Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [1]
Wil's Oriental Moralist included "The Petrified City," a tale told by Zobeide, an enterprising woman of Baghdad. Accompanied by two tiresome sisters, she sets out on a journey:
We set sail with a fair wind, and soon got through the Persian gulph, and saw land on the twentieth day. It was a very high mountain, at the bottom of which we saw a great town....
I had not the patience to stay till my sisters were dressed to go along with me, but went ashore in the boat by myself, and made directly to the gate of the town. I saw there a great number of men upon guard, some sitting and others standing with sticks in their hands; and they had all such dreadful countenances that they frightened me; but perceiving they had not motion, nay not so much as with their eyes, I took courage and went nearer, and then found they were all turned into stones, all petrified.3
Zobeide, though frightened, is determined to find out what happened. Exploring the town's fantastical palace, she discovers it full of "infinite riches, diamonds as big as ostrich eggs." And she discovers a sole survivor, a man chanting the Koran, who relates: "It was about three years ago, that a thundering voice was suddenly and so distinctively heard throughout the whole city, that nobody could avoid hearing it. The words were these: 'Inhabitants, abandon your idolatry, and worship the only God that shews mercy.'"
It seems that the message was repeated for three years, until the "only God that shews mercy" apparently ran short of it, and at four o'clock in the morning petrified the entire population, with the exception of the fellow chanting the Koran, who joins Zobeide and her sisters as they leave the city. The tale now takes some curious turns. At sea, Zobeide's envious sisters push her and her new friend overboard. He drowns, she survives. For their treachery, the two sisters are turned into black dogs by a passing dragon. Back in Baghdad, Zobeide divides her time between enjoying her great riches (for she had gathered up a few souvenirs) and disciplining her two new black dogs. She allows that "since that time I have whipped them every night, though with regret."
The world of "The Petrified City" was a world unknown to puritanical and bleak New England. Prior to Wil's publication of The Oriental Moralist, American school geographies had had little to say of Arabia, other than that "the Arabs are an ignorant, savage and barbarous people. Those on the coast are pirates; those in the interior are robbers."4 Yet in "The Petrified City," Zobeide is portrayed as smart, sensual, brave, and remarkably independent. And through her eyes we enter a world of exotic sights and sounds, of Oriental wisdom, of strange and mysterious happenings.
Zobeide's tale also happens to be the very first account printed in America of a city that time and again magically appears and disappears in the course of the thousand and one nights of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. The city is usually located in Arabia. Sometimes it is at the edge of the sea, but more often the traveler has to cross a forbidding mountain range and venture into a vast, sun-scorched land. Sometimes the city has no name, but often it is called Iram. And, as we shall see, Iram is one and the same as a fabled land and city known as Ubar.
Ubar, rich beyond all measure. Ubar, for its sins, suddenly and dramatically destroyed by Allah.
Back in the winter of 1797, aspiring publisher Wil Clap could take pride in "The Petrified City" as one of the "most fragrant and delightful flowers" offered to his fellow New Englanders. Sadly, his offering was unrequited: The Oriental Moralist had only a single small printing. Though Wil survived by printing tracts and memoirs penned by his Puritan ancestors, he was eventually forced to close up shop and head west, then south, in search of business. On his way to New Orleans he died in his forty-eighth year, of unrecorded cause.
Wil meant well, and he made a remarkable unsung contribution. So it is fitting that this book is dedicated to a forefather I never knew: