Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [0]
Finding the Atlantis of the Sands
Nicholas Clapp
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A MARINER BOOK
Houghton Mifflin Company
Boston New York
* * *
FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Nicholas Clapp
Illustrations copyright © 1998 by Kristen Mellon
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Clapp, Nicholas.
The road to Ubar: finding the Atlantis of the sands / Nicholas Clapp.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-395-87596-x
ISBN 0-395-95786-9 (pbk)
1. Ubar (Extinct city). 2. Excavations (Archaeology) —
Oman—Ubar (Extinct city). 1. Title.
DS247.063C55 1998
939'.49—DC21 97-36640 CIP
Book design and dune drawings by Anne Chalmers
Type is Electra by Linotype-Hell
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Kay, Cristina, Jenny, and Wil
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Contents
Prologue [>]
PART I: MYTH
1 Unicorns [>]
2 The Sands of Their Desire [>]
3 Arabia Felix [>]
4 The Flight of the Challenger [>]
5 The Search Continues [>]
6 The Inscription of the Crows [>]
7 The Rawi's Tale [>]
8 Should You Eat Something That Talks to You? [>]
9 The City of Brass [>]
10 The Singing Sands [>]
PART II: EXPEDITION
11 Reconnaissance [>]
12 The Edge of the Known World [>]
13 The Vale of Remembrance [>]
14 The Empty Quarter [>]
15 What the Radar Revealed [>]
16 City of Towers [>]
17 Red Springs [>]
18 Seasons in the Land of Frankincense [>]
PART III: THE RISE AND FALL OF UBAR
19 Older Than 'Ad [>]
20 The Incense Trade [>]
21 Khuljan's City [>]
22 City of Good and Evil [>]
23 Sons and Thrones Are Destroyed [>]
Epilogue: Hud's Tomb [>]
Appendix 1: Key Dates in the History of Ubar [>]
Appendix 2: A Glossary of People and Places [>]
Appendix 3: Further Reflections on al-Kisai's "The Prophet Hud" [>]
Notes [>]
Bibliography [>]
Acknowledgments [>]
Index [>]
* * *
Prologue
Boston, Massachusetts, February 1797... IT WAS SNOWING and well after dark when the wagon finally pulled up outside the bookshop on the corner of Proctor's Lane. Wil, the young proprietor, would have been waiting anxiously, stamping his feet to keep warm and every few minutes wiping the snowflakes from his spectacles. He helped unload the shipment of the books he'd had printed in New Hampshire and, back inside, hastened to inspect a copy. The sturdy little volume began with his friend Cooper's account of his trip to the continent and his discovery in a country inn of a French edition of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Cooper wrote, "When I had finished reading the book, it struck my imagination, that those tales might be compared to a once rich and luxuriant garden, neglected and run to waste, where scarce any thing strikes the common observer but the weeds and briars, whilst the more penetrating eye of the experienced gardener discovers still remaining some of the most fragrant and delightful flowers."1
Wil paced back and forth in his tiny shop, leafing through the translation—the first in America—of the tales. It was a daring, even reckless thing that he had chosen to do. It was not so long ago that the Reverend Jonathan Edwards had deemed that the only fit reading was the Bible or commentaries on it. Works of the imagination were the work of sinners, to be punished by an angry God. "That God holds you over the pit of hell," Edwards fulminated, "much as one holds a spider, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked."2
Wil, though, thought he had sensed a recent change in public sentiment. People were tired of the dark cloud of Puritanism. The time was ripe, he thought, for the "most fragrant and delightful flowers" of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, which he had slyly retitled The Oriental Moralist, hoping that nobody would notice the rather striking absence of morality in these tales of evil magicians, flying horses, secret lovers, and haunted,