This suggestion fell through as the PFLOAG situation in Dhofar changed following the accession of Sultan Qaboos. When working for ITN I went to Muscat to interview Qaboos, and he asked me about my years spent working for his father and the conversation veered to my long-time search for Ubar. He showed immediate interest and quoted from the Quran, ‘Irem of Ad of the many pillars.’ He wished me luck when I said that I hoped to be able to continue the search and, soon afterwards, through his kindly chief adviser Dr Omar al Zawawi, sponsored one of my Arctic expeditions. His only stipulation was that we fly the Omani flag on reaching the Pole.
Ginny became as fascinated as I was by the idea of finding the lost city and she did a great deal of research into its little-known legends in the library of the Royal Geographical Society.
Dr Omar invited us to stay with him in Muscat during a visit by the Queen to Oman. By then Omani officers were slowly taking over from the British at all levels of the Sultan’s Armed Forces, but Patrick Brook was still in Muscat and he sent signals to detachments of his Armoured Regiment to look after me.
In the north the country had changed beyond recognition in a thousand ways. Where fifteen years before there had been one school, one hospital and a few roads of tarmac close to the capital, there were now four-lane highways, spaghetti junctions, schools and hospitals throughout the country, free bus services, factories, museums, street lighting – indeed, everything you would expect to find in a developed country had arrived as though at the touch of a magic oil lamp.
And the overall planning had been sensible, avoiding wasteful haste and ugliness. The apparent miracle was easier to comprehend when one bore in mind that all ministries and all substantial plans were subject to the approval of one man: the Sultan. Despite his Western education, Sultan Qaboos was a strict Ibadhi Muslim and venerated the benefits of traditional values in architecture as well as in moral issues. Unlike Prince Charles in Britain, he did not have to fume in frustrated helplessness when he espied some monstrous concrete carbuncle rearing up in an Omani city; he simply ordered it to be pulled down and replaced.
In Dhofar the last of the adoo had surrendered to the Sultan, whose forces had in the early 1970s received military aid from the Shah of Persia, Britain’s SAS, the UAE and Jordan.
Despite Patrick’s help during my 1985 visit, I was unable to further my Ubar plans and the closest I came to the Wadi Mitan was a cross-country trip from Thumrait – now a square-mile complex of Sultanate forces, including a hardened runway for Phantom jets – to the Yemeni border at Makinat Shihan, well south of any likely Ubar site.
Back in England I met up with Nick Clapp, a freelance movie director who had edited a film of one of my polar expeditions and we had become friends. He had subsequently made a film in Oman about the golden oryx, had fallen in love with the desert and started to read about the Empty Quarter explorers. When reading about Bertram Thomas’s search for Ubar, of mysterious tracks in the great desert and a fabulous lost city, he knew that he had an ideal theme for a movie to shoot in Oman. So, for the next two years he became a bookworm searching for any and all Ubar clues – just as Ginny and I had on and off for the past twenty-one years.
Nick’s problem was that he knew only too well, after making his oryx film which had been sponsored by the Omani government who approved of that particular project, that he was highly unlikely to obtain a permit to film in the seldom visited province of Dhofar.
Nick went ahead with his Ubar research anyway and approached the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, whose Imaging Radar system on a Challenger mission passed over the Empty Quarter in May 1985. Nick’s contacts at the JPL, Doctors Ron Blom and Charles Elachi, showed him radar images of ancient stream beds and lakes, long buried under dunes, which may well have supported habitation in centuries past.
The Ubar bug had now infected Messrs Blom and Elachi, who kindly agreed to further radar imaging. Sadly, the following spring Challenger exploded after lift-off killing all seven crew members, and this affected all aspects of the planned Challenger programme. So Ron Blom took to studying images from the LANDSAT and SPOT satellite programmes instead.
By then Nick and I had agreed to work together in searching for the lost city. I would plan, organize and lead the search on the ground, as in the past, and he would organize and direct the movie-making. His film would be titled The Search for Ubar so he still stood a good chance of finding a ‘buyer’ for his movie even if we did not, in fact, find the city.
In 1986 the JPL team gave Nick an updated radar image from the latest Challenger orbit which clearly showed a short stretch of the ‘Thomas Road’ as well as an L-shaped feature nearby.
His Majesty the Sultan of Oman came to London and paid a visit to his old friend Tim Landon, who was by then a retired brigadier living in a secluded manor in Berkshire. I went there with an updated proposal for the Ubar expedition and His Majesty reminded me that he was not keen on people descending on Oman, especially the southern part, with picks and shovels. However, he had been pleased with the Omani involvement in my polar project and would be prepared to allow me to take an expedition to the south, provided any digging was carefully controlled.
At that time I could not clearly state where I wanted to excavate, but I showed His Majesty a LANDSAT space image I had received from Nick Clapp that summer. This showed thin white lines amid the dunes which could perhaps be the ancient camel trails of the incense trade. I assured His Majesty that I would revert to him as soon as I could draw up a more detailed and specific plan to search for Ubar.
For a while another ex-Sultan’s Army officer had searched for Ubar using a hot-air balloon, but he had given up the search so the coast was now clear.
In 1989, five years after JPL came up with the first Challenger radar image of the Ubar search area, they produced a detailed map of a number of ancient desert tracks but still no image of any potential buried site. Nick and a lawyer friend of his had also failed, despite approaching many potential millionaires in Washington DC and Los Angeles, to raise any funds to sponsor a Ubar search expedition.
Now that I knew there was no hope of a high-tech instant solution to the problem of finding Ubar, I contacted an old friend, Major Trevor Henry, who worked in an unspecified military department in Dhofar. He was the tough and enigmatic Scotsman who had been my sergeant instructor on the long jungle-warfare course in Brunei in the early 1970s. He had fought for the Sultan during the Dhofar War and had stayed there ever since. He knew more than any man alive about the country and its people and I was lucky that he agreed to do what he could to help my Ubar search. He had heard of a number of sightings of ruins or old pottery deep within the sands and, where permitted by his Omani superiors, he agreed to check them out.
Trevor warned me that delicate negotiations were in progress between the governments of Oman, Saudi Arabia and Yemen over the exact position of their mutual boundaries in the sands and it was important that no archaeological expedition unintentionally caused a border incursion before agreements were reached. He was well aware of my slightly dubious past within the SAS and I remembered the critical jungle report he had sent my 21 SAS commanding officer some fifteen years before. With Trevor as the expedition’s Dhofar representative, we were off to a good start.
In the summer of 1990 I spent a hectic few days visiting twenty-two Omani company executives in Muscat and managed to raise all the necessary funds and equipment that Nick had failed to obtain in the USA. Land Rover Oman lent us three Discoveries and British Petroleum Oman gave us as much petrol as we needed.
The Sultan gave me permission to go ahead with a reconnaissance expedition that summer and agreed to aerial support from a Royal Oman Police helicopter, if needed.
Nick recruited an experienced Middle East archaeologist, Dr Juris Zarins, who was well aware that all archaeological work in Dhofar had come to an abrupt halt back in 1972 when the Oxford archaeologist Andrew Williamson had been killed near the Sumhuram ruins. His Land Rover wa
s blown up by a landmine.
When the chance to join the Ubar search came his way, Juris saw it as a wonderful chance to visit Oman. He knew well that no new excavation work had been permitted in Dhofar for eighteen years and that prime sites existed that were almost certainly ripe for plucking. He gave little credence to the tales of Ubar and he did not like the thought that a high degree of interference with his work was likely from Nick’s film team, but for the opportunity to work in Dhofar he was prepared to put up with a lot.
The reconnaissance journey was to take place in July 1990, at the time Saddam Hussein was about to invade Kuwait. Luckily nobody then knew of Saddam’s intentions, so the Sultan’s Office stamped all the visas.
The team consisted of Nick and his wife Kay, who was a tough but likeable probation officer who looked after our commissariat, Nick’s friend George who was there, as far as I could make out, on the basis that he was helping to finance Nick’s film, archaeologist Juris Zarins, Ron Blom from NASA’s JPL and the film team.
We duly met up in Muscat and flew to Salalah where Trevor Henry was waiting. He had our Discovery vehicles ready, and for eight hectic days he guided us by way of many tracks that did not exist at the time of the troubles twenty-two years before.
Using the coordinates of the desert tracks JPL had obtained from the Challenger missions and the LANDSAT images, the Omani Police helicopter flew us deep into the sand dunes and, to the delight of Nick and Ron Blom, three distinct and dead-straight tracks led north-north-west over a low gravel plain and straight into the heart of a dune over 200 feet high. Since at this point the camel trail was covered by thousands of tons of sand, it could reasonably be assumed to be ‘ancient’.
In order to refuel and save valuable flying hours, the helicopter pilot told me that he would leave us with a cold-box of Cola tins and would return in an hour or so, by which time our appraisal of the area should be complete.
An hour passed by and, the inspection completed, we sat or squatted on a mesa top, high enough to catch any breeze to alleviate the oven-like heat of midsummer. But there was no breeze, not even the slightest of zephyrs, to cool our sweat-soaked shirts. The cold-box was soon empty.
I walked around the rim of the mesa and, peering over the western side, spotted an aperture, more a slit in the rock than a cave. There was enough room for all of us and an aperture in the ceiling caused a slight through draught. After an hour and a half I noticed that a mood of nervous apprehension had descended on our little group. Even Juris was not his usual talkative self. The thought was slowly dawning that, if the wheel of fortune was to cause the helicopter to crash, we could moulder here on the mesa until the end of time. In those days there were no mobile phones in everyone’s pockets!
‘Ssh!’ Kay whispered. ‘Listen.’ She thought she had heard the distant beat of the helicopter. There is nothing easier than to hear the vibration of imagined sounds when hoping for a rescue. Many a time in deserts and polar wastes I have distinctly caught the approaching beat of an aircraft engine, expected to bring vital supplies or to remove an injured colleague. But the sound was, as often as not, merely my imagination.
Two anxious hours passed by before our pilot returned. We flew to Thumrait base and then to the little-known ruins of Andhur. On the journey I reflected how, in some way, I was now back at square one. By hoping for space-age technology to identify the actual site of Ubar, I had fallen into the trap of suggesting as much to the sponsors. I had known that the glamorous mix of satellites and buried cities would excite even the most reluctant sponsor. Now, with all our space cards a busted flush, I still had to convince His Majesty and our sponsors to back the main expedition. Over the next week Trevor took us to every site of ruins in the nej’d and on the coast, in the Qara jebel and on the Salalah Plain which had ever been mentioned as being connected to the frankincense trade. Juris was in his seventh heaven and so was Nick and his camera team. They were both keen to dig and/or film at all these scenic sites – Andhur, Hanun, Kaysh, Muday and many others – some without names but none that had clues as to Ubar’s faraway location.
Luckily the humidity was high and monsoon flies were about, hungry for our blood, and this discouraged too much lingering, at least at the jebel sites. Ron nearly trod on an ekis viper, but Trevor stopped him just in time.
Scorpions, four-inch millipedes and giant spiders added interest to our trek up a side valley to a wonderful cave that in the past I had only visited by night for purposes of ambush. We slithered on the orange mud and avoided the dripping lianas with their colonies of stinging ants. The cave was wide and as high as a church, with a floor deep in the animal dung of centuries. Bats chirped from the dark recesses of the rock roof as Trevor led us to the mouth of an interior passage.
‘Leopards live in here,’ he told us, indicating the outline of feline spoor. A portly guide from the local tribe moved ahead and knelt down at the very mouth of the lair. At that moment Trevor emitted a spine-chilling scream with a fair attempt at ventriloquism. The guide leapt higher than I would have believed possible. He saw the joke and joined in the general mirth.
With the help of a powerful torch we inspected painted figures high on the inner cave walls, blurred symbols that seemed to include laden mules or camels but interpretation as to their identity varied to reflect the individual aspirations of the viewers. Nick, for instance, was keen on camels since from an editorial point of view he could the better splice this cave sequence into a desert scene filmed a week before.
Sweat glued our shirts to our backs and our socks to our ankles, bites itched maddeningly and I marvelled yet again how local mountain folk could survive such a hell on Earth for the three monsoon months every year of their lives.
Since my last visits to Shisr and Fasad, both locations had been settled and tasteful but modern bungalows had been erected for, in the case of Shisr, a dozen families of the local tribe, the Bait Masan, and, at Fasad, a camp for a ‘frontier patrol force’ of young Dhofaris with desert skills whose duties included, as mine had once done, patrols along the Yemeni and Saudi borders.
I asked the head of this patrol, a Rashidi bedu, about Ubar. He spoke of Ubar’s fate as though it were an integral part of his people’s history.
‘Maybe Irem lies in Yemen, or Saudi, or Oman. In those days there were no such borders, so no matter. Allah was good to the people of Ad who built the city, a paradise on Earth. But they were bad and forsook Him for other gods, so He destroyed Irem.’
The Rashidi made a pile of sand between us and then, scooping up another handful, dashed it down violently on to his makeshift city.
‘Like this,’ he said, ‘so did Allah treat the people of Ad.’
‘Is Irem of the Quran the same place as Ubar?’ I asked him.
‘Maybe,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Who knows?’
One elderly Bait Masan, Abdullah bin Salim, whose tribe’s camels had long travelled the Shisr region, remembered Fiend Force from the 1960s when we had taken coffee with his family at their various desert camps. He now invited us into the new majlis (community hospitality room) in the recently built village close by the old water spring and the 1950s fort built by my old boss, the late Sultan.
Abdullah was now the village head and his hyperactive son, Marbruk, proudly showed us round the seven or eight bungalows. ‘If you come back,’ he said, ‘we rent you these eight rooms if you like.’
As since the 1960s I had always considered Shisr to be the best start-point for Ubar dune-searching, this was good news.
Juris told me of a French lady archaeologist who had, years before, had a brief look at the heaps of old stone rubble all around the Shisr waterhole, but the few artefacts that she recovered were far too recent to have had any relevance to Ubar.
Nevertheless, for our main expedition, the site was geographically ideal. We took our leave of Trevor, who agreed to continue to advise and help me, and we left Oman.
Ginny had stayed at home, much to her frustration, because she had started to
breed Aberdeen Angus cattle on Exmoor and could not get away. However, she was determined to come on the main expedition.
A fortnight after we left Dhofar Saddam Hussein pushed his troops into Kuwait, and Oman joined the other Gulf States in condemning this aggressive move against an Islamic country.
To put together my proposal for Sultan Qaboos I needed a convincing opinion from Juris. He was nothing if not frank. ‘Didn’t see any real places,’ he said. ‘Just some pottery at Shisr. I didn’t think anything about any of the sites. Nick kept asking me and I kept saying, “I don’t know.” They just looked like interesting sites. I do know there is nothing in the Rubh al Khali. We have done the reconnaissance and have nothing to show for it.’
This was all very well but, were I to admit it to His Majesty or the sponsors, I feared that the main expedition would not be allowed to take place.
Some extra time was gained by the worsening situation in Kuwait. On 7 February 1991 I was forced to write to the Americans to tell them that we should postpone the main phase until November. I laid out a suggested schedule that involved archaeology on the Plain of Salalah, with Salalah as our base, then moving north to excavate at Shisr, Heilat Araka, Andhur and elsewhere, using Shisr as our base.
Nick approved of this, as did Juris, but Trevor Henry, so indispensable to our reconnaissance the previous year, warned me from Salalah that as part of the ongoing removal of all expatriates from the Omani Armed Forces he was due to leave Dhofar in the near future and we could no longer count on his assistance.
He had earlier referred me to another Scotsman, named Andy Dunsire, who had lived in Dhofar for some eighteen years and knew the country almost as well as Trevor. ‘Andy works for Airwork, the aircraft engineers in Thumrait. He will give you any help that you need,’ he assured me.
So in November 1991, twenty-three years after my first Ubar search, we arrived back in Salalah and set up a temporary base at the newly erected beach-side Holiday Inn – a far cry from groundsheets on the sand.
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