Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  On our slow and silent climb through shrubs and acacia and up the slippery slope on the eastern side of the Dahaq cliff, we of Fiend Force were surprised by the descent of a herd of cattle with unseen herders. We crouched low in the darkness, but when a herder yodelled and a woman from far above us trilled a reply, Said touched me and whispered, ‘They know we are here. We will need to be very, very careful.’

  Once the cattle had all passed by, sliding between bushes, Said scooped up a smattering of liquid green cow dung and wiped it over his trousers. I whispered to Mohammed and the other section leaders to have their men do likewise, especially on the hair of the Baluchis who, against my orders, still used smelly hair creams. Dhofari jebalis have the ability to detect any smell which is not normal to their existence.

  ‘They never move cattle on wet slopes by night,’ Said whispered. ‘They must have heard the Land Rovers way out where we left them and then sent the cows to locate us. They are cunning as rats. We must be very, very quiet.’

  The escarpment was steep. We were all fit and, without gear, would have made it to the plateau at the top of the waterfall cliff in an hour. But the sound of a single rifle clashing against a rock would betray the direction of our movement to hidden ears.

  Most of the Darbat villagers were indigenous jebali Qara, but mixed-blood Zanzibari slaves had over the past two centuries settled there, and most of them were now prime adoo material.

  In Salalah sooq (market), Hamed Sultan, my machine gunner, often spoke to Zanzibari Dhofaris. He was a first-generation Omani Zanzibari.

  After two hours we emerged on a level with the upper rim of the cliffs, and moonlight turned the monsoon mist a hazy yellow above the Darbat lake so that the vague outlines of village huts in the lakeside cultivated fields were visible. Above us the wooded escarpment continued to rise.

  At this point Salim Khaleefa with seven men went past us in two groups heading for a vantage point on the slope above the village. My section split likewise. Said, Hamed and my signaller stayed with me. I watched through my telescope as the others faded into the gloom.

  A wild cat screamed above us in the woods. Hamed leaned close. ‘That is no senoor cat, Sahib. That is adoo. Zingibaris of Darbat. Their night signals are those of their forefathers from the rainforests of Usumbara and Ukambani.’ Said nodded. ‘They know we are here, Bakheit. They will cut us off. We must move while we can.’

  I had seen and heard nothing to suggest that our presence was rumbled. No dogs barked, for there were no dogs in Darbat. Only wolves, foxes and hyenas.

  But I trusted Said and used my National walkie-talkie to whisper Salim’s section back down. I told them that we must move back to the plain before dawn as we were probably compromised.

  I knew other British officers who would think my actions weak, and even cowardly, but I had never shirked an ambush before nor did I subsequently unless advised to do so by the normally imperturbable Said and the aggressively anti-Marxist Hamed, whose parents had been killed by Marxists in Zanzibar.

  ‘They will by now have blocked the slopes below us,’ Said warned me. ‘We need another route back to the plain.’

  We agreed to head off on rocky ground where we would leave no footprints in the mud nor pass close by the village. The only feasible route was to creep along the very edge of the abyss on the cliff top to the far side of the Darbat plateau, then, once clear of the rock face, to find a way back down to the foothills.

  Said led the way with his rifle slung over one shoulder and a white phosphorous grenade in his left hand ready to provide immediate cover in the event of a sudden ambush.

  As we moved through the maize fields beside the lake, treading only on hard ground, we passed unavoidably close to animal stockades with thorn fences, and by the time we reached the rocky edge of the abyss, we had left no footprints.

  The wind blew from the north with a whiff of burnt dung, so our own sweaty body odour would be less detectable, even to the locals. We were lying prone on the ground when two men came out of a hut to our front and smoked together for half an hour. Soon dawn would break and our predicament would become dire. We were halfway across the width of the cliff face when the monsoon sky lightened and our silhouettes would soon be clearly visible to any watcher in the nearby huts.

  Hamed pointed to a wooded hillock which sprouted from the plateau. ‘We could hide there for now,’ he mused, ‘and then, tonight, carry on across the village fields to the far side of the cliffs.’

  It made good sense. Crouching low, we reached the little hill and, splitting again into four groups, found shelter behind boulders. My group wriggled with our guns into a shallow cave where we disturbed an army of black ants. I killed as many as possible, but was bitten again and again throughout the following day – one of the longest, nastiest and hottest of my life.

  There were scares each time a goat herd or lone villager approached our position, but it seemed that by dusk we were still undetected.

  All day long we had observed our intended escape route – the clear, flat ground that stretched between our hide and the point where the cliffs of the escarpment became merely a steep forested, but negotiable, descent. As far as we could tell, only cattle had been there, and we had seen a single large herd driven through at midday.

  Said said that this was a good sign because the jebalis never took cattle into an area where they could see that the adoo planned an ambush.

  But when the herd was still there after dusk, Said grew uneasy since, due to wolves, big cats and cattle thieves, herdsmen normally took their cows back to their byres by nightfall. So he suggested that we wait for a while.

  Between slowly wafting waves of moonlit mist, we watched a sudden commotion among the cattle, and through Said’s binoculars, better than my telescope at night, we saw a dozen figures drive the herd towards the escarpment’s edge and along our intended escape route. We conferred quietly. They must know, we agreed, where we were and had deduced where we were heading. Assuming that they were waiting in the scrub some few hundred yards away, we determined to trick them. Said and Hamed waited in the cave with the machine gun. I took the other section from the hillock and headed off at sixty degrees from our escape route, making the occasional noise and leaving our boot prints clear in muddy places. On reaching forest, we waited in the undergrowth until Said called on the walkie-talkie. He sounded elated.

  ‘When you left,’ he said, ‘we saw and heard nothing for two hours. Then the cows came back and many men. They moved below us and on to the village. They must believe you are headed further up the wadi and will plan to cut you off once you are well into the jebel.’

  We agreed to meet at the far side of the cliffs as originally planned, and did so with scrupulous care to be wraith-like. We reached the edge of the plain by dark, and three green flares fetched Murad. We had narrowly avoided entrapment in our ongoing and deadly game of nocturnal chess.

  In 1895 the first Europeans to visit any part of the Qara Mountains were a couple of avid botanists who, having heard of the unusual climatic conditions in Dhofar, determined to discover new plants there. Through a mixture of cunning, charm and good luck they obtained the Sultan’s permission and went with guides and guards into a few of the Qara wadis, causing a sensation with the jebalis in their impractical Victorian garb. Their botanic efforts were highly successful.

  Some sixty years later, Thesiger crossed the jebel on his way north from Salalah and, using his maps, the oilmen arrived in the gravel wastes just north of the jebel. In 1964, when the first army patrols probed some of the intermontane valleys and high pasture plateaux, they were the first Europeans to do so and, ever-menaced by possible ambush, they were inclined to stay on the Salalah Plain and keep jebel patrols to a minimum. So when Fiend Force arrived to penetrate some of the thirty valleys leading into the jebel from the south and lay ambushes wherever the constantly varying terrain favoured us, there were still many ravines wrapped in Alice in Wonderland vegetation, peppered with caves and deep in
adoo country where white men were talked of by wandering bedu to marvelling audiences of Qara jebalis.

  These Qara mountain folk’s history can be guessed at but with no great accuracy for their ancestors left nothing but scattered graveyards. There are no ruins in the mountains and no potsherds of antiquity. Even the oldest jebalis know few tales of their forebears.

  Archaeologists from digs in the Yemen say that the Qara were not the firstcomers to Dhofar. First came the Hamitic Cushites from Egypt who, in Dhofar, were known as Shahra and built the city of Robat whose ruins lie beside Umm al Ghawarif camp. Much later, they were overrun and enslaved by the Semitic Qara from the Nile lands and Ethiopia. These men came by way of the Yemen as part of the Joktanite invasion. Joktan was a descendant of Shem the son of Noah, and the book of Genesis states that Joktan’s descendants advanced as far as the Yemen and those under Ophir as far as the mountains of Sephar, now Dhofar.

  In the back of Murad’s Land Rover we carried steel ammunition boxes containing bullets, grenades and mortar bombs on top of a layer of sandbags to protect us (some hope!) from death following the detonation of a mine. On top of the boxes the five soldiers of my section laid their bedding bundles on which they perched. In one of the bullet boxes I kept my supply of books, all on topics related to my search for Ubar. Ginny had collected them or borrowed them (sometimes against regulations) from the library of the Royal Geographical Society and given them to me when I was on leave. Said Salim called it the ‘Ubar Box’.

  A well-thumbed bargain book by a Cambridge archaeologist, Paul Bahn, had introduced me as to how to teach myself to find a lost city. It soon became clear that the discovery of ruins had a lot to do with luck, not just skill and knowledge. Bahn wrote:

  Archaeology is like a vast and fiendish jigsaw puzzle invented by the devil as an instrument of torment since: (a) it will never be finished, (b) you don’t know how many pieces are missing, (c) most of them are lost forever, and (d) you cannot cheat by looking at the picture. Much of the time archaeological evidence is so patchy that anyone’s guess is as valid as anyone else’s. You cannot prove anything. Where the remote past is concerned, nobody knows what took place. The best that can be offered is an informed guess . . . Some eminent archaeologists have built their entire careers upon convincing bluff.

  Nonetheless I decided to collect all available clues from all available sources and to become the Number One Ubar Expert while I was still in the ideal employment set-up for locating a lost city in the most inhospitable place imaginable.

  To list some of the background facts, many of them very disjointed, will give an idea of the type of haystack in which I would be searching for the Ubar needle.

  The first obvious clue was that the location of the ruins would need to be somewhere between the product that the original inhabitants wished to sell, in this case incense, and the intended market, especially places to the north of Saudi Arabia.

  Second, there would need to have been an ample supply of water, which may or may not by now be covered by dunes.

  Third, historical clues would need to agree, at least approximately, on the best region to start searching. I was sure that the existence of Ubar could not merely be a myth or desert mirage because references to its existence have kept occurring in literature over a period of more than fifteen hundred years. Prior to that, the Arab traders of incense would have kept all references to their trade routes and incense orchard locations a close secret from the competition of Greek and Roman traders. That period with no records, a dark hole known as the Jehalia, the Age of Innocence, is even darker than the corresponding period in Western Europe owing to the lack of new conquerors of Arabia who might have kept records.

  At the height of the Roman Empire the Dhofar merchants were exporting over seven thousand tons of frankincense by secret land routes and by sea every year while managing to hide the actual location of the orchards from the Greeks and Romans whose pagan gods demanded that prayers and all ceremonial events, including burials, weddings and births, were accompanied by the burning of incense.

  In terms of geographical history the whole of the Arabian Peninsula was too hot and arid for human habitation around 6000 BC, so no trading centre would predate 5000 BC. This was not a very helpful clue!

  I studied both the Old Testament and the Quran (Koran) with care and both were helpful in fairly nebulous, often contradictory, ways. For instance, different translations of the Quran gave differing histories of the lost city of Irem, but they all talked of ‘the people of the Al Akaf’, and this was significant to me because the region of the Wadi Mitan and the nearby rim of the Sands were still called Al Akaf by the local bedu.

  According to Quranic history, the Adites or Ubariti were a tribe descended from Ad, the son of Uz, the son of Irem, the son of Shem, the son of Noah. Ad’s own son Shedad settled in Al Akaf and built Irem. Unfortunately the inhabitants of Irem/Ubar/Wabar became idolatrous and evil, so God destroyed them, in the same manner as he wiped out the biblical Sodom.

  At this point the Quran gives some worthy clues to Ubar-searchers. I quote: ‘And into Ad was sent a desolating wind that turned all to ashes . . . And we destroyed their cities . . . Against some we sent a sandstorm, some were seized by a great noise. For some we cleaved open the earth and some were drowned.’ I concluded that Ubar had been demolished by a natural disaster which could have been a tsunami, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or, most likely in the Wadi Mitan area, a sandstorm.

  The Encyclopaedia of Islam postulates that Wabar is ‘north of Mahra country and within the Rub’ al Khali (Empty Quarter)’.

  Noah’s Ark, Atlantis and the Lost City of the Incas had no greater supply of historic reference behind them, yet explorers from many countries have made great efforts trying to find them. Ubar, the Atlantis of the Sands, was another such riddle yet, up until 1969, only two expeditions had been officially allowed into Dhofar to search for it: that of Bertram Thomas and of the American Wendel Phillips. The latter had subsequently been told by the Sultan never to return to Oman.

  One of the reasons that Dhofar’s early history is so hard to establish is the scarcity of their ancestral remains or written records, other than graffiti in caves in a script as yet undeciphered, as the four different tongues of the Dhofari tribes – Mahra, Shahra, Harsusi and Botahari – are all different from Arabic.

  The Bible is not helpful in terms of clarifying the well-known legend that the Queen of Sheba was involved with Ubar and that she colonized the Dhofar incense orchards. Legends do suggest that she left her Yemeni capital of Marib in 930 BC to visit King Solomon, the third King of Israel, in Jerusalem in order to establish an incense trade agreement, but biblical references to her incense territories are muddled, either being the lands referred to in the Book of Ezekiel or the more northerly Sheba referred to in Genesis.

  Confused by the welter of conflicting Ubar clues, I decided to concentrate on known facts.

  Frankincense trees grow only in the specific climatic conditions to be found in Dhofar, certain islands off the Yemeni coast and Cape Guardafui in Somalia, and the Dhofar trees produce by far the best and most prolific harvests. Ignoring maritime trade, the routes from the nej’d incense zone to reach the key markets in the north of Arabia must all pass through vast waterless tracts of the Empty Quarter, and all the Rashidi bedu whom Sultan bin Nashran had quizzed for me agreed that the traditional camel caravans carrying sacks of dried incense involved one herdsman for fifteen camels with well over a hundred camels per trip. This meant that they would take on a considerable amount of water as far north as possible before entering the Sands. This in turn meant that Ubar’s site must be at the northern end of a significant wadi taking water from the Qara jebel out towards, and historically into, the Sands.

  Both the Sultan’s best desert guides, Hamed al Khalas and Sultan bin Nashran, agreed to guide us to likely wadis in the nej’d whenever Fiend Force was next sent north over the mountains for patrol duties back in the nej’d and the Sands.r />
  Said bin Ghia led us one night from the Umm al Ghawarif camp into the Wadi Naheez where its seasonal floods exit onto the plain and have washed out a cliff-flanked channel for some distance towards Salalah and the coast.

  Said knew a jebali family who were at the time camped with their cattle in shallow caves within this channel.

  Laying an ambush on the jebel side of these caves we stayed there for two days. Non-stop monsoon drizzle kept us all under cover and my own section camped within the main jebali cave among the jebalis and hug-a-mug with their cattle. Smoke from their dung fires hung low like fog and drove away the voracious monsoon flies. Without the smoke, men and animals would have been driven crazy.

  Salim Khaleefa paid the head of the cave jebalis for one of their goats which they killed and boned and then heated the meat in the ashes of a wood fire. We ate with them including, post-goat, a pudding consisting of glutinous flour balls dipped into an open jar of wild honey. This was still in the comb and the bedu ate the wings and abdomens of dead bees caught in the honey without seeming to notice. Finally we shared their drink, pink and soupy, which Said assured me was nothing sinister, merely cow’s milk mixed with the boiled pulp of tamarind fruit.

  After the meal all the remnants were placed by the women into a bloody goatskin and hung from the cave ceiling. Then, prior to patrolling our outer ambush ring, I sat back to digest and listen to the musical sound of the jebali chatter and the bleating of goats, all the while watched intently by ten very grubby little children. I rubbed tears away, for the dung fumes were acrid.

  On another patrol to the foothills of the Naheez and on an unusually dark night, Said seized my shoulder from behind. ‘Waqaf, Bakheit,’ he whispered. ‘Stop!’ I was about to walk over the edge of a sinkhole some 70 feet deep and 30 feet wide known as Ghaur Fazl. We rested that night further up the Naheez in a deep cave. En route, as usual, I never followed the obvious footpaths notable by the shine on the pebbles and rocks because on the softer sandy sections the smaller enemy mines, nicknamed ‘scrotum-thieves’, were often laid in such places. So I was wont to thread my way along less navigable routes which in verdant wadis like the Naheez involved the risk of disturbing snakes. There were many species, including the spotted rock snake which can glide up almost vertical surfaces, the tiny threadsnake and the ekis carpet viper which can kill in six seconds.