixty thousand dollars' worth of sophisticated hardware hit the ground and whirred to life. Looking on, Baheet ("Luck") and Mabrook ("Congratulations") uttered, "Hamdullalah"—thanks be to Allah.

  Ron was soon dragging the red sled methodically back and forth across the sinkhole. Bedrock was thirty feet down, and between us and it, the radar detected a jumble of fractured rock and, quite possibly, fallen walls and broken buildings.

  Charles and Kris monitored the recorder's complex squiggles. A sudden change caught Charles's eye. "Look here," he said, "see how it comes down?"

  "Which means?" Juri asked.

  Charles thought a minute and replied, "A well. I would say there's an old well down there." Further scans confirmed it. In the center of the sinkhole was the shaft of a well that might have been sunk by the People of 'Ad as, faced with a diminishing water supply, they sought to save their desert stronghold.

  That night Juri was drawn back to Shisur's fort and sinkhole, and by flashlight he walked the site. Kay and I tagged along. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble out here, quarrying and dressing thousands of stone blocks to make their stand in this remote desert wilderness. It would be nice to say that Shisur's stones spoke to us. But they didn't. As Juri pointed out, nothing belied their age. They could date to the days of the incense trade or, as most everyone thought, they could be the handiwork of the Yemeni sheik Badr ibn Tuwariq in the 1500s.

  "Time to stop speculating," Juri said, "and start digging."

  16. City of Towers

  FROM TIME TO TIME, Imam Baheet would ascend the minaret of his settlement's new mosque and summon the faithful to prayer...

  God is the greatest,

  There is no god but God.

  Baheet's call rang out across the tiny settlement and its nearby ruins. How strange it would be if Ubar lay buried within sight and earshot of where the faithful gathered to chant suras (chapters) from the Koran, suras that proclaimed:

  Arrogant and unjust were the men of 'Ad. "Who is mightier than we?" they used to say. (from the sura "Revelations Well Expounded")

  Have you not heard how Allah dealt with 'Ad? The people of the many-columned city of Irani, whose like has never been built in the whole land? (from "The Dawn")

  On a day of unremitting woe we let loose on them a howling wind which snatched them off as though they were trunks of uprooted trees, (from "The Moon")

  And when morning came there was nothing to be seen besides their ruined dwellings. Thus we reward the wrongdoers, (from "al-Ahqaf")

  'Ad denied their Lord. Gone are 'Ad...(from "Hud")1

  We settled in at Shisur. The three houses we had rented were filled with fine red sand that had to be shoveled out, our first excavation. Returning from a run to Salalah and the coast, Kay arrived with every inch of her Discovery packed with pink and turquoise foam rubber mattresses that she had found in the souk for four dollars each. When she opened the door, they sprang out and flew all over the place, much to the amusement of the locals. For a homey touch, Kay distributed brightly colored cotton bedspreads that featured sayings in an unknown (to us) language: "NAMI KAMA MAMA." "ADUI NI MDOMO WAKO."Swahili, Juri thought.

  From the airbase at Thumrait, Ran procured a woebegone generator and coaxed it to life. It gave us a couple of hours of evening light and powered our Racal radios, our link to the airbase and the world beyond. Curiously, the world beyond seemed remote from us, not we from it. We were quite happy just to check in with Thumrait twice a day, at one and seven P.M. In a typical call we discussed the impending arrival of five student diggers from the States and were delighted to learn that Airwork, as a gift, would be providing us with two twenty-pound Christmas turkeys.

  Juris Southwest Missouri State students were a little dazed when they arrived at Shisur, about as far away as they could be from the rolling cornfields of home. Three were undergraduates: Rick Brietenstein, Jean England, and Julie Knight. Rick had never been outside the country or even on a plane, yet he would soon be hard at work, both digging and compiling a tribal Who's Who of Baheet, Mabrook, and related Shisurites. We had two grad students, assistant archaeologist Jana Owen and registrar (recorder and keeper of our finds) Amy Hirschfeld. Both were experienced in the Middle East, having worked together in Israel. Kay and I were also delighted by the appearance at Shisur of our daughters, Cristina and Jennifer, on Christmas breaks from work and college (Cristina was editing a magazine; Jennifer was in her last year at Wesleyan University).

  To dig Shisur, Juri came up with a simple, specific plan: survey and test-excavate the ridge running east from the old fort (see plan, opposite). The ridge didn't look terribly promising. A few meters beyond the fort the broken walls of three small rooms rose from the dirt and sand, but otherwise the ridge appeared to be a purely natural feature edging the north side of Shisur's sinkhole. Juri explained that if this indeed was true, we could focus on the ruins of the fort and wrap up work here in relatively quick order. But if the ridge produced results, the site might amount to something.

  For surveying purposes, Juri and Jana Owen established a zero point, then measured everything out from there. Sighting with a theodolite, they laid out a grid of three-meter by three-meter squares and marked each with metal rods and orange string.

  While Juri and his crew prepared to dig the ridge, Kay bounced off across the desert in a Discovery and returned triumphantly with a bone-bleached, leafless bush in the passenger seat. Our Christmas tree. To the accompaniment of carols played on little speakers connected to her Walkman, she decorated it with a strand of twinkly lights, which she'd found in a hardware store on the coast.2

  On Christmas Day, Mr. Gomez outdid himself. As Kay had promised, he now had real food to cook, and though refrigeration was impossible, he had a two-burner butane stove supplemented by desert stoves improvised by our Airwork volunteers. To make one you fill a metal ammunition case with sand, then riddle it with automatic rifle fire. Pour in gasoline, toss in a match, and you have a hot, smokeless (in case of lurking enemies) fire. Today a dozen Airworkers joined us, bringing gifts of Christmas plum pudding, brandy, and their good company.

  North ridge 1: before excavation

  We found a place for everyone at one long table set outside. Our seats were concrete blocks borrowed from the construction of new Shisur. Our American students, all away from home at Christmas for the first time, took turns describing their family gatherings, and our Airwork volunteers, committed to an eleven-month stretch without leave, talked of snowy traditional Christmases in England and Scotland. Juri reminded us that the first Christmas had more to do with palm than pine trees and that the gifts were "gold, frankincense and myrrh."

  "There's a good possibility that's translated wrong," he added. "Gold could mean not shiny metal stuff, but a 'gold grade' of incense, perhaps a balsam. The Bible tells us there were twelve, maybe more, kinds of incense. So the gifts could have been what you'd find not far from here: three kinds of incense. Golden balsam, silver frankincense, and myrrh."

  If Shisur proved to date to biblical times, incense caravans may well have set out from here on a long and arduous journey north across Arabia—and, for some, on to Jerusalem. In order to return home before the scorching heat of summer
, Arabian traders would have timed their arrival in Jerusalem for late December or early January.

  Across the valley from Jerusalem are caves where the traders might have sheltered their camels from the winter rain and cold. Often, when local inns were full, traders and other travelers stayed in the caves. If an infant was born in their midst, Arabian wayfarers would have considered themselves blessed and offered the child gifts of their incense.

  Week two at Shisur ... We dug. Slowly, with trowels and brushes. Excavation wasn't a process to be rushed. If there was anything here, it would be revealed in good time—and it was. At depths ranging from a few inches to a few feet, Juri and his students uncovered the stone foundation of what was once a wall. It ran along the ridge that had appeared to be a natural feature. The three small rooms Juri had noted backed onto the wall. He speculated that they could be storerooms or merchants' stalls: "In souks all over Arabia, you still see shops laid out like this."

  Our student diggers were each assigned a three-meter square. As they carefully excavated, they recorded the positions of rocks—some of which were clearly the foundations of a wall—and noted subtle changes in the composition of the sand and dirt. Their initial modest finds included bits of worn orange pottery and tiny bones (probably mice). Juri circulated about, answering questions ("Is this worth anything?" "No"), making suggestions ("You can pull those little rocks out. Not structural"), and often pitching in with the spadework.

  Four days after Christmas, poking about in an untouched square,