Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [103]
O delegation of drunks, remember your tribe...
Wealth, easy lot...
An ignominious punishment shall be yours this day, because you behaved with pride and injustice of the earth and committed evil...
Sons and thrones are destroyed!...
Now all is gone, all this with that...
Checkmate...
It was a great city, our fathers have told us, that existed of old; a city rich in treasure...
At the end of life there is nothing but the whisper of the desert wind; the tinkling of the camel's bell...4
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Epilogue: Hud's Tomb
IN THE SPRING OF 1995, Juris Zarins and his crew wrapped up their archaeological program in Dhofar—and in neighboring Yemen, Kay and I, accompanied by our photographer friends Julie Masterson and David Meltzer, journeyed to where the myth of Ubar came to rest: the tomb of Hud.
Along the way we thought and talked about something that, we saw in retrospect, had underscored our quest for Ubar and the People of 'Ad: the relationship between myth and landscape. This relationship has been notably explored by the Australian architect and anthropologist Amos Rapoport, who listened to the stories of Australian bushmen and mapped their world as a mythological landscape. Rapoport perceived that a tribe's cherished myths—of its origin, its meaning, its purpose in the world—were "unobservable realities" that sought expression in "observable reality." Land and landmarks made myth real and validated a tribe and its heritage. To a seminomadic, materially rootless people, stories of their ancestors can mean as much as food and water.
Mythological landscapes can be found the world over. There are the kachina-populated mesas and valleys of the Hopi, the Buddhist caves of central China, the landscape of grief and miracles in the Holy Land. As we roamed Oman and then Yemen, it became apparent that southern Arabia had three distinct tiers of mythological landscape. There were the sites of fondly recalled bedouin raids and battles, proof of their daring and prowess. Next there were the many and dreaded haunts of djinns. And, lastly, there were sites associated with patriarchs and prophets holy to Islam. 1 This last landscape harked back to the time of Ubar and its principal players, especially the prophet Hud.
Ubar's mythological landscape
Of the two tombs of Hud appearing in this landscape, the oldest and perhaps original one is in an isolated corner of the Dhofar Mountains. It is marked on al-Idrisi's map of Arabia from 1154.2 We were told by the Omanis that it was a forlorn site and that nobody goes there now, which may or may not be so. In the 1930s, Bertram Thomas wrote of the bedouin perception of the site's awesome power: an oath sworn upon Hud's grave held more weight than one sworn on the Koran or in the name of the prophet Muhammad or of Allah himself. If a guilty party was dragged to the shrine, Thomas recounted, he would usually confess rather than profess his innocence and risk Hud's awful avenging power. Had not Hud brought down the wrath of God on the People of'Ad?
Regrettably and inexplicably, Omani government restrictions prevented our visiting this site, so David, Julie, Kay, and I found ourselves on our way to a perhaps less authentic, but considerably better known, Hud's tomb, at the far end of the valley of the Hadramaut in Yemen. 3 To get there from the capital, Sana'a, we drove through mist-shrouded highlands, across a land of soaring red rock mesas, then past a thousand salmon-orange dunes drifting into the sea. On the fourth day, at the old port of Mukalla, we turned inland and snaked up onto a drab, featureless tableland. We drove across it for the better part of a day, until suddenly the ground opened at our feet, a great rift nearly a thousand feet deep and one to two miles wide. This was the valley of the Hadramaut, the largest and surely the most breathtaking wadi in all Arabia.
We descended into a valley of foliage and flowers, surrounded by the buzzing of bees. (Their honey is unbelievably tasty.) Everywhere there were neatly furrowed fields tended by black-robed,