Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [104]
In the next few days, we were awed by the valley of the Hadramaut's dramatic setting and fanciful, spectacular architecture. We were also a little uncomfortable. We had come upon an ancient way of life, ordered and conservative, with traditions kept very much to itself. Also, steeped in Ubar lore, I found it hard not to feel that we were in alien territory, the land of the Hadramis, who had long threatened and likely pillaged our erstwhile if wicked city. I had to remind myself that this happened fifteen hundred or more years ago.
We worked our way to the Hadramaut's most distant major settlement: Tarim, city of 365 mosques, once known throughout Islam as "the city of wisdom and learning." In late medieval times, Tarim had been celebrated for its great libraries, and we hoped, though we had been forewarned to the contrary, that one of them might still magically exist and hold a long-lost copy of Ibn al-Kalbi's History of 'Ad, the Beginning and the End or the ten lost volumes of al-Hamdani's Book of the Crown (documenting the early civilization of Arabia), or undiscovered early tales of the Arabian Nights. But we knew that in the late 1700s, fanatic Wahhabi tribesmen had overrun Tarim and ripped to shreds and burned its books. What they missed had been destroyed by later infestations of white worms. Learning and wisdom had become ashes and dust.
Even so, there were reverberations of the distant past in the valley's everyday life. Sacrificial blood consecrated the construction of buildings; white paint splashed around windows warded off djinns; the social structure of towns, clans, and families was as it had been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago. And everyone was aware of the fate of Ubar and the People of 'Ad. The given name Abd al-Hud—"servant of Hud"—was common in the valley, and leading families claimed Ubar's prophet as their direct ancestor.
Every year Tarim's leading families oversee a three-day pilgrimage to Hud's tomb, fifty miles to the east. Reportedly, ten to twenty thousand souls travel to the tomb, many of them walking the entire way. Some oldsters, we were told, hobble a mile or two every year, intent on eventually accumulating the full fifty. It is a little-known Arabian event, yet in size and fervor it is second only to the hajj to Mecca. We would have given anything to witness this but had understood that it was off-limits to non-Moslems. Indeed, only Moslems who had roots in the Hadramaut were truly welcome.
We were told, though, that it would be no problem for us to visit Hud's holy precinct at any other time. And so on an April morning, awakened by the echoing calls of Tarim's many muezzins, we were on our way. It was a warm, sunny day, and we were all in good spirits, especially Hussein, our Yemeni driver, who kept time by thumping the stock of his prized Kalashnikov automatic rifle as he sang along with a newly purchased cassette of Hadrami music. East of Tarim the valley of the Hadramaut was quite wide and relatively uncultivated. We passed through several tiny villages but saw only a few distant figures. It was hard to imagine the dirt track clogged with the enormous procession of pilgrims that had passed this way a month before, as they annually did in the second week of the lunar month of Shaban.
By good fortune, there is a detailed account of the pilgrimage to Hud's tomb, written by Arabist-anthropologist Robert Serjeant in the late 1940s. As he described it, the procession out across the desert from Tarim was a high-spirited, often boisterous affair, with the pilgrims frequently