Lines 121–129: "he sent them two slave-girls, called the Two Locusts, who were singers in his service..."
Pairs of singing girls were a staple of pre-Islamic entertainment. What's interesting here is that the Locusts are decidedly free-spirited (a contrast to the reclusive stereotype of women in Arabia today). With little inhibition, they mock their audience of out-of-towners.
***
Lines 149–173: "God's angel Gabriel said, 'O cloud of the Barren Wind, be a torment to the people of'Ad and a mercy to others!"'
With these words, a torrent of imagery is let loose. And here we can imagine a blind medieval rawi, on the steps of a Cairo mosque, building to his tale's apocalyptic climax. It is late in the evening. Merchants have shuttered their stalls, yet people are abroad, seeking the breeze that comes on the wings of night. They're drawn to the rawi, who melodramatically lowers his voice as he relates: "On the first day, the wind came so cold and gray that it left nothing on the face of the earth unshattered." The eyes of little boys at his feet widen. The better to hear, the crowd presses in. "On the second day there was a yellow wind that touched nothing it did not tear up and throw in the air." The rawi melodramatically pauses and gropes to light an oil lamp; its flicker eerily brings life to his lifeless eyes. "On the third day a red wind left nothing undestroyed." He talks faster now, mimicking the cry of the defiant 'Adites: "We are mightier than you, Lord of Hud!" The rawi now shouts, louder than anyone could imagine, stunning his audience: "The wind ripped them apart and went into their clothing, raised them into the air and cast them down on their heads, dead." The rawi's imagery is increasingly fervid, gruesome—and powerfully poetic. With grim finality the rawi seals his story: "Sons and thrones are destroyed!"
Looking on, shaking his head, the rawi's mukawwiz mutters "Iram, khalas"...Iram, finished. The crowd sighs in relief and appreciation. The blind rawi faintly smiles as the mukawwiz's cup rings with dinars.
This climactic passage is packed with derivations, allusions, and lore. For example, our writer-rawi was no doubt familiar with the prophet Muhammad's antipathy to arrows, which in pagan Arabia were instruments of both gambling and divination. So when the 'Adites defy God's wind by shooting arrows at it, "the wind snatched their arrows and drove them into their throats." And the bizarre-seeming notion that the wind entered Khuljan's "mouth and came out his posterior" reflects an Arabian belief—still heard today—that the body is hollow. The concept of dying from a face-ful of wind goes back to the Enuma elish, the Babylonian creation myth in which a wind is driven into the goddess Tiamat's mouth; it gruesomely distends and destroys her.
Considered as a whole rather than as the sum of its parts, this passage is the payoff of a powerful myth. In the vision of mythologist Joseph Campbell, the essential function of myth is to pull individuals into accord with the universe. In warning the 'Adites, that is exactly what the prophet Hud tries to do. They could not care less; they revel in materialism, ignoring God. If anything, they consider themselves above any cosmic order. With the end clearly in sight, the 'Adites still scream, "We are mightier than you, Lord of Hud!"
The response, of course, is: God is mightier than you. And He proves it, wiping the 'Adites from the face of the earth.
But not all of them. The tale takes pains to add that Hud and a number of his followers survive, so that (as Joseph Campbell would have it) they may pursue, unhindered and anew, an accord with the universe.
In the world of early and medieval Islam, the story arc of sin, then warning, then more sin, then punishment was by no means unique to "The Prophet Hud." When it came to moral weapons, Muhammad enthusiastically chose the fear of God. In the Koran, time and time again, he tells of prophets spurned and cities and civilizations consequently destroyed by an angry God. The pattern goes back to Adam, who in Islam is not only a progenitor but a prophet. Speaking from his own recent and humbling experience, Islam's Adam instructs mankind in the correct way to live. But mankind never quite gets the message—despite the bad end that comes to Sodom and Gomorrah, despite the onset of catastrophes foretold by Noah, Joseph, Hud, Saleh, even Jesus (Isa in Islam).
Lines 178–198: "Kaab al Ahbar said: One day I was in the Prophet's Mosque..."
Though the curtain has inexorably rung down on Ubar/lram, there is more to the story. Adhering to good dramatic form, the climax of "The Prophet Hud" is followed by an anticlimax, an epilogue that eases the reader (or listener) back to the present. Moreover, the reader is assured that indeed there was such a place as Ubar, such a prophet as Hud. The evidence offered is Hud's tomb in Yemen's valley of the Hadramaut.
To this day, Hud's tomb is the most popular pilgrimage site in southern Arabia. Throngs of pilgrims offer incense at "the opening through which a thin man may pass." And they know well the story of the wicked city that denied the message of God's apostle Hud. Ubar may have been wiped from the face of the earth, but it was not—and is not—forgotten.
* * *
Notes
Prologue
1. "When I had finished reading the book...," Rev. Mr. J. Cooper, trans., The Oriental Moralist or the Beauties of the Arabian Nights Entertainments (Dover, N.H.: Printed by Samuel Bragg, Jr. for Wm T. Clap, Boston, 1797), p. i.
2. "That God holds you over the pit of hell...," Clarence H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., Jonathan Edwards (New York: American Book Co., 1935), p. 164.
3. "We set sail with a fair wind ...," "Exploring the town's fantastical palace ...," "It was about three years ago...," and "Since that time I have whipped them...," Cooper, "The Petrified City," Oriental Moralist, pp. 163–74.
4. "The Arabs were an ignorant, savage and barbarous people...," J. Olney, A Practical System of Modern Geography (New York: Robertson, Pratt, 1835), p. 201.
1. Unicorns
1. "one horn in the middle of his forehead...," T. H. White, The Book of Beasts: Being a translation from the Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), pp. 20–21.
2. The Sands of Their Desire
1. "right foul folk and cruel...," John Mandeville, Mandeville's Travels, vol. 1 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), p. 47; "The people generally are addicted...," William Lithgow, The Totall discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrenations of a Long Nineteene Years Traveyles from Scotland to the Most Famous Kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa (1612; reprint, Glasgow: J. MacLenose, 1906), p. 262.
2. "dashed down the mountain...," John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), p. 12.
3. he was a simple "Jewish Jesuit." What a piece of work was Gifford Palgrave. During his years with the Jesuits, he assumed the names of Michel Sohail, Michael X. Cohen, and Seleem Abou Mahmood el Eys. In Arabia, while still insisting he was a "Jewish Jesuit," he allowed that he had been "invested for the nonce with the character and duties of an Imam, and as such conducted the customary congregational worship." (Palgrave, "The Mahometan Revival," in Essays on Eastern Questions [London: Macmillan, 1872], p. 126.) In his later years, he was enamored of Shintoism.
4. "Nothing but an airship can do it," David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 663.
5. '"Why aren't you married, O Wazir?'...," Bertram Thomas, Alarms and Excursions in Arabia (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), p. 119.
6. Harry St. John Philby. If the name Philby seems familiar, it is probably because of Harry's son, Kim, the well-known KGB mole. With a craftiness that may have run in the family, in the 1950s Kim Philby infiltrated not only Britain's Secret Intelligence Service but, as a liaison officer, the CIA.
7. "the sands of my desire," Bertram Thomas, Arabia Felix: Across the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. 149; "the bride of my constant desire," Harry St. John Philby, The Empty Quarter (New York: Henry Holt, 1933), p. xxi.
8. "Tomorrow, the news of my disappearance..." This and the following quotes are from Thomas, Arabi
a Felix, pp. 1, 2, 42, 131, 136, 149.
9. with an accuracy that is amazing. For decades Bertram Thomas's map would be the only reliable guide to the Dhofar region of Oman. When we began looking for Ubar from space, I superimposed portions of Thomas's map on satellite images and found that he was never more than a kilometer or two off in plotting his route.
10. "Our morning start was sluggish...," Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. 160–61.
11. "'Twas I that learn'd him in the archer's art...," Zayn Bilkadi, "The Wabar Meteorite," Aramco World Magazine 37, no. 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1986), p. 28.
12. "the finest thing in Arabian exploration...," T. E. Lawrence, foreword to Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. xix, xvii.
13. "Here then the words of 'Ad ..." This and the following quotes are from Philby, Empty Quarter, pp. 165–66.
14. "mantle of fraud in the east...," T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1936), p. 503.
15. "I am convinced that the remains...," Raymond O'Shea, The Sand Kings of Oman (London: Methuen, 1947), pp. 180–81.
16. "A cloud gathers..." and "this cruel land can cast a spell...," Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), p. xvii. Thesiger describes (p. 219) a typical Ubar discussion: "According to Sadr ... the lost city of'Ad [was] under the sands of Jaihman. Muhammad was, however, convinced that this city, one of the two mentioned in the Koran as having been destroyed by God for arrogance, was buried in the sands to the north of Habarut. He reminded me of the many clearly defined tracks which converge on these sands, and which the Rashid maintain once led to that city."
17. Had he sought Ubar...? Years later, I listened as one of Thesiger's bedouin companions, Sultan Najran, relived the journey. I learned that Thesiger, indeed, had looked for—and found—the road to Ubar, but at the cost of draining his party's waterskins dry. His party was lucky to make it back alive.
18. "Qidan, the lost city...," O'Shea, Sand Kings of Oman, p. 1.
19. "I realized with a start...," James Morris, Sultan in Oman (London: Century Travellers, 1986), p. 121. Morris's book is a wry and immensely entertaining portrait of the world of Sa'id ibn Taimur, the sultan who had once retained Bertram Thomas as his wazir.
20. His mysterious mesa might well have been a desert outpost ... The site of "Qidan" could in reality be Muscalet, a settlement that appears on maps from the 1600s into the 1800s. Or it could indeed be ancient, the "Rhabana Regia" of Ptolemy's venerable map of Arabia. In an image taken by the high-resolution Large Format Camera aboard the space shuttle Challenger, O'Shea's mesa is where he said it was and has linear features that could well be man-made.
21. Mahram Bilqis. Mahram in Arabic means holy platform or sanctuary, and Bilqis is a traditional proper name for the queen of Sheba. In Yemen today, if you shout "Bilqis," half the little girls within earshot come running.
22. "almost trampled over the rest of us..." This and the following three quotes are from Wendell Phillips, Qataban and Sheba (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), pp. 225, 264, and 307.
23. "When I enquired if he knew..." This and the following quotes are from Wendell Phillips, Unknown Oman (London: Longman, 1966), pp. 222–23, 223–24, and 229.
24. "It was California Charlie..." Charlie McCollum, the fellow who spotted the Ubar road, was a Phillips sidekick. I managed to track him down in California; he confirmed that the road was as wide as a ten-lane freeway.
25. He shouted "This is Ubar!" Phillips's bittersweet jest does not appear in his Unknown Oman. It was related to me by one of his guides, Muhammad ibn Tuffel.
26. and prospered in the oil business. As a gesture of courtesy, the desert sheiks offered Phillips their homes, their possessions, anything he wished. He responded, no, no, they were too kind. All he asked was that they sign an option for the oil rights to their tribal lands. Brokering these options, Phillips became the world's leading private oil concessionaire—and his desert friends prospered as well.
3. Arabia Felix
1. "He is crazed with the spell...," from "Arabia," Walter de la Mare, Collected Poems, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 135.
2. none had really done his homework. Freya Stark, a hardy solo traveler of the 1930s, was apparently the only one to comb ancient accounts. But she never took Ubar seriously and never went looking for the city, even though her friend the sultan of Qatn "told me in the serenity of faith that everyone in Hadramaut places it between Hadramaut and Oman" (where Thomas, Thesiger, and Phillips encountered the Ubar road). Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1983), p. 181.
3. the land was uncharted. Reliable maps of Arabia were a long time coming. As late as World War I, when the Arab revolt was brewing, British cartographers had no knowledge of the location of Medina, at the time the peninsula's largest city. And the map that Bertram Thomas drew for his book Arabia Felix would be the best available for close to forty years.
4. "the way they cut their hair...," Aubrey de Selincourt, trans., Herodotus: The Histories (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 206.
5. where Alexander never set foot. Alexander the Great considered adding Arabia to his conquests, but he died in Babylon in 323 B.C. on the eve of his planned campaign. The fact that he wanted to invade the peninsula—and even make it his royal abode—is evidence that something in Arabia was of great value.
6. "The inhabitants of that place said...," Albert M. Wolohojian, trans., The Romance of Alexander the Great by Pseudo-Callis-thenes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 112–15.
7. "Why do you tread this earth...," Wolohojian, Romance of Alexander the Great, p. 116.
8. 71° × 23° ... 73° × 16°. Though the principle is the same, Ptolemy's latitudes and longitudes are not the same as those on modern maps, on which the 0° prime meridian passes through the British Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Ptolemy chose the Fortunate Islands in the Atlantic for his prime meridian, because they were considered the far edge of the habitable world. The scale of his system differs from ours as well.
4. The Flight of the Challenger
1. its inherent distortions ...In laying out his maps, Ptolemy miscalculated the circumference of the earth. To make things fit, he took to squeezing empty spaces—such as the hinterlands of Arabia.
2. "It's like rotating your house...," Elachi quoted by Ronald Blom, Oct. 1984.
3. "the loss of viewing time...," Time, Oct. 22, 1984, p. 72.
4. "Have you not heard...," N. J. Dawood, trans., The Koran (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 25.
5. the desert of al-Ahqaf. The Koran's passing mention of this region is a valuable geographic clue, for in post-Koranic accounts and even maps, al-Ahqaf (which has been taken to mean "wind-curved sand dunes") is located more or less where Bertram Thomas found his road to Ubar and where we hoped for success with the space shuttle's radar.
6. the proper names "bam" and "'Ad." The very earliest evidence of the city of Iram and its People of'Ad may be hidden in the word Adramitae, a southern Arabian tribe mentioned by Greek geographers. The name appears as well on Ptolemy's ever-helpful map of Arabia. Breaking the word apart, Adrami- could stand for "'Ad-i-lram"and the suffix -tae means "tribe." The Adramitae, then, would be the People of'Ad and Iram.
7. "Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine...," Charles ]. Lyall, Ancient Arabian Poetry (London: Williams & Norgate, 1930), p. 64.
8. "of ill omen...," Lyall, Ancient Arabian Poetry, p. 113; "She [War] brought forth Distress...," William A. Clouston, ed., Arabian Poetry for English Readers (Glasgow: McLaren & Son, 1881), p. 34.
9. "Arrogant and unjust..." This and the following quotes are from Dawood, Koran, pp. 159–60, 129, 205.
10. "According to the tradition of the Arabs...," Johann Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, vol. 2 (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972), p. 274; "the 'Adites continued to abandon themselves...," L. Du Couret, Life in the Desert: Or, Recollections of Travel in Asia and Africa (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), p. 271.
&nbs
p; 11. where lakes once formed. The ancient lakes of the Rub' al-Khali have been extensively studied by geologist Hal McClure. His findings are succinctly summarized in Arthur Clark, "Lakes of the Rub' al-Khali," Aramco World 40, no. 3 (May–June 1989).
12. "Iram ... will be unearthed, by ants...," Nabih Amin Faris, trans., The Antiquities of South Arabia (Princeton: University Press, 1936), p. 72. The prediction that Ubar would be unearthed by ants isn't as cryptic as it might appear. There are several classical accounts of ants bringing gold to the surface in India. Herodotus says: "There is found in this desert a kind of ant of great size, bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog ... These creatures as they burrow underground throw up the sand in heaps, just like our own ants throw up the earth, and they are very like ours in shape. The sand has a rich content of gold, and this it is that the Indians are after when they make their expeditions into the desert" (de Selincourt, Herodotus: The Histories, p. 246). Could this ant be a lizard or small burrowing animal?
13. "Whoever shall find and enter Ubar...," David T. Rice, The Illustrations of the "World History" of Rashid al-Din (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1981), p. 42.
5. The Search Continues
1. "The bedu tell of such places...," Ranulph Fiennes, Where Soldiers Fear to Tread (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), pp. 195–96.
2. frankincense ... exported by sea. From Dhofar, incense was floated in animal-skin boats down the coast to the port of Qana (west of Mukalla in today's Yemen). There it was consigned to camel caravans bound across Arabia to the great caravansary of Petra (in today's Jordan).
6. The Inscription of the Crows
1. converged at the well of Shisur. Curiously, the old incense caravan route to and past Shisur is accurately marked on a map in the classic 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Where this information came from is a mystery; at the time, no westerner is known to have penetrated the region.
The Road to Ubar Page 25